Ho Ho Holiday Cash for upgrades

[Soulmoon]

Ok, I got a wonderous new monitor for christmas to replace my ailing Dell craptacular monitor... a Viewsonic VX924. The picture on it for FS9, CFS3, CS, or any of the other things I do is fantastic.

However, with a few of my high end games... Quake 4, Battlefield 2, FEAR, a couple others... I'm starting to run afoul of the fact my /system/ is well over a year old now.... While this monitor handles it far better than any other LCD monitor I've ever used, you can still tell when your running something in a non-native resolution, which in this case is 1280x1024... Which demands a little more out of my system than the 1024x768 I used to run things at.

I got about a hundred dollars cash from assorted relatives over the holidays, and I'd like to put it, along with maybe at most a matching amount or a little more, towards an upgrade for my system. So, figure, max of 250 USD I'm willing to spend, preferably less.

The critical specs of my system are: 3 ghz P4, intel motherboard (Though I can't honestly remember which one, and it's a PITA to check), 1 gig Corsair XMS DDR-400 ram, SATA hard drive, nVidia GeForce FX5900 ULTRA 256 meg.

So...

I don't think upgrading my CPU would get me much without upgrading my mobo besides, and that would get very pricey... Since my hard drive is already fast, I'm thinking either add more ram (I have the fastest type of ram my mobo supports, I believe, so I can't get 'better' ram), or replace the video card.

Is there a really kick-butt video card out in the price range I'm thinking? I haven't been following the computer hardware market for a while.

Any other suggestions are welcome too, of course.

[ctjoyce]

Sapphire X800XT is around $250 on newegg

Cheers
Cameron

[Gary R.]

I recommend the 6600 GT.  You could buy that one now and have a little cash to spare, maybe for another 256 of ram even.  Or, for a little more, the 6800 is better yet.  Better than the X700.  Nvidias are a lot more OC friendly than ATI's are, they deal with heat dissapation a little better.  Your current vid card was good 4 years ago, but even then not as good as the competition.  It is the weak link in your otherwise still very much top level system.  Sure, a late model ATI would make a world of difference but the advantage of the nvidias are they are more stable, at least in my opinion and with the forceware you can download from 3Dguru you can set them up as much as you care to providing your willing to add the right fan combos to remove the heat.  I would try it with an ATI though.  Go for it.  

[Soulmoon]

Unfortunatly, I just checked on my motherboard... I'm going to have to upgrade that, probably, to upgrade my video card... It doesn't support PCIExpress, which most video cards today seem to be going to.

Seriously though, my video card is not 4 years out of date... It wasn't even out 4 years ago

[Alphajet_Enthusiast]

With a view to Vista (if it interests you) go for a GPU with at least 16X relative 3d Graphics performance.
The chart on my Geforce box says as follows:

Relative 3D Graphics performance:

Geforce 7800GT GPUs: 41X
Geforce 6800 GPU's: 24X
Geforce 6600 GPU's: 16X
Geforce 6200 GPU's: 5X

I would aim for a 6600 GPU or above, or the ATI Radeon equivalent of such.  :)