Seriously, the processor is the only thing that hinders your machine. You are wasting your money on memory and video cards if the processor just can't take enough. They are right, the processor sucks if you are onto gaming the newest games with the best quality. Athlon is like the Celeron series of the AMD world, in case you don't know. You should swap the Athlon for one Phenom II x2, at least. I guess you could use the new Phenom II X4 980 without a problem.