Upgrading PC

[reignsupreme11]

hey everybody, i'm relatively new to the realm of PC forums and PC building and i'd like some advice.
i recently bought a 9600GT and a 500W power supply for really cheap and I'm thinking of just giving my PC a whole re-working.
My motherboard is fairly old and can only run DDR, so i'm thinking of getting a new processor, motherboard and RAM.
I use it mainly for a fair bit of gaming (not tons, but demanding games crysis, fallout3 COD etc) and am planning to upgrade to vista in next year.
Last I'm on a real tight budget of about 450$ (CAD) TAXES IN, so if you could help with some decisions.

I was planning on doing this:

Motherboard: P5QL-PRO with CPU: intel e8400
or
Motherboard: P5KPL-CM with CPU: intel e7400
depending on which is a better deal

RAM: what's the best buck for buck way to get 4gb (2X2)?

Your opinions would be greatly valued as I hardly trust my own!

 

[yomamafor1]

Personally I would stay away from P5QL series, as they're the bog down version of P45. If your budget permits, I would highly recommend P5Q Pro with E8400. If not, you can always drop down to P5Q Pro with E7400. Either way, a P45 chipset is much better than any watered down version.

As for RAM, I would recommend either Crucial's DDR2-800 4GB, or OCZ's DDR2-800 4GB. The reason I suggested DDR2-800 as opposed to the higher performing DDR2-1066 is that you have to manually adjust memory setting to obtain DDR2-1066 speed, not to mention the incompatibility with running more than 4 sticks of DDR2-1066 with some motherboards (P5Q Pro included).

 

[reignsupreme11]

Thanks, I'd be able to do that if I did drop to the e7400. How much of a performance difference would I see between that and the e8400?

 

[yomamafor1]

If you're only using it mainly for gaming, you shouldn't see a significant performance decrease. Since games usually stress your GPU more than your CPU, CPU plays little role during gaming. While more games recently (Crysis / Fallout 3 for instance) do offload some work to CPU, but you still wouldn't see noticeable difference between them.

Happy building.