Upgrade Help

Hey guys,

I'm pretty good when it comes to deciding WHAT i want, but I suck at putting together a system when I'm on a very tight budget -- especially given the abundance of hardware out there, I might over look a certain piece that could've fit nicely in my budget. Thus you guys are desperately needed to help me on this one.

My current system is what you'd call ancient.
At the heart of it all lies an AMD Athlon 1.4 ghz cpu. The ram is a whopping 512 mb . And the video card is the worse thing to happen to me since chicken pox; a Radeon 9200 (128 mb). It crashes suddenly and randomly for no reason, stalling the system with it. The GPU recovery never even bothers to kick in, and when, in a blue moon that it does decides to kick in, everything is distorted; colours will be missing, swapped or just plainly the wrong pigments. Basically, the screen is unreadable and the system warrants a restart. And it's not like it's overheating either; my whole case is open with an industrial fan blowing into the bloody thing (and you thought your system made a loud noise).

I'm pretty content with it overall, except that I'm a programmer and not your casual one either. I make a living out of it and the projects I get pile up sky high with millions of lines of codes that need to be recompiled every 30 minutes or so. So you can see where I'm going with this. I need a better cpu. I also like to play games, but I can hardly remember ever playing any game on high-details and the best game I can play is half-life1 on medium-details with an average fps of 25 (good lord). That is IF I can ever get a game to run without my radeon throwing a wild tantrum. (Save me the remedies; I've tried just about everything -- the only remedy this thing needs is a good chucking from a fast moving car -- provided I have a replacement GPU). That’s why the second thing I need is a vid. card.

I have $534 (roughly $600 Canadian) bucks to spare on this thing.

My current specs are:
1.4 Ghz Athlon
512 DDR ram
Asus A7V266-C mobo
ATI 9200 Radeon
Everything else is irrelevant.

I would like to up the CPU juice and the GPU juice while I'm at it (doesn’t matter if the mobo needs to be upgraded as well, as long as the upgrade price of the mobo is accounted for in my budget ). And while I'm wasting money anyways, I'd like the upgrades to last a few years at the least.

As you can see, the task at hand is beyond comprehension for my inexperienced mind; hopefully you hardware junkies can point me in the right direction if that isn't too much of a trouble.

BTW, if I've posted in the wrong section; my apologies.

Thanks a bunch guys.

Don't count of that. AMD raised the price of the Athlon XPs after the A64s were released. Right now the X2 3800+ S939 and AM2 are listed at the exact same price. Just like last time.. Look for the price to go up not down to force adopting of AM2.

SLI with anything below the 7900GT is a complete and total waste. Get rid of that and use the money to get (better performing) 7900GT.