When to upgrade

[ukaserex]

I play City of Heroes. I play it a lot. My system, though capable of handling this game, seems to have a hard time doing other things at the same time.
My main reason for wanting to upgrade is the lengthy page loads. The people I team with, 3/4 of them enter maps a good 10 seconds before me, even though I click to enter before they do.

My case is pretty much a standard case, except the power supply is underneath it, instead of the top rear.

I want to replace the power supply, as this one only promises 16A at 12 volts on the single rail. It's also very loud; it sounds like a plane coming in for a landing.

I have an NVidia 7300 LE. It's a fine card, but I think I would be better served with a newer card.

Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 3 (2600.xpsp_sp3_gdr.100427-1636)
System Manufacturer: BIOSTAR Group
System Model: P4M90-M4
BIOS: Ver:1.0
Central Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.60GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 3070MB
.Net Memory Report: 1686MB out of 3070MB available
Page File: 3927MB (2058MB currently in use)
C Drive: (ExcelStor Technology J8080S) 43944MB out of 76308MB (57%) free
D Drive: (TOSHIBA ODD-DVD SD-R5272) zero-size drive
Windows directory location: C:\WINDOWS
DirectX: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
DirectX Diag version: 5.03.2600.5512 (32-bit version)

Eventually, I know that I need to get a new motherboard and cpu. (and memory) Eventually, I also want to upgrade my OS to 64 bit, too.



In summary: I'd like a reasonably priced system that will allow me to use my case, hard drive and DVD player.
But! I'd like to be able to do it in phases.
First, the power supply and the video card; then the MB,CPU and memory. Or, vice versa. I have a budget that allows me to spend a couple hundred, but I don't feel comfortable cleaning out my savings in this economy just to reduce some page load times. I don't want to pay for top of the line, but I'd like the system to be upgradeable to a better cpu at a later time, maybe a better video card later also.

However, I've read there's all kinds of new stuff coming out - should I just wait for the prices of today's medium-high quality stuff to become medium quality, and thus, better priced?

 

[evilavatar]

At this point it is not really worth putting a lot of money into a new power supply and card for this system unless you are going to reuse them in a new system as you re going to get very little extra performance for the money. You are better off to save up and get a new system soon as there is not much more you can keep doing to your current box to make it run better or faster. Eventually the processor alone will bottleneck your ability to do much even with a much better GPU.