Upgrading a pos, worth the effort?

[Table]

Ive got a comp thats about 3 1/2 years old (it just hit me today how long its been)
and im looking to eeek a little more juice out of it before I go for a new system build in the next 6-8 months. Ive orderd a new display (22" Samsung ftw), and obviously my system is woefully underequipped to take advantage of it (but it will look pretty on my desk damnit).

My system as it stands today is

Radeon 9800 pro 128mb
Amd Athlon 2600+ (~2.1 ghz...so stock speed really)
A7N8X Deluxe mobo (socket A according to asus website, http://usa.asus.com/products1.aspx?l1=3&l2=0&l3=0&modelmenu=0&share=txt/60)
1 gb RAM (two decent 256's and a crappy 512, but dual channel is running properly)

now ive got a decent heatsink and artic silver stuff, so the CPU runs cool (38 C... without the artic silver) and there is some room for OCing (if im not mistaken). Ive had some problems with OCing through the bios, is there any easier way to go about it? Can my vid card be OC'd and how would I go about doing that (omega drivers have a utility, but i dont want to mess with things I dont understand).

Beyond OCIng the obvious thing to do would be to get slight cheap upgrades to tide me over. Am I right in assuming the processor upgrade path is closed to me, as my mobo wont run even the old Sempron chips? (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...0001028+1051707438&Submit=ENE&SubCategory=343)
is it worth it to even try to upgrade to the 3200+ (if I can find somewhere that sells socket A, barton?, chips)
Is a GPU upgrade worth it?
RAM?
im trying to keep any stopgap upgrades cheap, as ide like to build a new system in the forseeable future, however ide also like to have a performance boost that can get me through the intervening months and perhaps allow me to put off the rebuild for a little longer.


In addition I have no idea what kind of system I should be looking to build in 6-8 months, ide like to keep costs to less then 800 (I know its hard to follow price guidlines 6 months in the future) so any tips/advice you would like to offer would be much appreciated.

sorry for my ignorance, a baby and life in general have kept me out of the loop for the past years.

thanks
any help is greatly appreciated

 

[The_Mage18]

Wow, you're really looking at a rock and a hard place.

Your video is dated at best. AGP is pretty much phased out.
Your combination of DDR is a killer, if you had 4 256MB chips you could re-use it all in a Socket 940 or 939 mobo but with only 3 sticks, you'd have to lose 1 for the board to work decently.

Honestly, I'd recommend you saving the money you would put into limping along with that system via upgrades and save it towards a new system. You could upgrade your current system but I seriously feel your money would be waisted doing that.

 

[Dangman]

I was about to do the same thing you were going to do. But then I realized that no matter what upgrade I perform on this PC (specs in sig), it was still going to be outdated.

So I say wait and save your money. You have a kid now. So it would be best to save your money.

But in the mean time till your next build, you can use ATI Tool to OC your 9800Pro. If your motherboard is supported, go download Clockgen. It's a pretty simple OC program.

 

[engiNURD]

I think the most performance gain you will notice (for general computing) would be a cpu upgrade:

$180 - Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 Conroe 1.86GHz
$57 - ASRock 775Dual-VSTA Socket T (LGA 775) VIA PT880 PRO
=========
$236 + tax and shipping

Re-use your 9800pro and DDR400 ram. When you get more cash, get a PCI-E vidcard (7600GT+). Next, get 2GB of DDR2-800. Then when you get even more cash, get a better mobo and a scythe ninja plus to oc that c2d monster even higher. For better gaming performance, upgrade the GPU... but high performance on agp will be expensive... and not worth it, imho.

 

[Table]

I think ill just weather the storm so to speak, thanks for the replys