Magicland, thanks for the info.
If I understand you right, you're saying that changing to the 8800 GT from
the 6800 wouldn't have been that noticeable of a difference on your system without adding more RAM, faster CPU or upgrading the MB?
What are your main specs?
No, the difference would have been noticeable no matter what, but as the 8800GT is only available in PCI-E and not AGP, I had to replace all the rest before I could make the graphics card upgrade. The only thing that was actually an "upgrade" rather than a format switch was going from an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ to a 5200+, but even that was made possible by the AM2+ socket on the new Mobo, as opposed to the old 939 (though I suppose the DDR2 ram is a slight upgrade over the old dual-channel DDR)
I'm currently running an Athlon 64 X2 5200+, 2 GB DDR2 800 RAM, with the MSI 8800GT 512MB (factory OC'd to 660 Mhz).
As I was on a tight budget, I bought the parts for the upgrade one at a time, while they were on sale, had a rebate, or both over a period of months (and actually traded my old memory, which we needed for a machine at work, for the new processor). Overall, the upgrade cost me (after rebates) $39 for the RAM, $49 for the Mobo, and $200 for the 8800GT (would have been another $120 for the processor), but moving up to a PCI-E based machine was the only thing that made sense, as the top AGP cards didn't seem like a worthwhile investment. Most were limited to 256MB ram and cost almost as much as I paid for the 8800GT alone.
It was just a matter of me being stuck with a bunch of old tech that needed upgraded all at once. One good thing, the Mobo I got is capable of running a Phenom processor, once AMD gets the bugs in them fixed.
The 8800GT is nice, just about everything except Crysis can be run maxxed out at 1280x1024 (or higher), while with the 6800 I really didn't want to push it past 1024x780 or face a performance penalty.