found this, i figure it's time to up grade "finally" seeing how my GPU keeps locking up.

*snip*

this is a rough overview of how video cards stand up to each other.

You can use this hierarchy to compare pricing between two cards to see which is a better deal. You can also see if an upgrade is worthwhile. I personally don't recommend upgrading unless the card you plan to upgrade to is at least three tiers higher on the chart. If it's less than three tiers higher than your current card, the upgrade is somewhat parallel and you won't notice a worthwhile difference in performance.

i am thinking about switching back to Nvidia and ditching my ATi, comparing the Tiers and bench marks i get more bang for my buck going back to Nvidia. so with that said what do you think about this card?

BFG Tech BFGR78256GSOC GeForce 7800GS 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 AGP 4X/8X Video Card for 180$ to me it seems like a good deal especially since i am upgrading from a ATi Radeon 9800PRO and yes i am still an AGP person... till my HD dies and or my mobo goes out i am gonna stay with AGP and my Gig (still have 1 slot open) of ram. and since there are no higher powered cards for the AGP person. hopefully they come out with a DX 10 AGP card

The 7800GS is a great AGP card, and for the price there's really no comparison. It will be an absolutely huge upgrade from the 9800PRO - each generation has essentially doubled the previous in rendering power, and that's a two generation leap. I did a similar upgrade several months back when the cards were $250, and it was really noticeable.

AGP cards are getting pretty thin though, so this could very well be your last decent upgrade before having to do the full mobo/cpu/ram combo upgrade.

Virgil:
this could very well be your last decent upgrade before having to do the full mobo/cpu/ram combo upgrade.

My sentiments exactly. If you could bear it, I'd suggest holding out a while longer until you've got enough saved up to just bite the bullet and do a full upgrade. If you can't wait though, what you've got planned should be a nice improvement for you.

I'm at the "whole new system" stage.

It would seem with all the new parts i'd have to buy for a decent upgrade, it'd be cheaper just to buy a whole system.

I had to upgrade my system last year or so to get the 7800GTX, because my mobo only had agp. That required a CPU,RAM, Motherboard,and PSU upgrade to do it. Course once I got those, it opened an entirely new level of upgrade, hooray! 3 Upgrades since, I love technology.

woo, da noze lives again!