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Nvidia measures performance with the second digit in the card's model. 5600 is 5th generation, 8400 is 8th generation, however since the "600" is higher than the "400", the 5600 is the faster card.

Benchmarks? Just because it's true that the 8600 was similar to the 7600 doesn't mean it's true that all x600 are the same, or that a card with a second higher digit will always outperfom a later generation card with lower digit. Are you seriously suggesting that in all the years since the first NVIDIA chipsets, they haven't improved in performance? That a 4600 will outperform an 8500? Sorry, that's ludicrous.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/07/05/vga_charts_vii/page4.html#3d_mark_2005 shows how even a 6600 demolishes the FX 5700, let alone a 5600. Then check out http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=716&model2=722&chart=308 to see the jump from a 6600 to a 7600 (about another factor of 2).

The GMA 950 may not have hardware T&L, but it does support pixel shader 2.0, which should be all Morrowind needs. In any case, I can't imagine that you get very good performance out of that IGP since the Geforce 6150 IGPs in one of my laptops can't even run Morrowind at an acceptable speed. What's your average, 10-15fps tops? Have fun with that...

It gets 100FPS indoors. On large outdoor scenes it drops to about 20-30FPS, but as others have said, that's more than adequate for a roleplaying game, not a fast shooter. So yes, I do have fun with that. And as I said, I know what it's like on a faster card anyway.

I've no idea why the lack of reflections - if it isn't shader model, it may be some other missing feature (unfortunately the Intel chipsets lack a lot - another reason to prefer the NVIDIA laptops).

Not everyone is a gamer interested in the latest games, games where high frame rates are needed and so on - but we still might play an occasional old game.

But not something as old as the GeForce FX 5600.

I don't know if you had a bad experience on that card or what, but seriously - the graphics industry has moved on light years since then.

"The general public is oblivious to the fact that internally the AMD architecture is cleaner and more elegant, the only thing they have to go on is marketing."

It doesn't help that in most benchmarks, AMD has been trounced by Intel this past year.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2007.html

For instance the AMD Athlon X2 64-bit dual core chip i use, is quieter, less power hungry and more powerful than its intel-equivalent.

Not saying that I dont believe you, but can you explain this?

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/07/14/core2_duo_knocks_out_athlon_64/page3.html

Processor Thermal Design Power
Core 2 Extreme X6800 75 W
Core 2 Duo E6700 65 W
Core 2 Duo E6600 65 W
Core 2 Duo E6400 65 W
Core 2 Duo E6300 65 W
Pentium D 950 115 W
Pentium D 840 130 W
Athlon 64 FX-62 125 W
Athlon 64 4800+ 95 W

the price:performance ratios look pretty good still, according to tom's hardware's charts at least.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=946&model2=882&chart=444

There are still plenty of reasons to buy AMD. We all seem to forget that these things just execute binaries and seem to be ascribing all sorts of personal identification with a friggen CPU brand, as if it were a shirt we wear every day. When I bought my way into dual cores kinda recently (you can probably figure out the type of user I am -- pragmatic?) I looked at their chart, looked around in my price range, and realized that AMD was as fine of a bet as Intel. I could have easily bought an Intel processor, but the products I found fitting my mainboard and processor needs aligned quite evenly over AMD, so after putting aside the market perception, that's what I got.

And my computer does its job of being a computer very nicely.

I also read that but I believe that their problem was that no part of the system was made to work in that way. The processors and motherboard were designed to work with identical processors, not an arbitrary set chosen from "what we had laying around." They had different memory management, cache, and SSE support. That said, the benchmark section showed that it worked surprisingly well, only failing on two of the dozen or so tests.

So basically WGA under SP1 causes Vista to act like crippleware.

The irony of course being that Vista was already "crippleware" from the beginning - crippleware by design, if you may ;).

As with all articles on Tom's you can get round the multi page bit by changing the index.html to print.html - eg:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/02/08/intel_skulltrail_part_3/print.html

That gives you a long single page. It's not perfect but it helps.

• http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/02/08/intel_skulltrail_part_3/print.html

HTF (how the fuck) is this a troll? Judging from this I would take the parent's claim with a grain of salt, however this does not equal troll.

You do not have to max out your credit card to get good performance in a DX10 card:

The Radeon 3850 brings us something we've been begging for ever since the DirectX 10 cards were introduced: a sub-$200 card with performance comparable to the high-end products. The Radeon 3850 delivers Geforce 8800 GTS 320mb performance for $100+ less. If you're looking to get the best possible performance for the dollar, this card hits the sweet spot. Best Gaming Graphics Cards: February 2008

Vista can play protected HD content at full HD resolution. The PS3 can do this. OSX can do this. The set top box with an embedded Linux OS can do this. No HD means no mass market sales.

IMHO, the Asus XG Station. That external graphics enclosure might be interesting.

Tell you what, Microsoft: You come up with an OS that outperforms XP Pro SP2, has some useful new features, is efficient, compatible, maybe even costs less, and then blow me, and I'll give your new OS a try. How's that sound?

Networking (Pre SP1)
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/2070

Raw CPU Use
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/xp-vs-vista-uk,review-2067-5.html

Gaming Performance (Especially after the Beta Driver Releases in Jan - Check out reviews from June to now - Drivers are faster than XP 99.9% of the time)
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_nvidia_windows_vista_driver_performance_update/page9.asp

Even Early Drivers (Beta Even) put Vista at only a few FPS behind XP, and this is pure RTM code, no optimizations:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/page11.html

DirectX10 REALLY does need Vista
http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/2/14/7060
The GPU scheduler and GPU RAM Virtualization are just two major aspects of what DirectX10 expects to be present, and if you run the DX10 libraries on XP, you will never get these features.

Vista is faster than Mac on own Hardware
(Didn't have link in my folder, but do a search, especially with Leopard and Boot Camp. From casual user reviews of Vista loading faster and being snappier than Leopard and Tiger to reviews that take native compiled applications or games for both Intel based codesets, Vista easily out performs OS X in raw application performance and ESPECIALLY gaming like Quake or WoW or other native apps that run under both OSes.)

Beware of Idiot Reviews
-Most Online and 'tech' reviews are conducted by iditors or people that don't have a clue what they are doing.

The main things you will find is that they use a first day installation of Vista, where Superfetch has had no time nor performed any optimizations on the system to increase applications load times, Vista itself has ran no optimization for prefetch, file placement as there is no data to base it on for the applications or games yet, and especially the intelligent SuperFetch optimiations make a massive difference in gaming where you have a tons of textures and levels being queued into the game.

Another signs of a bad test - They turn of Aero, which on modern Video cards is faster than turned off. They also go out of their way to turn of Search Indexing and other performance assisting tools like Superfetch. (In fact with Aero on and WDDM's scheduling handling the GPU in Vista, even a single game will usually run faster 'inside' a Window instead of Full Screen - something that is the opposite of XP or other OS models.

You can find a ton of reviews that fall into these categories.
Here is a recent one for Example:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=797

The majority of the problem with Vista is just like this article mentions 'perceived reality', and also the 'missed advantages' Vista does offer to everyday users as well as gamers.

Gamer example: run several high end games in a Window at the same time, notice you barely lose FPS in any of the Games even though they are running on the screen at the same time, or even in Flip3D (or a 3rd Party Expose' Mimic utility). Not only would this choke XP, since Vista DOES the GPU scheduling and is not application yield based like you find in OpenGL based OS designs, this is something that is nearly impossible to do on anything outside of Vista. And yes there are people that do this, just find almost any MMO player than has more than one account or playes more than one MMO, and they are usually running

Every vista thread on /. lately looks like this:

• Vista works great for me!
• Vista sucks!
• Vista works fine on my Dad's computer!
• Vista is a dog on my Aunt's laptop!
• Vista is just fine, so stfu!
• I have to use Vista and I HATE it!
• ...

I've never used Vista (maybe for 5 min at my parent's house), so I don't have my own opinion, but can we just admit that apparently SOME people have problems with it? I mean, sure some are probably exaggerating, and some are probably having driver issues (which I don't see any reason to ignore, actually), but are you really ready to claim that ALL the complaints are groundless just because YOU didn't have a problem? And what is a problem to one person may not be a problem to others. Someone could at least link some data to make their case: Here are some tests of XP vs Vista on the same hardware.

Shall we call you MS. Troll

Read this and then spin your BS. http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/

On the other hand there are some other surprises. If you expand the old graphs of PC processor clock speeds, we should have 12GHz CPUs now, but we don't. Clock speeds stopped increasing about 4 years ago. Processors are still faster due to architectural changes, faster bus speeds and more cores, but clock speeds are exactly the same if not slower than they were a few years back.

You know the saying 'if you think of something it has probably already been done'

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/06/19/can_ageia/

3 GB/s is at the low end of system RAM bandwidth, so you must be talking about bytes.

But 1280x1024x32x75=3145728000 bits/second, about 3.1x10^9 bits/second, or 393x10^6 bytes/second.

For most systems this would be about 4 to 10% of memory bandwidth. This article from Tom's Hardware seems to show that the effect on non-3D applications is minimal.

Several items are coming to a head in the laptop market that will drastically reduce power usage.

1) SSD Hard Drive. The hard drive is one of the biggest power consumers in the laptop today, by changing to an SSD, this can be drastically reduced. Yes, they are more expensive and they are smaller capacity than a HD, but in addition to being less power hungry, they are also much faster, smaller, and lighter.

2) Digital Paper Displays. The back lighting required by current LCDs is very expensive to run power consumption wise. They also require power 100% of the time to maintain the image itself even though this is much less than the back light power requirements. As the digital paper displays become more commercialized, we will see them start to take over the laptop market. Digital paper does not use back lighting and does not require power to maintain the image, only to change the image. Thus drastically reducing the amount of power required for the display.

3) Wireless network adapter. There are several changes coming in the Wireless world in the near future that will reduce the power requirements of wireless networking. As 802.11n moves from draft to production standards and the equipment become inter operable, we will see more usage of the N mode networking which will allow for most network cards to run at lower power for the same connectivity we see today. WiMax and other similar technologies will also bring lower power consumption for wireless networking.

4) Sub 40nm chips. As we shrink circuits smaller and smaller, we are finding that they, in general, require less power to operate. In addition, new materials, such as the new High-k materials, are required to allow circuits to operate correctly at this smaller scale and these new materials are also introducing power savings. As RAM, CPU, and main chipset chips are moved to the smaller die size we will find they use less and less power.

5) Non-Volatile MRAM. Another power consumer is main memory. Even if the system is idle, RAM requires power just to maintain the data stored in it. New technologies are just coming to fruition that will create RAM that does not require power constantly but will be just as fast as current RAM offerings and not have the life span problems that Flash RAM has.

Combine all of these changes with the fact that we may see Li-Ion batteries that have 3-5 times the capacity of today's Li-Ion batteries on a size to size or weight to weight ratio, I expect that over the next 5 years we will see personal electronic devices shrink to down to the point where they are practically non-existent

BartPE fits on a 256MB USB Flash drive. Surely something similar would be workable in 1GB.

AMD would be fine if they had an expensive chip they could sell at a premium, or a very cheap to produce chip they could sell for the budget crowd, but right now they have Acura production costs coupled with Kia per-unit revenues: bad times.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/19/using_windowsxp_to_make_raid_5_happen/index.html Found this online... if you have >= 3 HDDs available, can easily convert winXP into a RAID5 server, or so Tomshardware claims.

There is... check out the address below.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/19/the_spider_weaves_its_web/print.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/19/the_spider_weaves_its_web/print.html

There you go, no more clicking!

they're not upping the cache (which is where that discrepancy in performance in the benchmarks is REALLY coming from...) to match Intel's lead in this space

No, those are peak current requirements - the PSU may deliver 120A but for brief high current draw periods. It's easy, if you take a 400W PSU (which is overkill for most systems), and use it to somehow power the 5VDC rail alone you get 80A maximum draw. In reality, available power is more or less balanced between the 12V and 5V, so it's really half that. That is, if the system actually gets to require full power.

Now we have multi-CPU and multi-core CPU; that easily hundreds of amps on a MOBO; it mind boggling but your computer might be consuming as many amps at 1.33 volts as you4 entire house at 225/117VAC.

Actually, modern multicore CPUs are well behaved (relatively - they still draw power like hell) in that sense; such systems usually draw about 200W under load (specs here).

Then again, it's not surprising that a motherboard is running as many amps as your house wiring, since the issue here is power draw, and for computers this is still relatively low - 200-500W isn't really much outside household usage. Like i said, building a switching system for a industrial applications is not easy, nor cheap, and prone to malfunction; there's a reason most power distribtution systems run on AC.

No, those are peak current requirements - the PSU may deliver 120A but for brief high current draw periods. It's easy, if you take a 400W PSU (which is overkill for most systems), and use it to somehow power the 5VDC rail alone you get 80A maximum draw. In reality, available power is more or less balanced between the 12V and 5V, so it's really half that. That is, if the system actually gets to require full power.

Now we have multi-CPU and multi-core CPU; that easily hundreds of amps on a MOBO; it mind boggling but your computer might be consuming as many amps at 1.33 volts as you4 entire house at 225/117VAC.

Actually, modern multicore CPUs are well behaved (relatively - they still draw power like hell) in that sense; such systems usually draw about 200W under load (specs here).

Then again, it's not surprising that a motherboard is running as many amps as your house wiring, since the issue here is power draw, and for computers this is still relatively low - 200-500W isn't really much outside household usage. Like i said, building a switching system for a industrial applications is not easy, nor cheap, and prone to malfunction; there's a reason most power distribtution systems run on AC.

I use a 1gb swapfile/pagefile partition on a TRUE Solid-State disk (not FLASH RAM based - mine uses PC-133 SDRAM & the PCI 2.2 bus @ 132mb/sec. throughput, more on this in my P.S. below!

(Here, this unit is the only resides on my PCI bus slots, & I have no other PCI bus based addon cards is why & this does help also, because it has that bus exclusively (CENATEK RocketDrive is the model I use, I did a review for them in 2002, & have had it since)).

As far as the speed of my Virtual Memory Accesses this helps & seek times on it are WAY faster than on traditional HDDs.

I do FAR MORE than that, & here is why/how/what:

E.G.-> On its first 1gb partition I place the pagefile.sys. On its 2nd partition, I place my webbrowser's webpage caches, plus logging from the OS eventlogs (easily moved in the registry in Windows) & app logging (many apps allow custom placement of this. DrWtsn32.exe, zip/unzip tools, & far more). LASTLY, I also the location of my %temp/tmp% ops via environment variable tuning thru the SYSTEM ICON in CONTROL PANEL, & its ADVANCED section.

I make the logging/webpage cache 2nd partition on my TRUE SSD (not FLASH RAM based) onto it using NTFS compression, & this helps as well!

(Mainly doing this helps in that the type of data in browser caches & logs is largely text data!)

Thus, it massively gives me more storage, & more speed (smaller file masses to pickup, & today's RAM + CPU speeds offset the decompress stage in RAM today HUGELY compared to years past)!

Also, doing this? Well, I avoid fragmenting other files on my main programs & OS disk, & also avoid wasting I/O of many forms on them on my main disk too, plus CPU cycles wasted driving those I-O's that now take place on another disk, albeit a massively fast seeking one in an SSD...

APK

P.S.=> Mine's older & dated though... there are FASTER ONES OUT THERE!

Examples being the SATA bus based Gigabyte IRAM (uses 150mb/sec. SATA bus, & DDR2 RAM - vs. the one I have using PCI 2.2 132mb/sec. bus transfer rates, & slower PC-133 SDRAM), OR this one most recently:

HyperDrive 4 Redefines Solid State Storage

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/07/hyperdrive_4_redefines_solid_state_storage/

Now, there was SUPPOSED to be one released this year, called the "DDRDrive X1", which used DDR RAM and more importantly, the PCI-Express bus (far faster throughput than PCI 2.2 I use, & even faster by far than SATA of any variation currently)... it did not release, but I wish it had... apk

Basically the reviews on Anandtech & Tom's Hardware have drawn some interesting conclusions... In terms of write performance, some are significantly worse than most notebook HDs, but all are better in terms of read performance. The idle of SATA SSD drives are significantly worse than UDMA ones (0.5w vs. 0.05w).

Basically, do your research... How much speed you'll get depends on how they bank the flash chips. More banks of lower density chips will yield a higher transfer rate--but uses more power. (Good luck finding how any one brand of SSD drive is banked...) Tom's Hardware found that the Samsung 64GB SSD offered double the transfer rate than their 32GB SSD. Anandtech found the Transcend & Super Talent SSD's to be extremely weak offerings. But then again Anandtech found the MTRON 32GB SSD far superior to most other drives they tested.

Basically SSD drives help with bootup times but in mixed tests, only the MTRON SSD drives are near Raptor speed, but I found only one retailer that even sells them--and a 32GB one for $2336.95 !!!

Ummmm.... Check this out... http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2007.html

This chart shows that in terms of Price/Performance for the average user, Intel has only two CPU's that can compete with AMD's leading X2 (non-FX) processor (the 6000+, which is the highest AMD they have benchmarked). The first is the E2160, and the second is the P4E 613.

The field is LARGELY domainated (at the best scores that is) by AMD... Intel has 5 in the top 20, 1 in the top 10, and 0 in the top 5. AMD, conversely, has 2 x2's in the top 5...

"The CENATEK RocketDrive I use is dated though, & faster ones exist (e.g.-> Gigabyte IRAM, which iirc, uses SATA bus (150mb/sec potential vs. PCI 2.2 132mb/sec mine has) & also faster RAM (DDR2 iirc, vs. PC-133 SDRAM)... there was SUPPOSED to be a release of a PCI-Express unit called the DDRDrive X1, but it never happened!

Too bad. I'd love a PCI-x based RamDrive/SSD... apk" - by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07, @09:43PM (#21276631) Like I said above, check this out:

HyperDrive 4 Redefines Solid State Storage (The Fastest Hard Disk In The World):

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/07/hyperdrive_4_redefines_solid_state_storage/

APK

"The CENATEK RocketDrive I use is dated though, & faster ones exist (e.g.-> Gigabyte IRAM, which iirc, uses SATA bus (150mb/sec potential vs. PCI 2.2 132mb/sec mine has) & also faster RAM (DDR2 iirc, vs. PC-133 SDRAM)... there was SUPPOSED to be a release of a PCI-Express unit called the DDRDrive X1, but it never happened!

Too bad. I'd love a PCI-x based RamDrive/SSD... apk" - by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07, @09:43PM (#21276631) Like I said above, check this out:

HyperDrive 4 Redefines Solid State Storage (The Fastest Hard Disk In The World):

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/07/hyperdrive_4_redefines_solid_state_storage/

APK

"The CENATEK RocketDrive I use is dated though, & faster ones exist (e.g.-> Gigabyte IRAM, which iirc, uses SATA bus (150mb/sec potential vs. PCI 2.2 132mb/sec mine has) & also faster RAM (DDR2 iirc, vs. PC-133 SDRAM)... there was SUPPOSED to be a release of a PCI-Express unit called the DDRDrive X1, but it never happened!

Too bad. I'd love a PCI-x based RamDrive/SSD... apk" - by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07, @09:43PM (#21276631) Like I said above, check this out:

HyperDrive 4 Redefines Solid State Storage (The Fastest Hard Disk In The World):

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/07/hyperdrive_4_redefines_solid_state_storage/

APK

I hate to say this, I had a subscription to PC Mag from 1989-1993 then I learned UNIX and learned about real computers. That must have been the hey-day for them.

Does PC Mag matter anymore? I mean, isn't it just like Computer Shopper now? Full of ads for things I don't want or need with 1-2 articles of any use?

For example, they seem to have lost their way - current cover story is about smart phones? What, exactly, does a smart phone have to do with a PC? Of course, they have the gPhone link too.

Another article is GPS - what am I doing with a GPS on my desktop PC?

PC Mag has clearly lost there way. For me, Tom's Hardware http://www.tomshardware.com/ and Anandtech http://www.anandtech.com/ have taken their place.

If by "really quiet" you mean "my neighbours won't hear it," then yeah, call it quiet by all means. If you've heard any of the 8800 series cards' coolers, the 8800GT solution is not much quieter, so still in the hairdryer league. Here's hoping someone makes a factory-assembled fanless cooling solution for the 8800GT. It might be possible, given that it's power draw is not much higher than that of the 8600GTS.

XFX make passively cooled 7950GT's, and they seem to trounce the 8600GTS in many cases (a quick glance at a few charts like this show the 7950GT sometimes leading 2-3x, especially at higher resolutions and sometimes trailing to maybe 0.8x).

They're a bit chunky though (I have to run mine in the secondary PCI-E slot since the GPU and CPU heatsinks intersect), and obviously need a reasonable amount of case ventilation.

FWIW, the reccomended $100 card performs better than my card that cost $200 two years ago (6600 GT).

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/25/windows_server_2008_reviewed/print.html

Printable view -- http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/25/windows_server_2008_reviewed/print.html No ads either :P

Did you try clicking on any of the screenshots?

The link goes straight to PNGs.

http://images.tomshardware.com/2007/10/25/windows_server_2008_reviewed/08_initial_config.png

On Vista you can run several CAD/High End graphical applications under the Aero interface and not lose performance in any of the applications, even with them performing side by side. (This is the same paradigm shift that pre-emptive CPU operations offered applications, and Vista has extended this concept to the GPU subsystem.)

Er... no.

I can tell you that Vista offers nothing but complications and poorer performance for these applications. CAD/CAM demands RAM; Vista takes it away with bloat and poor memory handling. CAD/CAM demands graphics power; Vista keeps the GPU busy with its own tasks and has poor OpenGL performance.

Far and away the best Windows OS for CAD/CAM is XP Pro x64. I would strongly advise users to stay with XP, think about going x64, but definitely skip the current generation. Or see if your vendor supports OSX/Linux/Unix.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intel-039-s-X48-to-Come-in-Just-Another-5-Weeks-67604.shtml
http://www.dvhardware.net/article22289.html
It appears the X48 chipset is actually the X38 chipset without the ECC support and for DDR3 Only? Great, just when we weren't confused!

Here's another X38 review: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3120
A chipset comparison graphic: http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/chipsets/intel/x38-launch/memory-lg.png
And another review: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/09/26/intel_x38_chipset/

Vista performance is slower even with aero turned off and this is not an opinion, it has been benchmarked:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/page4.html

that's not counting the numerous vista performance bugs, nor the well know usability issues (allow, continue).. which effectively slows down your productivity

People are doing it with SD: http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2007/05/sd_to_ssd_conversion_made_easy.html
Here is the CF version: http://forevergeek.com/gadgets/compact_flash_to_ssd_converter.php
If you are not limited to the 2.5" form factor of a laptop chassis, there are better/faster ways of doing this: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/242281-32-drives

Can't read the article but this will help understand about the Hybrid drives.
Since laptops can't support the faster speeds that their desktop brethren, any access time improvement is desirable. You can keep your most frequently used data on the Flash or as a buffer, such as during a movie. Another benefit is that flash takes less energy to read than a HDD.
Here's also a review of the drive itself

Give THG a shot. It's XP Pro only and it's not perfect... but, it's been a pretty decent solution for me.

Here it is:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/05/28/getting_more_bang_out_of_your_dual_processing_buck/index.html

I'm no expert but I wouldn't expect a big performance boost from upgrading from DDR to DDR2. Memory performance in general isn't the bottleneck in a typical desktop system; memory CAPACITY might be, but if you have 2GB already that's not the issue.

If you're looking for an easy speed boost, a new motherboard plus a new CPU would be the way to go; CPU performance has been increasing dramatically lately. Here's a chart from THG that illustrates the progress; even the mid-range Core 2 Duos benchmark at 2-3 times the performance of an Athlon 3000+, and the high-end Core 2s are even faster. That's a much more dramatic performance boost than anything you'd see by upgrading your RAM.

The video isn't dead:
http://www4.tomshardware.com/site/downloads/wirednextfest_crash.swf
http://tau32.pair.com/german/video/wirednextfest_crash.swf
http://tau25.pair.com/sysdoc/video/wirednextfest_crash.swf

Speaking of the survey, is anyone else a bit surprised at the RAM numbers? If I'm reading it right nearly 45% of "gamers" have only 512 to 999 mb of ram. This survey started May 30th, 2007 and has been updated many times since.

With ram prices in the gutter I'm a bit shocked. 1gig of ram is less than $50 and has been for about 6 months. Why are these so called "gamers" spending hundreds on new video cards but still chugging along with $25 worth of ram? Many modern games like Supreme Commander won't even run with such little ram.

This might be even more surprising: only 0.43% have 2gigs or more. Less than 1% of gamers bothered to spend ~$100 on 2gigs of ram?

Also, 6.91% of gamers were running NVIDIA GeForce 6600 cards that came out in 2004. Another 4.42% are running the ATI Radeon 9600 which was out in 2003. These are very old cards for any true gamer to be running.

I don't think this survey is a good overall picture of what real gamers are buying and using. Real gamers are not using 4 year old Radeon 9600 cards and 512mb of ram.