Will my system support a new Nvidia card?

[Obtruse_Man4]

Over the past couple of months I've noticed games taking a toll on my system. You can see the specs of my system in my sig. With my mobo, I am currently running dual channel and have one slot left over. So I was thinking of upgrading my ram with another stick of 512MB. I also wanted to get a new graphics card. I'd like to switch to an Nvidia card. My question is, what's the best card I could get without having to get another mobo, and will this work without upgrading anything hardware wise? Will I get the full functionality I should? I know I can't get something like a 7800GT, but anything else that would upgrade from a 9600XT would be awesome. Any suggestions? Thanks

 

[beedubaya]

Get a 6600 GT or 6800 AGP, it will work great.

 

[Obtruse_Man4]

My clan leader (who is a .NET programmer) told me that I wouldn't get the most out of a higher card though. Now i'm not much into hardware. Software is more my thing. So will my system be able to handle a 6800 and will I get all the functionality I can out of it?

 

[beardo526]

If you are on a budget, the 6600GT would definately be the way to go. I think it has one of the best price/performance ratios out there right now. The MSI and eVGA brands are highly recommended.

 

[gaara]

6800GT would have the better price/performance ratio IMO...the vanilla 6800 would be the best if you could unlock the extra four pipelines

6600GT looks like it'll start to get cut off in the next year or so

 

[Nubius]

My clan leader (who is a .NET programmer) told me that I wouldn't get the most out of a higher card though.

That really means nothing...like I've been trying to explain across multiple threads for days now, a system doesn't bottleneck a video card....they don't communicate directly like a CPU and RAM does (meaning cpu and ram don't directly communicate with the GPU hence no bottleneck)....yeah of course it'd perform better with a better and CPU and RAM, but isn't that a given? It has nothing to do with your graphics card....even if you had a crappy FX5200 if you upgraded your CPU and RAM you'd get a better score so this whole 'get the most out of your card' is BS frankly...

if you got a 6800GT you'd be playing most games maxed out...it'd definitely help you to OC your CPU if you could, but you might just want to wait and build an AMD64 system as the memory controllers on those are quite superb, and the memory bandwidth they offer is quite a boost compared to the XPs and K7 generation.

 

[Obtruse_Man4]

Thanks for explaining it Nubius. I think I will get the Asus 6800GT, since it supports 8x AGP. Will also pick up a 512 stick of ram. As soon as my ebay crap sells...

 

[macdude425]

My clan leader (who is a .NET programmer) told me that I wouldn't get the most out of a higher card though.

Sounds like my dad...except he blew up my computer...

A 6600GT or 6800 would be fine.