Major Upgrade

[badders]

Right,
I think I need to upgrade. I ran FRAPS for the first time on C&C3 last night, and was getting 18-30 FPS with only a few things on the screen.
No wonder it slows right down when there's hundreds of units onscreen.

I've had this system for the last 4-5 years (M/B was a replacement from a shoddy MSI board)

My current System is:
Asus A7N8X Deluxe (Socket A)
Athlon XP 2600+ (Barton)
1.25Gb DDR333 RAM (2x 512 & 1x 256 Samsung sticks)
Excelstor 160GB SATA HDD (Cant be bothered to get model no.)
ATI Radeon 9800PRO 256Mb (AGP)
Windows Vista Home Premium / Kubuntu 7.04

I'm finding that my Processor is bottlenecking the system.
I can't overclock it (FSB up from 166 to 200), cos the RAM throws a wobbler (even when set to 83% speed which is 333).
I'm thinking that I want to upgrade the Processor; that requires a motherboard upgrade which requires I upgrade the RAM and Video card.

GAH!

I was thinking I want to go for a quad-core (I want to future-proof for about 4-5 years again) and a suitable Motherboard/RAM combination.
I'm going for an X1950PRO Graphics card, as I don't play too many games(certainly not the latest, greatest ones), and it's at a good price/performance point.

However, here's the crux - I want to spend as little as possible. I've got a mortgage to pay, and not much spare cash!
If I go for quad core, I'll wait for the price drops (when they propagate over to Blighty)

I'm not going to overclock, as I've never had much success, and can't be bothered with it to be honest!

I think not including the Graphics card, I'm looking at £375 for the three.

What's best price/performance wise?

 

[darksidedragon]

You should be able to get a Q6600 after the price cuts along with a Gigabyte P35C-DS3R motherboard (supports both DDR2 and DDR3 memory) and 2GB, possibly 4GB of DDR2-533MHz memory (don't need faster RAM if you're not going to overclock. However, DDR2-667 and DDR2-800 memory isn't much more expensive than 533 stuff).

Even though you've said you want a quad core processor, I'd still advise you to look at the Core 2 Duo's (in particular, the E6600). They're pretty good processors, and you shouldn't have any bottleneck problems.