Worth upgrading card?

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Got a 2 year old GTX 260 at the moment. I was thinking of getting a GTX 460 seeing as the price is quite reasonable at the moment (in £££) and i've got some cash to spare now im back in work. I'd hand down my old GTX to my brother.

For £120 give or take thats actually cheper then my 260 was when it first came out.

I don't know if ATI have any decent cards at the moment? Since my old 9800 pro blew up on me a few years ago i've never really been keen on them. I don't want a sodding fan to quit on me.

Saying that a 62 gig SSD is looking quite tempting as well use my 600 gig sata 2 for storage and apps and the 62 gig SSD for the o/s and games.

I don't think there's a huge performance increase between the 260 and 460, AIUI you'd get DX11 support and Fermi (ish) architecture but not necessarily a huge boost in performance. I recently bought a 460 after my 9800GTX broke, which is a bigger step up, and haven't noticed a stunning increase in performance - it's better, but not "wow" better.

Yeah I looked into it went trawling through benchmarks and what not. I can't see a reason to get a new graphics card at the moment really unless im going to the full hog and moving onto an i7 or i5 chip which will need me to change motherboards. I ain't doing that.

It looks like a more significant and cost effective performance increase would come from getting a Solid State Drive and putting my operating system and intensive programs on there. Then use two of my old sata drives in a raid0 setup and my 640 gig drive can become my storage one.

I'm looking at getting this crucial SSD

Crucial RealSSD C300 link

64 gigs for £117 is a bit steep but it sounds like it would make a cost effective performance boost for my machine

Aside from SSD, also consider upgrading the CPU/Motherboard/Memory to faster components.

Higher clocked memory can give a significant speed increase. I had not upgraded my system since 2007 and were still able to run new stuff rather well. Dual/Quad core CPU is probably not that well used by games today, but i think that they will soon. Recently got a 250 card cheaply, i was thinking about 460/70/80 but the next step will be a new CPU/Mobo and lots and lots of fast (2000Mhz+) DDR3 memory.

i don't think you should really upgrading anything. You might as well just start a new computer from the ground up.

In terms of upgrading the other components I can't really upgrade further with this machine as its motherboard and processor have been succeeded by the i7, i5, and i3 processors which are on a differnt socket. So you are correct i would have to create a new machine from scratch.

However the machine is still capable of running things to a high standard at the natural resolution of my 28 inch monitor so I don't really see the need to make it a secondary machine, unless i'm gonna get people around for lan parties or something

I can clock my DDR2 RAM to a higher rate then I am now. I can clock my wolfdale up to 4,0 ghz with no significant increase in heat that the standard fans can't cope with. So i've yet to really put this machine to its limit and to be fair the only games that come to mind that realy put this machine to the test ar empire total war with the darthmod when i've had about 22,000 soliders on a battlefield.

When I built this machine in september 2008 I heard people saying to get a quad then cause games will be multi threaded. Well two years on im still waiting for these multi-threaded engines to emerge that use more then two cores at once.

I've gone off upgrading the graphics card completly now. I think my next purchase will definatly be an SSD.

Well I got a solid state drive. The speed jump is awesome, and my machine is so much more quieter even though the remaining two sata drives are in a raid setup now. Once a disc enclosure i've ordered arrives I'm gonna use my old 640 gig drive for storage and backup purposes.

I upgraded from 2 GTX285's in SLI to a single 5870 Black Edition and immediately saw a huge difference. Especially in BFBC2 with everything maxed I get around 140 FPS. But, thats not the point. I also upgraded my wife from a pair of 9800gts in SLI to a pair of HIS 5830's and she can use the same setting in BFBC2 and she gets around 100FPS. The 5830's can be had for less that $189USD each.

Also, I heard a rumor that since they are released the 5870X2's, and they are doing really well, AMD may be releasing 5830X2's and 5850x2'S respectively. It's one of those "how long can you wait?" kinda deals.