PC Upgrading Help

[MasterOfPupets]

Hey guys

I'm in the military right now, finishing up training for the National Guard in the next couple weeks. When I get home I'm looking to do some upgrades to my PC.

1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc

Gaming, mostly MMOs (Cataclysm, and SW:TOR mainly)

2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?

Probably $500, but the less I spend the better

3) Where do you live?

Ohio, 44145

4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. "Everything" is not a valid answer. Please list out all the parts you'll need.

Whatever gets me the most bang for the buck upgrading. Probably more RAM and a video card, or possibly a new MB/CPU/RAM. Not sure what the best upgrade path will be.

5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.

Don't have my computer here so I can't say for sure about make and models, but I'm reusing the PSU (it's a good one), optical drives, HDDs, Keyboard, mouse, and monitor. As well as anything I don't upgrade.

6) Will you be overclocking?

Probably, as long as I can keep the heat output down.

7) What size monitor do you have and/or plan to have?

22". 1680x1050 I believe.

8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?

3 weeks, not really looking for specific parts or deals, just looking to find out what parts to upgrade in my budget to get the most improvement for my money.

9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? etc.

Just standard features. I only use 2 SATA HDDs and have no desire to use crossfire or sli in the future, I prefer single card solutions.

10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If yes, what OS? 32bit or 64bit?

I have a copy of 32bit xp pro, planning to upgrade to win7.

Not sure if answering those really helps, he's the basic situation, I want to upgrade the PC to perform better for as cheap as possible, looking for the biggest bang for my buck upgrade wise. Cheaper the better.
Current Specs:
Q6600 OC'd to 3.22ghz stable
Radeon 4870
2gb DDR2 ram (not sure on specs, but it's running at the same speed as the 6600)


I was thinking I should either toss some more ram in and upgrade the video card, but I don't know if the CPU will bottleneck a new video card. The other option is upgrading the CPU/MB/RAM all at once, but that sticks me with the older video card and most likely will hit the top end of my budget. Any advice?

 

[Dangman]

Find out what PSU you have. No offense, but we can't take your word that it's a good PSU. Too many times on this forum, people have said the exact same thing when in reality, their PSU is a POS. So yeah, please find out what PSU you have as that determines your upgrades.

Also, which HD 4870 do you have? the 512MB or the 1GB model?

Oh the and the Q6600 won't be that much of a bottleneck.

 

[MasterOfPupets]

The PSU is from PC Power and Cooling, so I'm not too worried about it. I'm hoping to get the parts ordered before I head home so I can have them waiting for me. No way to really get a model number for it.

The 4870 is a 1GB model, it's the Gigabyte reference design.

And I wasn't sure about the Q6600. I've been out of the game for a while with PCs due to lack of money (less temptation if I don't read about new tech) and wasn't sure how big of a jump the new CPUs are over the older ones.