Really, the best bet for you is a cpu AND gpu upgrade. Get a core2quad Q6600 and proceed to over clock it by at least 400-600mhz. That is if you have decent cooling already in your comp and have it well ventilated.Switching to a quad will gain benifits across a range of games, simply because they wont be cpu starved anymore. In fact skyrim was horribly 2 thread bound at launch, but subsequent patches addressed this and balanced it with both the RAM and gpu. Skyrim still heavily depends on 2 threads, but people on the steam forum have been reporting that it does use all four threads at times.

IF a cpu upgrade is not possible or your case isn't up to par, then I'd say just oc the cpu you have and leave it at that. Better saving for a new cpu+mobo+ram and case.

Onto the gpu. It's a shame you don't have a 8800gtx or ultra since they are STILL relevant today, if power hungry. Not to worry because a 560 Ti on the nvidia side will easily best skyrim at your res, along with almost any other game on the market. They are pretty power hungry though.


On the ati side, get a 6870 and nothing less. The new 7870 and 7850 is out and the card they replace (6900 series) will quickly go out of stock. Get a 6900 series card if you want, but I find them too pricey and not a huge jump from the 6870.

^ This.

The Q6600 and Q6700 are widely available as surplus for about $100 (US). They overclock mightily, and that board is a good one for overclocking. 3 GHz even on stock cooling is easy.

With RAM, it's more important to have enough than to have the fastest. If you have 2 sticks now, get 2 more sticks of 1GB or 2GB, to give you 6 or 8 GB total. That will let a 32-bit app use 4GB for itself without having to compete with Windows.

The hard disk market has been chaotic since the floods in Thailand wiped out a lot of production. There have been some decent (by this market's standards) deals on WD Caviar Black and the (lesser) Caviar Green disks.

In AMD GPUs, stretch your budget for an HD 6950 over the 6850/6870 if you can. In nVidia, the 560 Ti is deservedly the most popular.

It does make things load faster and sometimes run a bit smoother (places where the HDD usually would kick in don't happen with an SSD). Searching is certainly faster.

But Robbeasy has a lot of possible upgrades before that one's a realistic option. I'd certainly prioritise RAM and GPU over an SSD. But then it really does depend on what he's using it for. Beyond the obvious bit of gaming, he hasn't said.

The only upgrade I haven't taken for granted in the past few years has been a SSD.

Thanks everyone for all the advice - I've plumped for a nvidia 560 Ti for starters, with a look to a CPU upgrade shortly..

That's not exactly so. Actually, only the graphics aperture is mapped, not the entire VRAM. So you can have a 32-bit OS, a 2GB GPU, and a 3GB userland.

But it's still true that you can't have more than 3GB in a 32-bit program on 32-bit Windows. That fourth GB is always reserved for kernel and memory-mapped devices (including the GPU aperture).

32-bit Vista is notorious for being too aggressive in making backing copies of the aperture, thus wasting large blocks of userland. This was much improved in Windows 7.