Need your advice on upgrade

[Newsboys2004]

Okay, please refrain from telling me to upgrade to Intel or whatever, I just need your opinion on this.

I currently have an Athlon 2500+, with 512 megs of 3200 hyperx ram and a 9600 pro.

I was going to upgrade to a 6800 GT (Not ultra), and 512 megs more ram. But I realized something, my processor may end up bottlenecking the new videocard a bit...

So, I came up with a second option... Instead of just selling my video card, I... sell my whole system, and get a Athlon/64 bit processor with higher bus speed (2800+, 3000+, 3200+), a new mobo, 1000 gigs ram AT LEAST, preferably 400 bus speed, and a 6600...

It would be slower then the 6800GT, that's for sure, but supposedly, it's supposed to be a great card, and it'll be on pci express... And it will have much less bottlenecks...

SO what do you think? Do you think the 6800GT would be able to captilize on it's speed, or would the 6600 be faster with less bottlenecks? I'm sorry, but as of this moment and getting a laptop and a IPAQ 4700, I really can't afford to get a top, top of the line pc

 

[BillLeeLee]

Overclock the 2500+.

The 6800 GT would be bottlenecked from performing at its finest (to be honest, I think even some of the fastest CPUs right now are pretty much bottlenecking the X800 PE and 6800 Ultra cards).

However, it would still blow away the performance of the 6600 series, especially if you turn on effects like AA/AF (which, to my understanding, stress the GPU more than stressing the CPU, so the bottleneck wouldn't matter as much).

Plus, seeing as how you were thinking of an Athlon 64, buying the PCI-express 6600 cards would be useless, since there's no PCI-express mobos for the Athlon 64s yet.