Unsure of what to upgrade

[Cheesetogo]

I'm looking to upgrade my computer, but I've been out of this for a bit over a year now and I'm unsure of what exactly I should upgrade.

Right now I'm running:

Opteron 165 @ 2.6
2 GB RAM
X1900XTX
DFI Lanparty SLI-D

The monitor I use is a 1680x1050, and I prefer not to play my games at other resolutions.

I'm looking to upgrade this to play some of the new stuff that's come / coming out, such as Crysis.

I'm mostly wondering whether I should bother upgrading my system to Core 2 or not - how big of a difference would I be seeing with it?

I'm also unsure about SLI - dual 8800GTs seems like it would be the way to go right now, but motherboards seem like they might be an issue. I've been looking through threads in the motherboards forum and I'm seeing that the intel boards do not support SLI even though they have dual PCI-E slots. If I do choose to use an SLI board, are my choices going to be rather limited? I'd be looking for something that I can overclock well with.

Also, is it likely that we're going to be seeing a whole new series of cards coming out in the near future? Should I consider holding off my upgrade for a while?

Thanks for any feedback.

Edit: I forgot to mention my budget, which would be about 500 dollars for a video card upgrade and around $1000 for a full system upgrade.

 

[oynaz]

I would wait with upgrading. Throwing $1000 dollars at a full system upgrade would not give you a performance increase to match the investment, IMO.

 

[tjaisv]

Well right now u can get a new x38 Crossfire board and a Q6600 CPU and a 8800GTS video card. Or u can wait and pay a lot more for Penryn and DDR3 and new graphics chipsets, whenever they come out.

 

[boomhower]

I would suggest to upgrade you graphics, either one or two GT's your choice. Just take a look at the mobos and decide which chipset you like better. You may become CPU limited if you go with the SLI option though. I would wait until mainstream penryn hits before switching platforms.