Upgrading piece by piece...possible?

[plokman]

Ok, so the time has come to upgrade again, but as always $$$ is a problem. I don't have enough to upgrade all at once, so im wanting to do it bit by bit (ram, GFX, cpu etc).
Current Specs
AMD AthlonXP 2100+
256mb generic ram (presumebly 266mhz)
GeForce4 Ti4200
Asus A7S333 MB
iCute 0301SL-BB-2B ATX Case 320W

other things like HD, Audio mouse etc i dont care about right now...SO

eventually i want to have
either athlon64 3200+ or P4 3.2ghz
either GF FX 5xxx or Radeon 9xxx(not sure which models yet, dependant on $$)
1024mb ram

ok, so i really dont know how to go about this.
I'm not hardware illiterate, but i still dont know ALOT of stuff, obviously, thats why im posting. So i dont think that theres any point buying new ram and puting it in my current system, because this mobo only supports DDR333, and presumebly im gonna want DDR400 in the new system?

So that means i can't upgrade the ram (which i think is limiting my system more than anything) w/o UGing the mobo. But, would i beable to use my old athlon 2100+ on a mobo that would need to be able to take a future athlon64, or P43.2??

If not, then that means that i now have to upgrade all three items at once. Mobo, CPU and RAM.

Now, how much Power is my new system gonna need? as i said above i have an icute 320W case. Is that going to beable to power say,
Athlon64/P4 3.2
GF FX/radeon 9xxx
1GB ram
soundblaster/audigy
80GB@7200
40GB@5400
2xFront mounted fans

?? Im so stuck, because i only want to upgrade half the computer, So i dont want to be buying a preassembled comp from some store.

ALSO is there any point in leaving the 256mb RAM in the new system, to make 1280mb ram? plus how important is the brand of ram that i get?

I think thats all for now. Thanks in advance for any advice guys.

 

[Crashman]

Well, your motherboard should support DDR400 and DDR333 speeds as long as the BIOS is up to date. In fact, ANY DDR board should. That's because DDR400 is capable of running at slower speeds. In fact, ANY memory is capable of running at slower speeds.

But your old system uses such a nice combination of parts, I'd just keep using it and save your money for a complete replacement system.

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