PCA Forums

Ok Campers,

I'm getting ready for Elder Scrolls Oblivion and need to upgrade. The question is: Do I upgrade the video card of my CPU? What will give me the biggest bang for my very limited buck? (MY wife is going to kill me either way). This is a general use system with some gaming on the side so I'm not going crazy on the upgrade, would like to spend less than 200 bones.

My gut tells me to upgrade the video card, I'm thinking a Radeon 9800 pro or maybe a geforce 6800.

Thoughts?

Here's my system:

Processor
Model : AMD Athlon(tm) XP 1700+
Speed : 1.46GHz

Mainboard
Bus(es) : ISA AGP PCI USB FireWire/1394 i2c/SMBus
MP Support : No
MP APIC : No
System BIOS : Phoenix Technologies, LTD 6.00 PG
Mainboard : MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO., LTD MS-6570
Total Memory : 1GB DDR-SDRAM

Video System
Monitor/Panel : Default Monitor
Monitor/Panel : Plug and Play Monitor
Adapter : NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700LE

GF 6800 is my recommendation.

if you want to keep the $$ down I would got with a 9800 pro - not as fast as a 6800 mebbe.....I tried a 6800 before I got x800 and didn't like it ... anyway your system is going to be cpu limited with a current high end card....

I would get the 9800 Pro. If you got one of those for around $100 you could also swing for a better CPU for about $100 and meet your goal and upgrade both.

eGo

Unless you're going to play extremely high-end games (DOD Source, BF2, FEAR) at full eye candy, a 9800 Pro will more than do the job.

My LAN party system has a 9800 Pro and I can run everything mentioned above just fine, just not at max eye candy. But these are VERY high end games using HDR and other high-end hardware DX9 features.