£180 What to upgrade?

[celliott]

In recent games such as BF2 SF I have seen a definate slowdown in performance. Because of this I have a budget of £180 to improve my pc so it will handle the latest games at 1280x1024 without any performance issues.

I am pretty sure the fact that my graphics card is only 128MB is holding me back, since the space is needed for the newer games, eg 128MB is the minimum for BF2.

What is going to be the best thing for me to do? After looking around it seems that ATI provide the better performance for money since thier cards in general have higher clock speeds than the nvidia equivilant.

Currently I Have:

AMD Athlon64 3500+ Newcastle
Asus A8V Deluxe Revision 2
Western Digital Raptor 36GB (Boot Drive)
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 80GB (Storage Drive)
Sparkle 128MB Geforce 6800 (Unlocked 16/6)
1GB PC3200 Geil Value Dual Channel Kit
NEC 3450 16x DVDRW
Hiper Type-R 480W PSU

Any help/advice appreciated

Thanks

 

[Eliminos]

I think it would be best to plough the whole £180 into Graphics. If you can scrape together £216 you can get a 7800GT which I would highly recommend. If not you could go for the Powercolor X850XT for £153.

As for:

What is going to be the best thing for me to do? After looking around it seems that ATI provide the better performance for money since thier cards in general have higher clock speeds than the nvidia equivilant.

Its not really true. Just because ATI have a higher clock speed on comparable cards to nvidia doesn't mean they are better.

You don't see many people recommending a 3GHz Pentium over a 2GHz AMD now do you?

 

[Dace]

I think that you would benefit from both a better graphics card AND more memory.

I'd suggest buying a better graphics card using up most of your budget with a minimum 256mb cache.

Sell your old graphics card for what you can get.

Use that money towards a 2gb Geil Value kit.

Pop that in your computer, and sell your 1gb Geil Value kit.

That should get you both upgrades for your money, and everything is happy

 

[celliott]

As much as I would love a 7800GT I would also need a new motherboard. I have put up my old card in the price check forum to see what its worth, hopefully I can get about £80 for that.

I was looking at these two cards, is there any difference performance wise except one is vivo, how would these compare against my current card?

PowerColor ATI Radeon X800 GTO16 256MB GDDR3 TV-Out/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-055-PC)
PowerColor ATI Radeon X800 XL 256MB DDR3 VIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-038-PC)
OR, is it worth £15 more for this:
PowerColor ATI Radeon X850 XT 256MB GDDR3 TV-Out/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-037-PC)

Buying one of these will allow room for the new motherboard. After selling my current card and current memory, i have enough for a 2gb kit.

 

[celliott]

Just seen "AGP Gainward 6800GT Golden Sample w/ Artic Cooler" in the for sale section for £140, would this be any good to me?