Left behind the times - can anyone reccomend a cheap upgrade path?

Evening all.

I've not upgraded my PC for a few years now - it's an XP3200 with 1.5gb Ram. I've started to get quite seriously into photography and I could do with some more grunt for driving Lightroom and PS, but I don't want to spend much at all. I'm aware that that CPU/Mobo/Ram combo will be seriously dated now, 4 years even? So I guess there's quite a lot I could slot in for not very much money which will provide a fairly hefty performance boost. Could any of you gents do me a favour and suggest some upgrade options? If I set you 3 targets of £100, £150 and £200, could you suggest what I could get for each of those price points and which would provide best VFM for my purposes?

In case it's of relevence, I'm also using an AGP ATI X1600 (might be a problem?), an IDE and a SATA HDD and several PCI cards (WLAN, Network etc). I'm happy with the rest of my system, I'm not much of a gamer any more.

All suggestions much appreciated.

Gigabyte 81865GME (£30) + E2140 (£45)...the giga will take PC3200 plus AGP and the cpu should overclock 50% at min.

Remember that many of the motherboards that support both AGP and PCI-E and DDR and DDR2 will only have two slots of each of the RAM types. Hence you can only have two DDR or DDR2 sticks and you cannot have a mixture of DDR1 and DDR2 either!!

For around 200 quid you could get the following:

17381
Asrock 4CoreDual-VSTA VIA PT880 Ultra, S775, AGP / PCI-E, DDR ** Please see Tech specs ** £32.29 £37.94
LN12200
2Gb (2X1GB) Corsair TwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC5400 (667), 240 Pin, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 4-4-4-12 £33.99 £39.94
LN19278
Intel Core 2 Duo E4600, S775, 2.4 GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2MB Cache, Retail £74.11 £87.08
LN11608
400w Silverpower SP-400P2C thermal controlled cooling fans £20.79 £24.43
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Net Total £161.18

Carriage £9.93

V.A.T. £29.94

TOTAL £201.05

If you go the Ebuyer route you could get the following:

ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2 Socket 775 8 Channel Audio AGP PCI-E ATX Motherboard 131143 39 in stock £34.27 £34.27
Remove from cart late delivery cut-off and timed delivery unavailable for this item Kingston 2GB KIT (2X1GB) DDR2 667MHz/PC2-5300 CL5 Non Ecc 1.8V 091124 377 in stock £33.84 £33.84
Remove from cart Antec EarthWatts 380W 80%+ Efficiency PSU - 80mm Fan 4x SATA PCI-E 120375 55 in stock £24.86 £24.86
Remove from cart Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 2.20GHz Socket 775 800FSB 2MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor 130486 132 in stock £69.44 £69.44
(click if you have changed any details) Cart Total: £162.41

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I originally had an XP2800 with 1gb of RAM and I upgraded to an E4500(overclocked to 3.1ghz) and 2gb of RAM and there was definitely a good performance increase in applications like GIMP and especially video transcoding. I would get a new PSU as after 4 years I would not want to tax an old power supply any further with new bits.

You can reuse the X1600 card as it is still decent for most purposes. I would then sell your old CPU,motherboard and RAM. You CPU is still sort after on Ebay last time I checked on Ebay.

if its a socket A follow this Thread "Nutters on ebay"

http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=119927