Upgrade advice

I'm going to be upgrading my system for the holidays. I've spent countless hours picking apart THG and AnandTech for information, and I'm pretty sure I know as much as I need to in order to make the right decision. But nothing is more helpful than getting the opinions of people with experience, which is why I'm here.

Gaming is my primary interest, but I'm not looking for a new video card. I've already decided that I'm going to buy the GeForce FX when it comes out in February. The major problem I'm having is with the loading times. Newer games take AGES to load up, and it's so bad that when I join a Battlefield 1942 server, all the vehicles are taken, and people are already racking up points at at least one flag. Needless to say, it's extremely frustrating.

Here's my current setup:

AMD Thunderbird 1.4GHz
MSI KT266 Pro Motherboard
256MB PC2100 DDR
IBM Deskstar 40GB Hard Drive
GeForce 3 Ti500 64MB

I don't have any problem with the loading times of any applications except for games. Even Photoshop loads fast enough for me. I want to drastically improve loading times now, as well as have a system that won't choke when future games hit it. I also don't want the system to end up being a huge bottleneck for the GeForce FX. I'd like to only buy one processor in the next year, if possible.

So what do you guys recommend? What areas should I focus on upgrading to get what I'm aiming for? Many thanks in advance for the help. Cheers.

[EDIT]
I don't want to spend a fortune on all this stuff. I'm thinking in the price range of about $400.
[/EDIT]<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by AltKey on 12/02/02 01:11 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

Get P4 w/ Hyper-Theading, WD 8MB cache HD, 1GB dual channel DDR333/DDR400 CL2 or 512MB Rambus PC1066.

Get an nForce2 motherboard, two 256MB sticks of CAS2 PC2700 (because it's a dual-channel motherboard), and a new 7200RPM hard drive to install the games on to. Reuse everything but your current mobo and RAM.

Or something like that.

Load time is a combination of your hard drive speed and your RAM's speed. So get the best RAM and HD speed and all else will fall into place.

I couldn't be bothered with making sure the prices all fit perfectly into place though, so you'll have to fiddle with what size hard drive and how much RAM to make it all fit into your budget.

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I'd suggest a faster processor and cheaper board. You'd see excellent performance from an XP1800+ ($70 max), MSI 745 Ultra ($70 max), ATI Radeon 8500 full version ($100 max), and a Maxtor 80GB drive ($80), and a 256MB PC2100 DIMM ($60).

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If loading is your primary consern then i recommend a RAID setup. I curently am running a RAID with a 1.4 gig athlon with 256mb ram(two WD 20gb 7200), and it wasts my brothers computer (2200xp+ 512mb ram 80gb 7200HD) at loading games. so a RIAD 0 will help alot... IMO extra memory would help too.

also i wouldn't worry to much about the cpu... a 900 mhz cpu will max out a GF3 @ 1024x768 in most games.