Worth upgrading?

[TheJkWhoSaysNi]

I'm considering upgrading my computer. Really I just want to be able to play Oblivion and Battlefield 2 better.

My current specs:

AMD XP2800+ Barton
1gb PC3200 DDR
Radeon 9800 Pro


My budget is about £200-£250.

I'm considering upgrading to a Sapphire x1950 512mb AGP and adding another GB of RAM.

Will I see enough of a performance increase for this to be worthwhile or will my CPU cause too much of a bottleneck?

 

[Jonty]

Hi TheJkWhoSaysNi

Just a quick post I think you would certain see a noticeable improvement in performance with those particular upgrades. That said, your CPU would be a limiting factor, so it may be worth saving a little more and seeing what your new budget could stretch to.

Naturally if you want to go all the way, if you doubled your budget you could probably build a nice Core 2 Duo system with excellent price versus performance, and mainstream DirectX 10 graphics cards will also be available within a few months.

So really it depends if you're lucking for a stop gap upgrade or something more permanent.

Kind Regards

Jonty

P.S. I forgot to mention, some games are very CPU intensive and so bottlenecks are much more noticeable in those applications than in others which are more GPU reliant. Please forgive my ignorance, but I don't play Battlefield 2 or Oblivion so I can't advise from first-hand experience, but I'm sure there is plenty of information out there on the internet when these games have been reviewed and benchmarked.