Upgrade path. ASRock 939Dual Sata-II. Sound advice?

[sirchmeister]

Ok. I currently have a ASRock Dual Sata-II motherboard which I purchased about a year or so ago. Here are my system specs:

MainBoard: ASRock Dual Sata-II
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+
RAM: 1GB Corsair ValueRam
Video Card: NVIDIA Geforce 7900 GT/KO
Hard Drive(s): 1 500 GB Maxtor and 1 160 GB Seagate (External, for backups etc)

My main concern is cost effectiveness. I do some gaming on my system but not much. I play the occasional WoW. I am not huge on games so on a scale of 1-10 gaming falls at about 5-6 for me on my wants. I do a lot of video encoding/decoding/transcoding etc. I am currently running XP MCE 2005 and I stream movies to my 360 with Transcode 360. Right now that is not a problem. However, I do eventually want to stream HD movies to my 360 and that is where I can see my system becoming a big bottleneck.

So here are my list of wants:
Video Editing / Enc/Dec/Trans: 9
MultiTasking: 8
Games: 6

I guess this screams new processor and ram? That is the problem I am stuck with. My board supports AM2 through an upgrade board. But is that worth it? Should I just go AMD 64 X2 Dual Core on the lower end 939 CPUs? Maybe slap in more ram with that? Or would it be smarter to pick up the AM2 Upgrade board for around 50 bucks and go that route with DDR2 Memory. It seems the prices are very even in terms of AM2 vs 939. It looks like the only additional cost incurred to me would be the AM2 board plus the initial replacement stick of RAM and the extra RAM.

Advice, Thoughts?

Thank you.

 

[Roguestar]

If you have a socket 939 processor and DDR1 then wait until you have enough money to make a complete overhaul. You can probably get yourself a Core 2 system for around $400.

E4300 - $117
2GB DDR2 - $80
Gigabyte S3 - $100
250GB WD SATA HD - $67
re-use graphics card (assuming it's PCI-E)

 

[Blain]

The Asrock CPU board uses the DDR2 when you have an AM2 installed. So even if CPU prices are equal, the DDR2 is cheaper.
But it's still no C2D combo. 😛

 

[VirtualLarry]

You could always drop in an Opty 170, and use that for a year until native 45nm quad-core CPUs come out, and then upgrade. I have to admit, though, that the C2Ds really rock for re-encoding tasks. I can DVDshrink a movie in under 13 minutes with a 2.8Ghz C2D.