I went the bleeding edge route around four years ago, and boy did it bite me in the ass. I held back in only two areas: DDR ram instead of DDR2 and 32 bit Windows, both of which screwed me over in the long run, as it was impossible to upgrade from my 2gb of DDR without redoing the entire set up. Killed any hope I had of playing 4vs4s in Supreme Commander without crashes.
So now I'm here, four years later, desperately in need of an upgrade. My new 1080p monitor only made that all the more obvious.
I'm also now sitting on a free copy of Windows 7 64-bit, and I figured I might as well finally upgrade before installing.
All I need to upgrade is my mobo, CPU, GPU, RAM, and HDD. Honestly, I don't play games as much as I used to (I was an RTS whore until I got Vista, which turned me off to PC games for a long time), and now I use my PC a lot more for multimedia purposes and music/photo editing. My current rig can handle most of what I want to do, like watching 1080p content or messing around in GIMP and Fruity Loops, but it slows to a crawl if I try to do any of those things while simultaneously doing anything else. It also has issues playing what few games I do still play. Left 4 Dead 2 runs like ass, and due to CPU/RAM limitations, I couldn't handle larger matches in Supreme Commander when it came out three years ago! That's arguably my favorite RTS of all time, and I have yet to be able to play it properly.
So long as my new rig can multitask numerous programs with ease, run older games at 1080p, and run newer games at at least 720p, I should be fine.
Here's what I'm currently thinking about buying:
Western Digital 1TB 7200rpm HDD
OCZ Platinum 2 x 2.0gb DDR3 @ 1333
Asus M4A77TD AM3 (from OP)
AMD Athlon II X3 440 Rana 3.0GHz (from OP)
And I'm not sure which GPU to buy. I'm trying to keep this <$400, but as it stands I'm already at $362, so I guess I'll have to get near $500.
Think this'll get me by for what I want to do? Any GPU recommendations? I've always gone with nVidia in the past, but it seems like AMD is the way to go these days. Is the 5770 really necessary for 1080p? I probably won't be playing that many new PC games outside of Portal 2 and maybe Starcraft 2, and neither Valve nor Blizzard have been known to require beefy hardware. Most of my favorites are older RTS games. Think I can get by with the 4850?
And I'll probably grab a Blu-ray drive down the road too, but not til the end of the year at the earliest. Most of my movies are on Blu-ray, and at the moment I can't watch them in my room since the ps3 is in the family room.
Also, thanks for all the work you put into this thread, Garcian!
Edit:
I'm eyeing this GPU:
Essay Pro