I might be thinking about a PC upgrade

[Onyxmeth]

greenmedic88 said:
Start with the budget: how much do you want to spend?

For the least amount of $, your best bet is a simple RAM upgrade and a VGA card upgrade.

That would easily be under $200.

You can buy matched 2GB sticks of DDR2 6400 RAM (compatible with your MoBo? check first) for under $50 if you find a decent deal (NewEgg). At that price, it doesn't even matter if you're using a 32bit X86 version of Windows that can only address less than 3.5GB of memory.

A 9600GT can be bought for around $100. A 9800GT can be bought for maybe $120 w/ rebate (sometimes instant rebate).

ATI has fallen back into favor since the intro of the 4000 series and has an excellent range of VGA cards that are comparable with Nvidia's line up at all price ranges.

The 4850 is probably the best bang for buck these days, but still tends to run about $150 w/ rebates or big discounts. There are cheaper cards from ATI ranging from $100 to $130, (4830, 4670) that offer good price/performance.

Choosing ATI or Nvidia will often be a matter of best available deals, or preferably a close examination of benchmark tests (Tom's Hardware) to show which cards run which games best.

For a bigger upgrade: Intel Core2 CPU, 775 socket PCIEx16 MoBo, RAM, VGA card.. Price would vary greatly depending upon individual components sourced.

Around $200 does sound nice. If it's going to be too expensive, it's just not worth it, since I could just be spending all that money on games for my current platforms.

What would be the cheap end of the bigger upgrade you mentioned at the end? Roughly of course.