Whats more important in my situation for gaming? cpu, system ram, video card?

Im runing on a AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3800+.

My RAM is 1022.5 MB

My video card is a NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS with 256 mb

Im also running windows XP



Im trying to run newer games, i love making them look the best i can but i honestly dont care bout that when i just want to run the damn game!



Games ive wanted to run have been

Crysis(all i wanna do is run it at a decent speed no matter how bad it will look)

Gears of war (have it beat it, lags kind of and i wanna make it look good)

Bioshock (beat it but it laged and i couldnt get it looking good)

and thares others but all i need to know is what should i do to atleast keep up with games. i cant spend alot right now so a simple cheap fix would be ideal.|||The 8800 cards are much faster so that would be my first buy. RAM is cheap going to 2GB would be a easy upgrade that won't cost much.



At that point I think your CPU is going to be the bottle neck of the system so upgrade is suggested. Any order of the upgrades you list will help the performance of your system. I think you will notice the biggest increase by doing the video card first. You may need to get better PSU depending on what you already use. Check out a wattage calculator like the one at newegg to get the answer to that.



http://educations.newegg.com/tool/psucal…|||RAM. It's always the most cost effective upgrade. 2gbs of the fastest RAM your motherboard can support is good enough. Getting a dual core CPU is a good upgrade too, but that would require a new MoBo, which means (probably) new RAM and (maybe) a new video card.|||You need a better video card man. Something like an 8800gt, or a 9600gt will destroy that card you have now. make sure you get a 512mb version as well....



The 8600gts is actually a pretty crappy card, its not much better than a 7600gt which is now outdated.



Also, the cpu is a single core, which really bottlenecks the card severely.....a dual core would double youre performance.



My rig is an athlon 64 X2 5000+ overclocked to 3.0ghz, 3gb ddr2 in dual channel,and an 8800gt oc'd as well. I can pull an average of 33fps in crysis at 1280x1024 with high settings.|||y duo core when u can get quad core for about the same price, 8600gts is aite u can play most game with it, just upgrade ur ram to at least 2gb it only cost like $100 for 2gb ram, for cpu it depend what ur motherboard can support. but for $100 on ram u will see improvement|||I would say the single one thing to upgrade which boosts gaming performance would be the graphics card! There are many options depending on your budget....HD2900s, 3850, 3870, 3870x2 for ATI cards and 8800, 9600 for Nvidia ones