Perhaps my system is starting to show its age, or I've just become too demanding, but I'm not quite satisfied with my performance on the F.E.A.R. demo, so I was toying with the idea of an upgrade.  Then again, there are apps that cannot be put 100% (FS2004's 3D clouds, anyone?) so I'm not sure it's be worth it.

AMD 64 3000+
MSI K8N Neo
BFG GeForce 6800 OC AGP
1024 PC3200 (I think)

I think thats a good rig lol..
You cant realy complain on the graphics card.. the chips a 'tad' old.. but still better than most.. 

My conclusion:

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The only thing I would dream of doing to that would be throwing a 3800+ or higher in it. Unless you plan on overclocking, that is the only thing you could do to make a noticable improvement.

Beyond that, you would need a new motherboard (SLI) and a couple cards to fill the SLI slots. And the new processor.

Too much money if you ask me, I just overclock the heck out of my stuff. I figure when my overclocked rates become outdated, then I upgrade.

There you go then, Scorp...

What Autopitot said, plus a herd of Hereford white-faced steers...and you're sorted... ... ...!

Cheers, all you guy's from Takes-Us... ... ...!!!...!
LOL...!

Paul...Hereford. England... 8)...!

http://www.herefordcattle.org/

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Fozzer!  Your beef!  What have you done?  You need 100%, grade A, Texan Angus beef! Longer's always better!



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What I meant was flying with real, updated weather on a stormy Alaskan dawn.  Me thinks that'll stress any machine.

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I've often thought about this.

I've also noticed that socket 754 boards don't seem to feature PCIe.  As long as I don't lose too much of my... assets ...in switching to 939, I think it's a viable option.  I've wanted to do this mostly because the 7800 seems to be exclusive to PCIe.  Then again, is the 7800 really leaps and bounds beyond the 6800?

I'll do a 3DMark, but I doubt I have any configuration issues since I reformatted.

Hmm...

[thinks for a moment]

I suppose I should be getting a 7800 then eh?

In what test? and what settings? to make it meaningful to me....

Socket 754 boards come with PCIe as well, but thats not the thing.

S939 uses a different CPU, so that's the only bit other than the board you need to buy extra.

939 runs a faster FSB, and a dual channel memory controller resides on the CPU itself. I think they are the two main performance factors compared to socket 754.

If you were considering a CPU upgrade anyway, then you are really only going to need a replacement mainboard in addition to that to get into socket 939.

Mind you, some decent RAM would be good if you dont already have it because many socket 939 rigs will auto-overclock if set to do so, which isn't a bad feature to have if you are not manually overclocking.

Well, I get over 9000 marks with a 6600GT.

I'm still not sure if you have a vanilla 6800 or a 6800GT.

In either case, your score seems very low to me.

That score could be normal if you had all quality and filtering options maxed and forced in your driver settings if your card was a vanilla 6800, but it still seems low to me, I've never tested a plain 6800 myself.

For example, with a 6800GT I would expect at least 12,000 points.

Anyone else have a better idea of the 6800 and 6800GT's actual performance in 3Dmark03 ?

At this point, if it were my rig, I wouldn't rest until I was getting 3 x times the performance you are getting.

I think you need to fix what you have, nevermind upgrading.