Thoughts on current system - what should be upgraded - and what can I live with assuming a low budget. .

[episodic]

AMD Athlon XP 3000+ 333mhz model
768 megs of pc2700 ram.
ASUS Kt-400 Motherboard.
80 gig Maxtor 7200 and a 20 gig Maxtor 7200 (IDE). . .
Geforce 5200 FX 128 meg 128 bit graphics card AGP. . .

Would a motherboard swap to a socket 754 system be worth it? I was looking at the Sempron 754's and the 6100 board from Biostar. . .

Would the ram be a bottleneck? or would I need new ram.

Or should I just wait another year? My main use is photoshop, web browsing, flight simulator 2004, etc.

 

[RussianSensation]

web browsing is mainly internet speed limited

photoshop is ram (which you dont have a lot) and cpu speed, and hard drive speed. Flight simulator is probably both cpu and graphics card. I would tell you to buy a new graphics card since that is best bang for the buck to improve gaming, but it doesnt sound like you game much.

I dont think your system is too bad. Maybe wait to upgrade everything when socket M2 comes out for AMD in Q2 2006? You could get 1 gig of PC3200 ram now. But M2 will use DDR2. So I am not sure if you want to hold out and buy a new system. Plus you are stuck with AGP graphics card so you wont be able to reuse that either most likely.

 

[episodic]

Yea, flight sim runs great on the 5200.

My main complaint is with photoshop and with encoding time on some videos I do ( I did not mention this earlier). . .

I may just get another 512 of ram and get me a better monitor (I'm still using a 17 crt that is getting old) . . .

 

[t0mn8r]

Cheapest and best upgrade is RAM. Depending on apps (how many and what you use) 1 gig minimum. I use 2 gigs and it works very well.

 

[ribbon13]

Want upgradability, and not be on a dying platform? Get an ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 and whatever 939 CPU your budget will allow. You can get a PCI-e card later if you want. You can get a nice Dual-core Opteron to really help out with photoshop encoding if you want. You can get a decent memory upgrade later if you want. It allows you to upgrade the rest of the parts when you can afford it.