Is this a worthwhile upgrade?

[Kingston]

Currently have a Pentium 4 2.4GHz running on a Gigabyte motherboard. The board is about 4 years old and does not support PCI Express, SATA or DDR2.
Currently running 512MB of PC2700 RAM and a Western Digital 40GB HDD. Graphics card is an older nVIDIA TNT with 16MB onboard. Windows 98 SP2!

Thinking about upgrading to an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe and AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 1GB of DDR2-533 memory, a Seagate 250GB SATAII HDD, and an ATI Radeon 9550 with 256MB. Would this be a worthwhile upgrade over what I presently have, or would I be better off from a priceerformance perspective to just install the AGP version of the ATI card and another 512MB of memory into the existing system?

I will upgrade to WinXP Pro SP2 (already have the disk) regardless.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Kingston]

Thanks for clearing me up. It's been so long since I built a system that I can't keep track of what's what anymore.

I would like to keep the budget at $600 or less. I know that I can buy the motherboard and processor for $220 from Tiger Direct (after rebate), and the ram should not cost more than $100. So, that leaves me with about $150 for the video card and $125 for the HDD.

I guess my question is, will I see an appreciable improvement in my system's performance over the current P4 2.4GHz 512MB PC2700 system? I will use it mostly for office applications, but I have been getting into gaming recently as well, with Guild Wars and Doom 3.

 

[turpit]

Currently have a Pentium 4 2.4GHz running on a Gigabyte motherboard. The board is about 4 years old and does not support PCI Express, SATA or DDR2.
Currently running 512MB of PC2700 RAM and a Western Digital 40GB HDD. Graphics card is an older nVIDIA TNT with 16MB onboard. Windows 98 SP2!

Thinking about upgrading to an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe and AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 1GB of DDR2-533 memory, a Seagate 250GB SATAII HDD, and an ATI Radeon 9550 with 256MB. Would this be a worthwhile upgrade over what I presently have, or would I be better off from a priceerformance perspective to just install the AGP version of the ATI card and another 512MB of memory into the existing system?

I will upgrade to WinXP Pro SP2 (already have the disk) regardless.

Thanks in advance.

Well, yes it would, relative to your current system however, theres some new hardware due out over the next several months that may drop prices on the hardware you've mentioned. Additionally, Windows Vista with Direct X 10 is due out soon which may or may not impact hardware prices as well, based on demand for Dx 10 video cards.

You may be better off waiting until after the new year, if you can hold out that long. The system you are looking at, while a good improvement over your old system, is not quite up to speed with current hardware. On top of that, AMD will not be supporting socket 939 much longer, which means no CPU upgrade path for that mobo. Futhermore, 939 only supports DDR, not DDR2. DDR 3 is not to far off in the future. Finally, the ATI 9550, while a solid card is dated relative to ATIs current top of the line X1950 and wont work in PCIe.

The bright side is you should be able to assemble that system at a relatively low cost, as the hardware is at clearance prices. So, as long as you realize the 939 CPU and DDR RAM are near the end of their support/availability lives, and the 9550 is also limited (but for that mobo it's upgradable) go for it.

 

[1Tanker]

Currently have a Pentium 4 2.4GHz running on a Gigabyte motherboard. The board is about 4 years old and does not support PCI Express, SATA or DDR2.
Currently running 512MB of PC2700 RAM and a Western Digital 40GB HDD. Graphics card is an older nVIDIA TNT with 16MB onboard. Windows 98 SP2!

Thinking about upgrading to an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe and AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 1GB of DDR2-533 memory, a Seagate 250GB SATAII HDD, and an ATI Radeon 9550 with 256MB. Would this be a worthwhile upgrade over what I presently have, or would I be better off from a priceerformance perspective to just install the AGP version of the ATI card and another 512MB of memory into the existing system?

I will upgrade to WinXP Pro SP2 (already have the disk) regardless.

Thanks in advance.

Any particular reason you are looking at AMD? Your memory choice will retard the full potential of this CPU.

EDIT: Nevermind, saw your budget choice.

Do you live near a fry's??? This will beat the 4000+ handedly and is likely cheaper, and you can save your DDR memory for now, and work up to a better MB:
http://www.netaffilia.com/ad/electronics/frys/i/2006/10/27/20398.htmlJeez, at that price, it's worth buying just for the CPU. Then either trash the MB(and get a good one), or try and sell it for a couple of bucks..Great deal. Win/Win situation.