Should I upgrade ram or vid card?

B

BlueSphere

Geek Trainee
Hi, I'm new and decided to register to get some advice before I do anything drastic.

I'm thinking about upgrading my computer's ram or video card and am not sure which would provide a better performance boost.

Some specs:
dimension 4700
GeForce 6800 256mb
1GB 3200 (x2 512MB) ram
pentium 4 3GHz cpu

Oblivion(outside) and the demo of medieval 2 really chug on my setup even on lowest graphics settings and I don't think supreme commander will work any better on my setup when it comes out either. So I've decided to upgrade, I have about $300 budget so I can't do anything to fancy at the moment.

I was wondering which would help more in this issue, getting a geforce 7900gt or another GB of ram.

If the 7900gt is the way to go, is it a problem that is only supports dx9? If I, in the future, spy a game that requires dx10 am I not going to be able to play it on a 7900?

I'm really a noob at hardware so If you need more specs or anything just ask.
:D
 
BlueSphere said:
If the 7900gt is the way to go, is it a problem that is only supports dx9? If I, in the future, spy a game that requires dx10 am I not going to be able to play it on a 7900?
Click to expand...
From the information I've got only 8800 GS/GT is capable of Dx10...U can even look at google as well...[google]dx10 Capable Video Card[/google]...
 
You will always notice the graph card improvement. So i would go for that.

Oblivion ran fine on my spec at medium settings and it isn't much different to yours. I clocked my Ram and CPU but not by loads.
 
If you want to run dx10 games on a dx9 card, they will run but will obviously not look as nice.

8800gts cards go for around 400$ and these are the cheapest dx10 cards

I would definately upgrade the GFX card as that will show the biggest difference in performance

I assume that you have a PCI-E graphics card slot for all of the above to apply. the dimension 4700 that i googled has a PCI-E mobo....

the problem is that if you get a very nice gfx card like a 8800 then it wont perform at its best due to the rest of the system botlenecking
 
No, I'm not getting the 8800, to expensive and to much of a prototype.

7900gt is what I am thinking of getting. I not looking for dx10, I was just curious if dx10 games would run on a dx9 card, but you said they would so I am satisfied.

And yeah, I should have PCIe which makes upgrading my card no problem.

Thanks all for the help.
 
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