Which part should I upgrade first?

[Ezmartini]

Hi, I have a few extra dollars to spend this month, and I was wondering what computer component I should upgrade next. Here are my current specs:

Gigabyte AGP motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (lacking)
1 GB Corsair DDR RDRAM (fine)
Radeon 9500 Pro 128MB (lacking)
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card (fine)

For HL2, which do you think is the bigger bottleneck on my system, the CPU or the GPU? When that is decided, what should I upgrade to (best value, not top of the line)?

Thank you for any suggestions.

 

[DrDevin]

You are kind of stuck right now. Your system could upgrade to a better videocard or CPU just like you said, however you can only achieve an XP 3200 maximum if your motherboard supports it. However your new videocard would probably be bottlenecked in the CPU. I would reccomend waiting until you have enough for a socket 939 CPU and a geforce 6600GT, 6800GT or X850. This will last a long time and would provide a lot better performance!

 

[michaelsil1]

I would suggest you save your money and upgrade to an AMD 64 System. If you just can't wait get a new Hard Drive and use it just for Games you'll see a much better gain than if you were to just upgrade your CPU or Video Card.

 

[Beerdude26]

I would go the same as michael (I actually have to too, lol)

Buy yourself an AMD Athlon 64 , 30% more performance.

Oh, and buy yourself a motherboard with PCI-Express, cause that really will become a prerequisite for future games.