Yo,

I've got a 2 year old pc, its got an intel p4 ht 3.2ghz, pci express x16 slot, 1gb ram and ati radeon x700 256mb graphics card.
I'm thinking of upgrading to 2gb ram and a new graphics card.
What would be a good graphics card in the $100-$150 range(maybe 9600gt or ati 3850) for this system?
Will there be a big disadvantage from the single core cpu and do u think that this upgrade of ram and graphics card will give a good boost in performance? would like to play ut3, crysis on low/medium settings.

Thanks heaps.


the funk

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814122046

This.

Your CPU will be your next bottleneck. look to that as your next upgrade.

this is a much better card and hardly more expensive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814161235

also this will run better on the pci-e 1.0 x16 slot that you have. i've heard of a lot of 8800s not working at all on pci-e 1.0 and a bunch of associated problems that aren't easy to fix.

i just bought one and played crysis on very high settings and it was playable. i was amazed. i do have a better processor than you (AMD 5600+ X2 ~2.9 GHz) but you should see an amazing improvement with this card. the 8800GT isn't bad either, though.

You may want to invest into a Pentium D, you may find one floating on ebay.
Won't be a fantastic jump, but a jump nontheless

thanks for that.
one other thing, my case has only 2 small fans for airflow. Could this affect the graphics card a lot? or would buying a graphics card cooler solve the problem?

My PC is similar to yours I run P4 3.0G, 4 GB Ram, But I upgraded my graphics to 9600GT and all my games work great. COD 4 runs 90-100 fps. I have all stock fans and power supply. Just my 2 cents.