Should I get another CPU? Time for an upgrade?

Here's what I got now...

Antec Lanboy case, Enermax 480Watt PS, AMD Athlon XP 2800+, Asus A7N8X-X nForce 2 mobo, Kingston 1024MB PC3200 DDR400, BFG nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB DDR3 AGP, nForce 2 sound, Sony 16X DVD-Rom, LG 8X DVD-RW, Maxtor 60GB HDD, Western Digital 80GB HDD.

I recently bought the GeForce card and it's pretty much the fastest video card on the market right now. I get great 3DMark2003 results (around 11,000 3d marks). However, my CPU marks are quite low. When I run some newer games such as Doom 3, HL 2, etc, I still get some choppiness once in a while. For the money I paid for my video card, I'd expect flawless performance. Do you think my CPU is lacking? What CPU would you recommend? I was looking at the AMD 64 3200 or higher. I want to stick with the nForce mobo's.

thanks a bunch,

Bryan

 

There are some loading screens in doom3 which basicly just cause a slightly lag when going through some doorways, everyone experiences these. Usually they arn't too bad. Like a second at most and then it returns.

At any rate unless you're running a bunch of crap in the background, upgrading the CPU isn't going to do anything for you. It's fast enough, sure its scores arn't the highest but it doesn't matter because games arn't using all of it anyways. An upgrade of the CPU will only make a diffrence on the benchmark scores.

 

if its just for gaming, its now worth it. Save your money until you decide to go all out PCI-Express later on.


Someone I know just fried their XP 2800+ trying to overclock (raised Vcore too much) and upgraded to basically my identical setup, including an Athlon 64 3500+ on an MSI K8N NEO2 Platinum, and a BFG 6800GT OC.

he had the 6800GT on his 2800+ system as well before it blew, and the difference in 3dmark03 scores from then to now is a meager 300-500 points, which i cant say for certain are from the CPU alone, since the tests were with different drivers.


In any case, my point is you wont notice FPS gains in games, so you might as well wait for prices to drop.