Which is a better performance enhancer for online gaming?

[Eyeball-Dragonmaw]

Upgrading from DSL to highest speed available through cable broadband which I think is being boosted to 20mbs/sec and currently my dsl is 1.5mbs/sec


or....


Upgrading my computer which is about 3 yrs old which uses amd 3200+, 2mb ram, 8800 gtx nvidia vid card, and keeping DSL.

[Alanthus]

Your DSL bandwidth have little impact on your gaming experience except making patches load slower. The connection latency between your and the game shard does, that includes mouse/keyboard, nic, router, modem, your ISP to game shard ISP, connection design and implementation of game shard and so on. Unless you know that whatever you're getting gives you markedly better ping times you're propably better off attacking the part of the chain you can control.

Or in short, most likely upgrade comp

[Dromic]

Upgrading from DSL to highest speed available through cable broadband which I think is being boosted to 20mbs/sec and currently my dsl is 1.5mbs/sec


or....


Upgrading my computer which is about 3 yrs old which uses amd 3200+, 2mb ram, 8800 gtx nvidia vid card, and keeping DSL.

In a year maybe look at a PC upgrade.

I moved from cable to DSL and will never look back. The DSL offers 1/2 to 1/3 the latency of Cable (WoW DSL 50ms/Cable 130ms) and picked up a 3.0 Mb/s plan. Also my DSL all last year was down only 9 hours compared to 290 hours with cable. (Roadrunner). I did use one other cable company and they only had 71 hours downtime so not all are horrid as RR. Yes I am that bad recording known downtime to see who is better. After running a BBS for 3 1/2years (in the old days) I was very picky about downtime.

20 Mb/s sounds good till you factor in ISPs bandwidth caps. I you pick a new ISP be very careful with the cap. Some ISPs will let you download 200 gig per month and other are capping to only 10 gig. Then you pay $1 per gig after that. To be honest 3 Mb/s to tops 6 Mb/s is all you will ever need.
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[xpolockx]

In a year maybe look at a PC upgrade.

I moved from cable to DSL and will never look back. The DSL offers 1/2 to 1/3 the latency of Cable (WoW DSL 50ms/Cable 130ms) and picked up a 3.0 Mb/s plan. Also my DSL all last year was down only 9 hours compared to 290 hours with cable. (Roadrunner). I did use one other cable company and they only had 71 hours downtime so not all are horrid as RR. Yes I am that bad recording known downtime to see who is better. After running a BBS for 3 1/2years (in the old days) I was very picky about downtime.

20 Mb/s sounds good till you factor in ISPs bandwidth caps. I you pick a new ISP be very careful with the cap. Some ISPs will let you download 200 gig per month and other are capping to only 10 gig. Then you pay $1 per gig after that. To be honest 3 Mb/s to tops 6 Mb/s is all you will ever need.

Heh, my experience is exactly the opposite. I had verizon DSL and it was horrible - dropping out every few hours so I'd have to reset everything. Numerous techs came out, all to no avail. My cable experience, while also not perfect, blows my DSL out of the water. I guess it depends on your location and such

ISP bandwidth caps do suck, though, and I know a lot of them are sneakily putting in caps without saying anything.

I'd say upgrade the computer myself, but it's probably because like Alanthus said, at least you know exactly what you're getting. Cable providers can be notoriously unreliable, and DSL depends far too greatly on the quality of the infrastructure near your house/apartment. That's just my two cents though