minimum worthwhile upgrade?

So... I had been planning to gimp along on my system that I had until money improves for us... at which point i'd replace it with something current-generation. However, a month or so back, mainboard crapped out, taking 1/2 my RAM with it. Decided at that point to go ahead and spend a lil $ to get it running again; and not 2 weeks after I put a new MB in and got that working, my video (6800 GT) died, so all i could do was swap in the next best thing i had laying around... my trusty ol' 4200 TI.

So ... money won't be looking up anytime soon, and here i sit looking at the handful of my games that will run on the GF4. I'm thinking I'd like to try and scrap together a few hundred bucks to upgrade a lil bit; just for something to get by on til i can afford current generation machine.

Here's what i'm running now after all my hardware problems:

A64 3200 (754)
Biostar Nforce 3 MB (not sure of the model offhand)
GF4200 TI 64MB
512MB RAM
onboard sound
all IDE drives

I guess the question is, what would you guys say is probably the minimum level i'd need to upgrade to, in order to get something worthwhile to tide me over for another year or so? Not lookin' to play anything too demanding... certainly none of the new DX10 hotness... but i would like to get titan quest and Civ 4 running again, and a couple other games of approximately that age.

budget: likely no more than $300-$400
display resolution: 1024x768 or 1280x1024 (that's my usual minimum, and the max my monitor will do, respectively)
windows: XP Pro (sorry; forgot that wasn't necessarily obvious with my hardware age)
power supply: Antec NEO somethingorother... 480W i think. would have to get home and check for the PCIE connection; It'll do either a 20 or 24 pin mainboard connection

For that much money, you can easily buy a new mobo, CPU, RAM, and a GPU. I mean, I just picked up an E2200 and an Asus P5LD2 for around $200 (love the mobo for it has 3 PATA ports). You're looking at about $50 for 2GB of decent RAM. That would leave you $150 for a new GPU.

I mainly agree with jtt283, you can overclock those X2 processors a lot just on stock cooling. I would throw in artic silver 5 thermal paste, and I would recommend G.Skill for ram but many suggest Crucial for stability, I have G.Skill with no problems, plus they have a life time warranty.


4-4-4-12 @ 2.2 volts
Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820146565
$74.99 - Rebate (If you qualify) + Free shipping

The RAM I use and would suggest but some people have had it die on them, but I have not had this occur to me.

4-4-3-5 @ 2.0-2.1 volts
G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820231114
Price: $69.99 + Shipping