It's that time of year: upgrade time (suggestions welcome)

[thraxes]

Well I now have the money (and the will to spend that money) for a nice upgrade of my machine.

I currently have

P3-800 @ 1GHz
Asus P2B-F
512MB PC133
120GB HDD
SB-Live
LG 8x writer
Toshiba 40x CD
ATI Radeon 7000 (in exchange for my old TNT2 )

I was initially thinking about replacing the "ancient" mainboard and the CPU with an AMD setup but that would also mean getting new DDR RAM which would bust the budget and not really remove the main bottleneck of the current system: graphics

So I am set to get:

Radeon 8500
Lite-On 24102B 24x CD- writer
NEC 5800B 16/40 DVD drive

I do not really want to go Nvidia, not that I have had any bad experience with them it's just I want to try something different and the ATI card I have now runs without any problems.

So any further suggestions or scolding remarks to dump the mobo and CPU aswell (which I won't since it still does it's job well and has been super reliable for 2.5 years and counting) are very welcome!


EDIT: typo

 

[MisterDuck]

I'd probably go with an nvidia card, but that's my only reccomendation. Other than that, a 1ghz machine should do just about anything without too much trouble at all, so I don't think you need to upgrade that stuff right now - I'd wait for something really revolutionary.

What about soundcard stuff or speakers/headphones (a nice pair of headphones rocks!!)? Monitor? Just some suggestions.

 

[thraxes]

I have a Samsung 950P Monitor so no need there
The sound is hooked up to my Pioneer Home Theatre system.. it's loud enough so I have no need there either (oh yeah and it sounds good aswell ).

I want the Radeon since I can get it at a good price I occasionally need the dual head function.

 

[ledzepp98]

i have a radeon 8500 and i'm happy with it (i upgraded from a geforce2 ultra). as for the cpu/mobo/ram, i'm sure a lot of people will tell you to upgrade but i would only upgrade it if you feel that it is slow. unless you do things that stress the cpu close to the max (such as divx encoding) there should be no real reason to upgrade. once you are at the 1ghz level, a faster cpu will not make windows feel too much zippier, especially with 512megs of ram. it will only help with applications that will take advantage of more mhz.

 

[CubicZirconia]

Try and play morrowind, then you'll find a way to upgrade your cpu/mobo/ram.