I just bought my new house and came out ahead of the game with how much money I had left over.  So I have some money to burn.  I have every good Wii and DS game out there so I can't waste any money on anything for those systems at the moment.

I could purchase the following things with my spare cash:

- A new 4850 Vid card to go along with my Socket 939 Athlon 64 x2 3800+ cpu

- A mini laptop such as the Asus EEE or MSI Wind.

- An Xbox 360 (after the price drop)

- A PS3 (after we hear about what's happening with it at E3)

I currently have a Radeon X800 XT vid card in my PC, so it's not a horrible card but obviously not the best in the world. A new vid card would allow me to play Bioshock and Gears of War etc.  I'm not sure how much of a limiting factor my CPU will be on the new card though.  It'd be nice if reviewers took older systems into consideration once in awhile.

The vid card is probably the easiest thing for me to do as well since it's the cheapest and I don't have to explain to my wife why I need another gaming system.

What do you guys suggest I do?

Vid card.

im thinking about building my pc at the end of the year, so in this case i would recommend the vid card.

but thats because i aleady have a ps3.

ps3 for the sony exclusives
pc for microsoft's games
easy as that

you're AMD dual core isn't really bad and probably would not prevent you from playing future games so go with the Video Card provided your RAM is good enough.

Edit-

Just overclock the CPU.

PS3, sheerly because of the great diversity of the machine and the great upcoming exclusives eg LBP, home Killzone 2, GOW3, Tekken 6 etc

@Blazinhead89: Sadly none of those games really interest me. I do however like some of the other downloadable games and would probably use it to replace my PS2 to play PS2 games so I'd need to buy a fully BC PS3.

I agree with blazinhead... if you have a nice tv.

If you dont already have a hd tv, (at least 1080i), then IMO that should definitely be your purchase.

i think sony will drop the price of ps3 after microsoft does, then buy a ps3 as most 360 games are also on pc anyway

360 would be a tad redundant

My MB wouldn't allow me to OC my CPU at all (ASUS A8N-E) I currently have 2GB of ram.  Most PC's come with 4GB now... so I fear I'll soon fall way behind the tech curve.  Everytime I'd try to boost the cpu speed my system would crash right away....  it's been awhile since I last tried though.

First of all, congrats on your new house.

As to the topic, I chose to use my rebate check to upgrade my PC. You'll get most of the HD consoles' third party games (and most of Microsoft's), but usually better and cheaper (albeit a month or two late).

Still, if you need a laptop for non-gaming purposes, then that's probably the best bet.