i have a (very) old Asus P5KR motherboard and i'm getting a chance for a minor upgrade.
so i have my sights on a new video card, since it will have the most noticable improvement in performance in it's primary usage - gaming.
so i'm wondering if it's even worth it to buy this video card if there's a chance that the Mobo or the CPU/RAM will bottleneck it. for refference, my CPU is a Intel E6550 @2.33GHz, and my RAM is 2x2GB Elixir DDR2@800MHz.
pretty shitty, i know.
so should i go for it or should i get something less powerful but more "compatible" ?
also: i was thinking about the ram - since the asus website says i can't run any ram faster than 800mhz, will it matter if i got more of it? that would mean i have to track down the same sticks of ram that i have, or i could go crazy and replace all of it with new sticks.... which will probably cost more .
also also: i was thinking of getting a small SSD to be my OS drive, maybe 60GB. and again, i'm concerned with compatibility with the cpu / motherboard.
Yes it supports it. DDR2 RAM is so incredibly expensive as of late, so I wouldn't bother adding more at that kind of cost. It just isn't worth the expense. Yes your motherboard supports any SATA iteration, but it will cut the transfer rates in half for SATA 3 drives. So it probably isn't worth the money until the next update when you get a SATA 3 compatible board.
Yes, grab the 7770 Ghz ED. if possible. It seems like only 1 tier up, but it's actually 2x faster. Both will be bottlenecked by your CPU, not that much however. If you choose to go with the 7770, you'll be happy with it even if you change platform.
By the way, ASUS says your mobo does support memory up to 1066mhz DDR2 (http://www.asus.com/Motherboard/P5KR/#specifications) (It even has support for crossfireX with dual 2.0 slots. Not shitty at all. Pretty impressive, especially for it's age.)
But I wouldn't bother upgrading that, 4GBs 800mhz is well enough for any kind of game. Nothing special, but still decent.
IF, you're not planning to change platform anytime soon, you could pick up a SATA2 60/64gig SSD or even SATA3 for that matter, won't be that much slower. Still 5x the speed of a standard mechanical. Still, IF! you're not planning on platform change, you could pick up someone's used Core2Quad online if you could find it cheap. Maybe sell a speaker or something, not that big of an improvement, rather just maxing out your rig.
I would still recommend getting the 7770. It defines budget gaming. Most you can get for little money.