What's my bottleneck?

[StarLord]

Why buying a 7950GTX and wait 2 years for a DX10 card when he could buy a 8800GT or GTX right now and have the DX10 with it, or wait a couple of months and maybe buy the ATI DX10 one.

[Ash2Dust]

Assuming you dish out the $500-$600 for a DX10 video card, what can you do with it for the next year or two? Dish out another $100 for Vista? Last I heard, only Vista will allow all the effects of DX10. Crysis is the only thing I've really heard looking at, but that could be another year or two. Also 8800 is the beta hardware of the 8xxx series just as the 6800 and 7800 were.

I have the feeling that the budget of his upgrade is prolly $300 max.

[ph1l0r]

Really. Just save until you can afford a new mainboard, cpu, ram and a pci express graphics card. Doesn't have to be the greatest and the latest. You should be able to get a used 7800GT/GTX card of Ebay for a reasonable price, as well as a mainboard with a 939 socket for an Athlon X2 or something (currently AMD is using AM2 Socket, now new CPUs released for the 939) for pretty few bucks. Spend some time digging on Ebay. I am sure there are plenty people that sell their "old" stuff to have the latest and greatest. I'd say you might be able to get a configuration thats almost twice as fast as yours for around 500 euros.

[Total_focus_haz]

Ram Means nothing for a graphics card if anything can cause some serious lag in game if you dont have decend memory and a cu to handle it. Recently i got a xmas bonus so i bought BFG GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB, but becuase i still used a 3000+ Athlon it couldnt run at full tlt so got 2x dual intel p4 superchilled thingy 3.8Ghz now it superfast and 2GB of Ram. Some Sites that offer dcents deals


http://www.overclockers.co.uk
http://www.aria.co.uk
http://www.ebuyer.com
http://www.ebay.co.uk

Soem decent deals but make sure you now what you want it for, i do alot off video editing on mine so hence the big card and all but just for gaming you can get x1950 ati 256 or 512 for 200 bucks

[Winter_Lion]

Another gig of ram would hasten map loads

How so? Wouldn't a faster hard drive speed the loads, while a better cpu would speed up the "verifying client data" part?

Sure, a faster hard drive and cpu will improve your performance but it's all about getting the most bang for the buck here. The faster hard drive would not speed your load up enough to be worth the expense of adding a new one just for that. Same goes for the cpu, it might speed up lots of operations in the BF2 startup through logging on to the battle server and playing the game but not by as much as having 2 gigs of ram to work with.

Just the way it is..............If you are only looking to upgrade one area, find the area that needs the most help and can be upgraded for the least.

Winter