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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vagabond" data-source="post: 1938745" data-attributes="member: 14517">The video card will bring your gaming experience to respectable levels, more so then just the CPU upgrade alone would do.  Where the CPU upgrade will help is with your video capture and editing. In particular, when you convert video from analog to digital, or if you need to resize the video stream, add effects, etc.  What would help even more is if you add an hardware MPEG encoder card (which, like a 3d video card, takes away work from the CPU and does it much more efficiently then the CPU can).  I have little experience with hardware MPEG cards, so I can't really recommend anything.  However, I have heard good reviews of the Hauppauge PVR 250/350 series.  The web page is <a href="http://www.hauppauge.com" target="_blank">http://www.hauppauge.com</a>Another thing that will help with all around performance is to add a Serial ATA or SCSI drive to your system, and place all your data on the new drive.  Going SCSI is probably too expensive, with good controller cards starting around $200, and drives about 2 to 3 times as much as the equivalent capacity IDE drives.  SATA is less expensive.  Your motherboard may already have a SATA controller on it, in which case, you just need to start buying drives, which are comparable to IDE in price.  Otherwise, controller cards can be picked up for about $40.To sum it up the order of upgrade should be:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Video card for games</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">MPEG encoder for video capture</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">CPU, For video capture (If you can't find an MPEG encoder card)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">SATA or SCSI hard drives for general performance boost</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">CPU for general performance boost</li> </ol></blockquote>

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