Should I upgrade my graphics first?

Question

I am a PC gamer. I know and plan to upgrade my system to a quad core, sli nvidia, 4gigs ram, new HD, monitor and all that jazz.

That costs money so I am not doing it right away. 

I have an AMD athlon 64 3000+ 1.8ghz overclocked to 2.2ghz
2.5gigs of DDR 1 ram
Nvidia 7300LE PCI-e

I was wondering if I should ( just until I upgrade everything else ) buy a 8800gt/gs/gtx/gts SLI graphics card for some extra performance by the time. I have ddr1 ram so when I upgrade I would have to wait till I get the board, processor and ram, for some game enhancement.

Will the 8800 have a huge effect when compared to the 7300le?

By the way, my current system barely meets most game's minimum requirements, but I still run them, some better than others.

Gears of War, Assassins Creed, Crysis, Call of Duty 4
so I'm not looking for a cheap solution.
Thanks

Lonno · Accepted Answer

Your computer is older, but what is slowing down your gaming performance or "bottlenecking" your whole system is the video card. The 7300 LE is basically garbage. If you bought a high end card such as the 8800 GT, it would move the bottleneck from the video card to your processor. 

However I do believe you would see a substantial difference in gaming performance. You could probably run everything on high for every game except crysis

Another computer builder · Answer

Yes, an 8800 card will blow away the 7300. I upgraded a socket 939 system with a 7600 xxx card to a 8800gts with more than double the performance increase in games. The processor I had was about only 200 mhz faster than yours so it was comparable.

Anonymous · Answer

Yea dude get a 8800 7300 soo old lol

It should have an huge difference u would probably could run those games at the highest quality

Kenster102.5 · Answer

7 series is mid to high range graphics card, go ahead and by the new card.

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Should I upgrade my graphics first?

4 Answers