Help with upgrading

[NitroTurtle]

I'm looking for some help picking out components that will give me the best bang for my buck. I use my computer primarily for gaming, mainly MMORPGs that seem very dependant on a fast system. The items I'd like to upgrade are my motherboard, CPU and memory. I've always used AMD processors, mainly because they were cheaper than comparible Intel processors, although the price gap seems to be narrowing so I'm not partial to either really. The only requirement I have for the upgrade is that I want to have 1GB of RAM. This is what I have come up with so far:

ASUS "A7N8X" nForce2 Ultra 400 Chipset Motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 3000+ "Barton", 400 FSB, 512K Cache Processor
2x Kingston 184 Pin 512MB DDR PC-3200

This totals up to about $400 from newegg, which is about as much as I'd like to spend. I'm not looking for the fastest, newest, latest and greatest rig, I'm just trying to get something that will last me another year or so and outperform my current system (AMD 1800+ with 512Mb PC2700).

Any comments or suggestions are very much appreciated. As I've said, I'm not really stuck on any particular manufacturer or clock speed, I'd just like something reasonably fast with a gig of RAM for around $400. Thanks in advance.

 

[calam63]

1: what mmorpg?

2: have you read anandtechs latest mid-range guide? - http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.html?i=2058

 

[wickedone]

Looks good but I saw nothing on video card or hard drive, if you can try and save up for the new ATI X800pro or xt they are a great improvment over the later cards and some of the newer games are actualy being made to take advatage of there features unlike it was if you bought a high end card before.

 

[oldman420]

get a mobile barton 2400 for much less than that xp3000+ and take it to 2.2 gigs