I can understand your "itch" to upgrade.
I just got an Asus K8N4-E Deluxe, X700 Pro, Athlon 64 3400+ and 1 GB RAM Corsair Value Select.
Right now, I'm incredibly satisfied. Playing UT2004 at 1268x1024 with texture, world and character detail on highest (and physics, LOD whatever on default) wtih amazing frame rates.
But, I did have some little "glitches". I had to install the latest Realtek 97 driver to eliminate static. And when I installed the latest ATI driver, I found out the error messages I got were from the fact I needed to install .NET (yeah, sounds strange). Then I found out I had to install the Nvidia chipset driver to make the Ethernet port work so the Internet would work.
I used pricegrabber.ca (use .com in the US) and pricenetwork.ca (only Canadian I think) to find the best prices (although I believe canadacomputers.com and shoprbc.com are not on pricegrabber).
Anyway, I got the X700 Pro for $135 CDN and Athlon 3400+ 2.4 GHz for let's say around $220 CDN if you don't count shipping etc. Well, that's an incredible bang for the buck if you look at benchmarks.
I suggest the following benchmarks:
CPU benchmarks
http://www23.tomshardware.com/
GPU benchmarks
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/2005-17gpu.html
Of course, some people are going to argue you're better off getting socket 939. Well, I'll give you my take on that. I saw two different benchmarks on tomshardware with the 4000+ on it. One was at 160 fps in Unreal Tournament 2004, the other at 161 fps. I looked at the test setups and they were very similar. One had the 3400+ 2.4 GHz on the benchmark at 151 fps, the other had the X2 3800+ at 136 fps. Well, I would have paid like $225 more for the damn X2 and some people are saying they have problems with the dual cores and gaming. So, 10% less performance, way more expensive, and some problems with certain programs which are made for single core. Also, let's say you buy a 3000+ Venice socket 939 and want to upgrade to dual core later. Well, you're going to spend an extra who knows how much money on the dual core CPU anyway. You could always do what I did and wait for socket M2 to come out. That way, you know you'll be getting DDR2 RAM and possibly other advantages as well.
Me, I'm totally flipped out about my machine. (I even flashed my BIOS to 1006 so I don't have any problems and don't expect any now.)
\EDIT: Possibly the cheapest way for you is get an Abit KV8 Pro and I believe I saw the Athlon 3400+ on sale at Ewiz for about $150 US. (I bought mine on sale at Compuvest even though the shipping to Canada was $25 US.) I also got a Gigabyte Neon Cooler 8 for $20 CDN from canadacomputers.com (and Asus mobo $130 CDN, Corsair 1 GB RAM $130 CDN I'm very satisfied with that heatsink.
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