Video card upgrade worth it?

[Bruceman]

Current specs

p4 3.0ghz
1.5 GB of Ram
ATI Radeo 9800 pro 256mb
Windows XP pro SP3


I've been away from PC gaming for a while, but lately i have been playing a lot of WoW. The game runs fine untill im in high traffic areas, Dalaran and Wintergrasp are the worst. Wintergrasp sometimes boggs down to 2fps which is obviously unplayable. I was thinking about getting the Sapphire radeon 3850 HD , and upgrading RAM to 2 gig to improve performance. I am not interesting at buying a new motherboard for a PCIe slot at the moment. I understand that the rest of my system will bottleneck the card to an extent, but what type of gains do you think i would experiance from this upgrade?

[Masaki 7-11]

Ideally a new system would be the best solution, but if you can't afford a new one at this point and are ok with putting a bit more money into your system, you'll see a good improvement in performance (1.5GB of ram should be enough so there isn't much point in getting more) with the HD3850. Dalaran seems to lag on all my computers even my high end gaming one (in my sig), however if you keep the settings reasonable you shouldn't go lower than 20fps. Make sure you have a good power supply that can handle the HD3850 since it will require a good bit more power than the Radeon 9800 Pro. If you put aside about $400 (assuming you already have the OS), you can get a pretty good gaming computer.