Computer rebuild advice...

OK, I'm in the process of a major upgrade. I was running the following:

AMD Athlon XP 2200+
ASUS A7V333
Sapphire Radeon 9550 256MB
550W Chiefmax PSU
1 GB stick Kingston PC2700
512 MB stick Atlas Precision PC2700

Now, I've only replaced the CPU and MB with the following:

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice
ASROCK 939DUAL SATA

I did this last night, so the only test I've run is 3DMark05. I'm only getting a 3D score of 1704. Slightly improved from before, so I'm thinking it's my GPU holding me back. So, what's your advice on this? If I replace my GPU with the eVga GeForce 6600 256 AGP (another item from the $500 gaming rig), do you think my gaming performance will go up noticeably? I couldn't find any benchmark results run on the $500 Gaming Rig setup.

That and getting some DDR400 RAM

I just went through a similar upgrade (see post decrease in 3dmark score after upgrade). My 3dMark score went down substantially after switch to the ASRock mobo and 3000+ Venice.

I hvae looked at a ton of BIOS options and messed around with memory configurations to no avail.

If you are looking at a video card upgrade, I recommend going PCI instead of AGP.

Regardless of my problems, I do think that your card is the driving force behind your scores.