QUOTE(chuOS @ Aug 30 2005, 11:03 PM)
For me to upgrade my graphics card it would cost me over $500 right now ... and it doesn't need an upgrade but I'm positive I would notice a difference if I did upgrade it.
I just upgraded my ram for $260 and my processor for $100(its still crappy but I'm holding out for a better one and hoping the ram will help my computer run faster).
Does anyone know if I would get a preformance boost if I use a sound card instead of the built in sound in a motherboard? The sound card is slightly better but I'm considering selling it to a friend.
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You're thinking of the GF 7800GTX. If you were to upgrade to a "sane" top-of-the-line card (say a 7800 GT or a 6800 Ultra, X850XT), it would be 400, and if you were to upgrade to a fairly old top-of-the-line card (a 6800 GT, X800XT), it would be 300. You don't need to upgrade to the very best to be able to play games in a year or two from now with at least medium settings.
The one extra thing you might need to upgrade today/next few years is a new mobo to have the PCI Express port. Those cost about $75-110 though, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.
RAM you need to upgrade about every 3 years or so, because I'm still running on a 512 meg system just fine (although I minimalized XP and tweaked it a bit) with NOD32 in the background and playing WoW. A gig would be perfect for today/next couple of years though. 260 sounds about right...
Games like WoW and BF2 really take a toll on the RAM. Basically in situations where you see a lot of HD use, that's where RAM is used (to cache data that would be used and re-used over again). Like, the auction house in WoW or city maps in BF2. If you've got a lot of textures, models, etc. to store before the video card uses them (and it doesn't have them cached in VRAM), RAM helps. Also, if you're running programs in the background, or a lot of programs in general, extra RAM also helps.
A better CPU helps in calculation-intensive tasks, such as AI, physics, etc. Outside of games it could be used to do such tasks as hash breaking (calculating the hash to compare it later takes CPU time, esp. if you do it a lot like in a hash breaking routine... try it out with the unknowns with Ladik's MPQ Editor), lab/research work (SETI @ home and Folding @ home come to mind, although they're designed to have a very low priority.)
Nowadays if your clock speed is above 2ghz you're fine in terms of games (and yes, I realize there's more to CPU's than clock speed. This is just a generalization.) Better processors usually allow an extra 2-10 FPS if the FPS is at like 110 and it's not capped by your video card. Margins like that are so insignificant, the human eye can't tell the difference (it can't tell the difference of anything over 50FPS.)
You would probably not get a performance boost if you use a stand-alone sound card instead of a built-in one, but you would get the benefit of having the sound technology (EAX, EAX2, etc) in games if you could really use it (i.e. have a surround-sound system that you use to process digital out.)