Best upgrade path?

[InorganicMatter]

I, like many others, bought into RAMBUS memory. Now, here I am with probably $500 worth of RDRAM, and anything but $500 worth of performance. Specs are as follows:

2.60GHz Pentium 4 (400MHz FSB)
768MB of RAMBUS Memory
ATi Radeon 9600XT
80GB Western Digital SE (8MB Cache)
Viewsonic A70 (17" CRT, non flat-screen)
Microsoft KB/Mouse

For now, let's say I have $700 to put into this (Of course, less than $700 would be even better). I would like to stay with Intel, as I do a lot of video encoding and multi-tasking, and I would like to go back to nVidia graphics cards (One ATi card was enough to convince me of their "quality"). The computer will be used for some newer games (HL2, Doom3, Far Cry, STALKER should we ever see it). If what I hear is true, SLi isn't too far away for Intel, and I would like the system to be SLi ready, even if I only have 1 video card in it for now.

 

[atomic3]

with 700 you can almost build a new pc, as long as you dont need a case, keyboard, mouse or monitor. You can easily price out a nice cpu, mobo, ram and video card that will blow your current set up away for 700. Better yet, sell your current components on ebay and you will have closer to a grand to play with.