Upgrading my once-proud pc

[Golem]

I like to go for ninja upgrades because I want my money to go as far as possible in one hit. Last time I upgraded was over two years ago, at a time when the AMD 2000XP was the top grade processor.

It's that time again, with LLamaLAN 2K4 imminent, Half Life 2 (graciously delayed...) coming soon, and BF42 and its various mods (Galactic Conquest \o/) running slower than I want.

I don't want to go stupid with costs, but at the same time want a rig that'll be considered up to date for more than a month.

The graphics card I'll definately be getting is the Sapphire ATI Radeon 9800XT 'Ultimate'. I'm also looking for a new AMD processor and was weighing up the benefits and costs of the AMD Athlon 64bit 3400 and the Barton XP3200+ (400 fsb). Not sure which I'm going for yet but it's looking like the XP3200 due to the cost of the 64bit one.

Apart from that I haven't decided other stuff like memory, motherboard, even if I need a new PSU or not. I want a rig that will overclock nicely, with no component holding back the power of the graphics card or processor.

A friend suggested I ask you guys as there are people on here who know what they're talking about. So can anyone help me out and suggest a meaty spec?

Thanks in advance.

 

[.Wilier.]

https://forums.freddyshouse.com/showthread.php?t=9752

https://forums.freddyshouse.com/showthread.php?t=8958

https://forums.freddyshouse.com/showthread.php?t=9085

should keep you going for a bit.

 

[Golem]

Should have known there'd be plenty of up to date info about this. Thanks for the pointers.

 

[Mr.Monkey3]

Worthy of consideration is cooling. Should you wish to eek out the best performance possible from your rig, watercooling or peltiers are good options.

I've found that the Radeons are limited mainly by the heat they produce. Throwing on a better heatsink (not a passive one) will result in significantly better performance. I think HardOCP may have managed to get 50% improvement in clockspeed, simply by using watercooling on the gpu.

Both watercooling and peltiers have come of age, and are now about as hard as fitting a new heatsink (ie not at all).