What should I upgrade first?

groph

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Hello all, first post. I was just wondering what the "weakest link" of my system is. I can run Crysis on maximum settings and experience a little bit of FPS loss when there is a lot going on, Battlefield Bad Company 2 runs flawlessly on medium with very minor FPS loss on maximum (it still looks awesome in medium so I leave it there), CoD WaW runs flawlessly on maximum, GTA IV has the odd hiccup here and there on maximum but it's still pretty smooth and very playable. RTS games like Dawn of War II, Starcraft II, Supreme Commander 2, Sins of a Solar Empire, Red Alert 3, Command and Conquer 3 and 4 all run flawlessly on max, but RTS games aren't as specs-intensive as shooter games often are.

My current specs

Antec 900 case w/ Antec Tricool 120MM case fan
Ultra Products Lifetime Series Pro ATX 750w power supply
ASUS M4A78 Pro socket AM2+/AM3 motherboard
AMD Phenom II X4 940 AM2+ quad core @ 3.0
Kingston Value Dual Channel 4GB (2x2) PC2-6400 800MHz RAM
Seagate 500GB SATA 16MB cache hard drive
Sapphire Radeon HD4870 1GB GDDR5 graphics

OS is Windows 7 Premium Edition 64 bit

I'm definitely a layman when it comes to computer hardware, so bear that in mind. I mostly play RTS games but I do enjoy a good FPS and I hate choppy gameplay and bad graphics. If I'm playing a game, I want it to look good and run well. I'm guessing the RAM is the weak link, it's dual channel DDR2 and now we have dual channel DDR3 so I assume that works more efficiently, generally speaking.

EDIT: My screen resolution is 1600x900, and obviously I mostly just play games, I'm not big into multimedia or encoding/decoding whatever. I'm either playing a game or wasting time on the internet/doing school work.
 
You would have to get a new motherboard to support DDR3, however your board does support DDR2 1200 (O.C.). For best performance ASUS recommends only running it in the yellow slots though, so that limits you to just two DIMMs.
 
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