Little upgrade advice?

[AstroCat]

Current system:
AMD 4000+
2 gig DDR RAM
Asus A8N-SLI Premium
Nvidia 8800GTX
CL X-fi

It has served me well for years but I really want to upgrade, admittedly mostly for gaming purposes, thinking Age of Conan in May will be a big factor for me. I think I have at least one more big computer upgrade for gaming in me, then I will re-evalute when the '09/'10 next gen consoles come around vs. the state of PC gaming at that time.

I know that next month the x48 boards, and the new Intel ICs should be readily available. I also know that come end of this year the whole new Nehalem core will kick in.

So, what to do?

1) Get the best I can next month and ride it through Nehalem till the next "big" thing?
2) Try and upgrade the 939! Maybe a Opteron 185 or something, and then go with Nehalem come q4 '08/q1 '09
3) Do nothing yet, suffer and wait till the end of the year, I so don't want to do this.

Any ideas? Thank!

 

[tiraides]

Nehalem is expected to arrive at some time on/around the end of this year. It may take a few more months before we have a working (read: stable) system based around Nehalem. Having said that, you could get a new processor/mobo/RAM bundle now for around $300. For example:

$90 - Abit IP35-E P35 ATX motherboard ($30 MIR)
$45 - G.Skill 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 800 dual channel kit (free shipping)
$125 - Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 processor (free shipping)
==========
$260 - Total (not including shipping, taxes, or rebates)

You could theoretically keep everything else the same and run with the above setup (among countless other configurations) until Nehalem arrives.

Out of curiosity, what does the rest of your current rig look like?