Upgrade Time! This look sound?

[Sjixxxy]

Current system is a Pentium 4, 3gig, on a Intel D865PERL board. 1 gig Ram & NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT AGP initially put together in early `04.

Perfectly adequate for everything I do, but its lost its sparkle when I load up games these days. 3dmark06 clocks in at around 1250, so Frame rates are borderline acceptable, as long as I play in no frills modes. So I want to invest about $800 to give my system a kick in the pants to make gaming more pleasant.

Here is what I have in my cart right now for $737. Any major foot stabbing with this collection of parts? I'm not really planning to try to go berserk with over clocking the processor. If I can have it chill around 3.0g I should be able to live happy.

COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UW

Antec SmartPower 2.0 SP-500

Intel Core 2 Duo E4300

GIGABYTE GA-965P-S3

Kingston ValueRAM 1GB (2 x 512MB)

ZALMAN CNPS7700-CU

EVGA 512-P2-N635-AR Geforce 7950GT KO 512MB

My grey area are RAM & Cooler. I understand that the e4300 stresses the RAM less then the E6xxxs, so I can get away with cheaper stuff right?

Cooler I pretty much picked at random based on price, so definitely give some advice there.

FWIW, I'm planning on sticking with XP for now.

Thanks!

 

[CmdPT]

This system looks fine by me. But Instead of the Zalman 7700, use something like Arctic Freezer 7 Pro, Thermaltake Big Typhoon, Sycthe Infinite, Zalman 9500 or 9700. These are better than the Zalman 7700.

As for the RAM go with OCZ Gold 1GB for $96.99 at newegg. It is $19 more than the Kingston.

But other than that Pretty good system and Enjoy it.

 

[lambofgode3x]

i originally picked up a 7700 for my system and was not happy at all with it. the performance sucked. i went out and got a thermalright si 128 and i love the thing.

this roundup will show you how some of the most popular cpu coolers perform. link

review on the thermalright si 128. link

edit: and for ram, i have ocz ram myself. the gold series ram is great for overclocking. i have ddr 400, but i can overclock it to ddr 490 and still keep my timings low. ocz ram is highly recommended (by me. i'm fairly sure that there's lots of people out there that will disagree)

 

[Sjixxxy]

As for the RAM go with OCZ Gold 1GB for $96.99 at newegg. It is $19 more than the Kingston.

w/$10 rebate. So make that $9 more.

 

[cutthroat]

I would suggest getting a 2x1GB Dual Channel DDR2-800 or DDR2-667 kit. You'll see a difference in performance.

 

[CmdPT]

Didn't see the rebate. With $9 more shouldn't be too much for you

 

[denverjomo]

I would suggest getting a 2x1GB Dual Channel DDR2-800 or DDR2-667 kit. You'll see a difference in performance.

I do not think this motherboard can use DDR 2 RAM, only DDR...