Tax Return Upgrade Confusion

[papa0tter]

Howdy all, Ive been reading the forums here for the past week trying to figure out the best path to upgrade my 2 year old rig and am in desperate need of guidance so I don't screw everything up. I need to spend as little as possible but my max (which I am really trying not to hit) is $700. I will try to use everything I can from my old system to save money. I do play games but have not purchased anything that requires DX10.

Anyway here is my old system:
COOLER MASTER Centurion 532 RC-532-SKN1 Black Aluminum bezel, SECC chassis ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail

BFG Tech BFGR78256GTOC GeForce 7800GT 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Supported VIVO Video Card - Retail

HITACHI Deskstar T7K250 HDT722525DLA380 (0A31636) 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

ASUS A8N-SLI Premium 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

Antec NEOPOWER 480 ATX12V v2.0 480W Power Supply - Retail

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego 2.2GHz Socket 939 Single-Core Processor Model ADA3700BNBOX - Retail

CORSAIR XMS 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TWINX1024-3200C2PT - Retail

19" Generic Korean LCD

3 Additional IDE HDD (of varioius sizes)

IDE DVD Burner (I forget what)

Running on Win XP Home

My proposed upgrade (found by reading others posts):
GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX All Solid Capacitor Intel Motherboard - Retail

Intel Pentium E2140 Allendale 1.6GHz 1MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor - Retail

ZEROtherm Nirvana NV120 120mm 2-ball UFO Bearing / Transparent CPU Cooler - Retail

G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F2-6400CL5D-2GBNQ - Retail

G.SKILL 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Desktop Memory Model F2-6400CL5S-1GBNQ - Retail

Rosewill RC-200 PCI IDE (ATA) Silicon Image RAID (0/1/0+1/JBOD) Host Controller Card - Retail
To run older IDE drives

Acer AL2216Wbd Black 22" 5ms DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor with HDCP support - Retail

For a grand total of $526.93

I would really love to add a video card but mostly just play City of Heroes and Hellgate London along with some older RTS games and am thinking that my old card with the new processor and memory plus monitor will perform and look much improved. This card EVGA 8800GT 512MB appears to be the best for the dollar but would put me over my limit a hair and as I said the less I spend the better my marital relations will be.

Also I'm hoping that I can just hook up my old primary HDD and it will work. Hopefully someone with more experience can tell me if this is possible or not, or just plain dumb.

I have never really overclocked but have read that this processor can easily overclock to 3GHZ. So my thoughts are this would be a much more upgradeable rig in the future. (I think a quad core will work) If the PSU is decent the GPU would be easy to upgrade later, when I have the need for DX10.

So am I on the right track fellas?

Is there anyway to do this less expensively for a decent performance boost per dollar?

 

[DanNeely]

With 3 dimms in your system (instead of 2/4) you're going to be operating in single channel mode at a 50% loss in memory bandwidth. Either drop the 3rd gig or upgrade to 4 and acept that most of the 4th won't be usable.

 

[papa0tter]

Thank you Dan, Wasnt sure about the 3rd gig. After taking that off that brings the total down to $501.94 + shipping.