Upgrade question

[Tanatz]

My girlfriend's computer has the following:Pentium 4, 3.0ghz1gb RAM, DDR400 (PC3200)Radeon x300Question 1: If you had to upgrade 1 item, would you add another gig of RAM or would you upgrade the video card?  I would think RAM first, since it would help her even in non-gaming applications.Question 2:  I have an Opteron 180 OC'd to 2.8ghz, 2GB of DDR400 (PC3200) and a 7950GT.  I am thinking of buying myself an 8800GT and giving her the 7950GT.  Would my CPU be a bottleneck for an 8800GT?  If so I think I would just buy her some RAM and call it a day.

[TSR-DanielH]

I'd upgrade the RAM first.  As for the second question, most of the video processing for EQ2 is done off the CPU so you wouldn't see that much of a performance increase going to the 8800.  It would help, but the gains wouldn't be that high.

[Cassea]

Well I hate to disagree with a SOE tech but that x300 is a really rotten video card. With XP EQ2 runs just fine with 1gig. Vista, of course, needs 2gig but you can add 1000 gig and that x300 is still crap.In fact, IMHO, there is little reason to add expensive DDR1 memory to that old system. Adding a 8800 or like card is also a bit of a waste unless you will be moving that card to a better system in the future. Since your system is only as fast as the slowest part you could add an 8800 to the system but you will not ever get close to full performance with that CPU.My recommendation for what it's worth....Unless you will be upgrading to a new system soon and as such reusing that 8800 (which is a nice card) I would go cheap and save your pennies for a new system down the road.Pop in an ATI 3850 or Nvidia 9600GT. Both are cheap and fast. Smarter still would be just to settle for a cheap ATI 2600XT from Buy.com or even cheaper x1650Pro or XT. Neither are speed demons but they match your system pretty well and run rings around the x300.If $$$ is not an issue (and I suspect it is otherwise you would not be running on such an old system - don't worry I'm not knocking you... I've been there myself) then get whatever video card you want but the video card is without question the weakest part of your system.If you are running XP then EQ2 will not even use the extra gig of memory aside from maybe helping as a hard drive cache.-JBP.S. Make sure what graphics port you do have. It will either be PCI, PCIx16 or AGP. PCI means you need a new computer. AGP means that you pay about 50% more for the same video card you can get in PCIx16 format... IE time to get a new computer. If you have a PCIx16 (the x16 part is very important) then you have some options because any card you get can be moved to a newer system down the road. With AGP you are buying a future paper weight.