The final and last upgrade! Need feedback

Hello All!!
The journey of my PC is finally coming to an end.
Built it myself in the fall of 03.. for about $5,500 CAD!!!
And it served the price tag for these years.

Initial setup
P4 3.0Ghz
1GB Ram
ATI 9800 PRO 256 MB
Creative Audigy 2ZS

Upgrade
2GB Ram
ATI x1950 512 MB [AGP]

After upgrading to this configuration it failed to live up to the FPS standard for the only game I play, UTIII.
I get about 25±5 FPS on XP and <10 FPS on Vista.
I feel the RAM and the VPU are not bad, but it could be the processor that's bottlenecking.
Now I am planning to through some cash on the system for the last time and get a CPU upgrade.

And my million dollar question, will I see any improvement in FPS by upgrading to "AMD Athlon 64 X2 5400+ 2.80GHz Socket AM2 OEM Processor" from "Intel P4 3.0GHz", and if so by what margin? Other better alternatives?


Please provide your feedback/opinion.
Thanks in advance!

the athlon 5400 smokes the p4 3 ghz but that means a new build. why not go for a Q6600

what you have is a decent system that has no upgrade potential.

sell it and start fresh.

about the cheapest you can do is
AM2 dual core $50 - 100
MoBo $50-100
memory $40-80 (2 or 4 gigs)
graphics $100+
reuse you case, PSU(maybe), HDD and other crap
$250 minimum

about motherboards and PSUs.
my Abit NF-M2 was fine with a 20 pin PSU plugged into a 24 pin slot. it even OCed like that. I know other boards had problems, even with a 20-24 adapter

the cheapest upgrade for you would be to get a s939 board w/ an AGP slot. that would leave you shopping for a board and CPU only, but wouldn't let you upgrade in the future and would leave graphics as is.

a s939 board w/PCIex16 would let you upgrade graphics, but would only let you reuse you memory over what I suggested. memory is cheap now.

is that a 775 P4 w/ DDR2?
if so, you could reuse everything but MoBo and graphics and keep you CPU and memory.

they did make better AGP graphics cards, but that would be throwing money away IMHO.