Upgrading advice needed please...

[najibs]

I'm trying to see if it's worth upgrading my one year old Dell Dimension 8400.
It came with a plain vanilla GeForce 6800 256Mb, it's not the GT or Ultra. I don't know much about the card since htere's not much info about the Dell 6800 on the web, so are there any pipes to unlock on this baby or any good overclocking possibilities? If so, maybe I'll buy it an NV Silencer with some AS5.

I was also wondering if it was worth shelling out $378CDN for the 7800GT. Will I see a significant improvement? I mainly play games like F1 2002 and FlightSim 2004

If not the video card upgrade, I'm looking at upgrading:

1. 2x256Mb DDR2 --> 2x512Mb DDR2
and
2. replacing the Seagate 7200.7 SATA with 2x200Gb Maxtor DiamondMax 10

 

[mash]

Yes, you will see a huge difference upgrading to the 7800GT. If you feel a need for graphics, go for that.

However, the RAM needs updating as well. Having a 7800GT and just 512mb of ram is a bit unbalanced. You might want to go for a nice ram upgrade, and save a bit more for the vid card.

 

[najibs]

What if I get a X800 GTO2 and unlock the pipes and overclock it? Can it get to 7800GT performance that way?

 

[Novensu]

When trying to unlock the pipes on a video card it is a hit or miss type of thing if it works great, if not move along. The 7800GT would be a definite upgrade expecially with the flight sim software that you play. I think your best bet would be to upgrade the ram and then use the left over cash to buy the best card available. I am sure you could get some great advice to what that would be in the video card forums.

~ Novensu