What CPU should I buy? I just bought a BFG 6800GT OC [PCI-E].

[sofakng]

To make a long story short, I just ordered the power supply/video card deal from chumbo.com... For those who aren't familiar with it, it was a deal for a 530 watt power supply (100% pci express compatible) as well as a BFG 6800GT OC [PCI-E] video card.

Now, here is my current system:
ASUS P4S533
Pentium 4 - 2.53 GHz
1 GB RAM (Corsair DDR PC2700)
ATI Radeon 9700 PRO

So far I'm almost positive I'm buying the ASUS A8N-SLI motherboard (espicially since I just bought a pci express video card, heh). What I'm not sure about is the CPU. Ideally I'd like to stay around $500 for the CPU and Motherboard -combined-. That puts me in the price range of a Athlon64 3500 (90nm) CPU.

I'd like to hold off on upgrading the RAM if possible...

Oh, this system will be used almost 100% for gaming (but a little video editting here and there).

Does anybody have any suggestions for me? Will the Athlon64 3500 CPU be good enough for my system? Is it worth it to pay an extra $200/$300 to get a 3700/3800 CPU? I'd really like to get a FX-53 but that's way out of my pricerange... (unless of course the performance is exponentially higher than all the other CPU's).

 

[ts3433]

If you're not going to actually do SLI, try an NF4 Ultra board (it might be better to wait for more selection).

The A64 3500+ will be fine for that. Also consider getting a Winchester 3200+ and just overclocking it if you find you need more power (there's not a whole lot of difference at stock, and OCing should be easy). You shouldn't see much of a performance penalty by using your PC2700 with an A64 (see Zebo's memory tests in this forum), and you can always try to overclock it if you want.