Upgrade Help Please!

Well it's that magical time for an upgrade. I need some help though. Having not upgraded for a while I'm a little out of touch on the old hardware news so please give your view of the below spec that I'm looking at.

Athlon 64 - 3200 1mb cache Socket 754
MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R (Socket 754) Motherboard
Zalman CNPS7000A-AlCu Ultra-Quiet CPU Cooler
Sapphire ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB
Western Digital Raptor 36.7GB Serial ATA 10000RPM (X2)
Kingston HyperX 1GB (2x512MB) DDR PC3500 CAS2.0 Dual Channel Kit (Still undecided on memory, your thoughts would be good)

The above has been picked from reviews I have read on this site and Toms Hardware. If you guys could give some views on actual usage then it would be appreciated.

good set up but if you're not urgent for an upgrade then wait. The new AMD sockets 939's are coming out in just over a month, end of March beginning of April. So prices will start to tumble. Also the new ATi cards are coming out shortly, we hope, and PCI-X (new bus) is coming out around the same time as the socket 939's. So now is not a good time to upgrade.

Steve

ps apart from that it's a nice rig, when I uprade, april time probably, I'll get the same RAM that you're looking at, Kingston PC3500 cas 2.0

If you deffo want it now i'd say get a AXP/P4 for now and spend the saved money on the newer 74gb Raptors & a reliable PSU.
Waiting could be good advice as 2004 looks set to be pretty interesting but you cant wait for ever! If HalfLife2 does come out this year :eek: you can be sure that the newer gfx cards will follow but a 9800pro is a solid card.

I kind of need it now as my motherboard is dying slowly amd I only currently have a XP2000
nf2 motherboard - 333fsb max
512 pc2100 DDR
GeForce 3 64mb

I have owned all this stuff since they were all first released as I used to run a small computer game shop that done some hardware aswell. As you can see it more than a little past it's sell by date in running some of the latest games.
I have the money too spend now and want to spend iot before i waste it tbh.

Would you recommend a P4 3.2g or the Athlon64?

After reading reviews on tomshardware asnd sites like that the AMD gets the nod for games. I would aslo like ssome opinions of people who don't advertise the crap on they sites :D

hehe, right IMHO from reading reviews on websites that advertise etc and speaking to a few people (I used to work for a review site myself...) I would recommend the AMD for games, as you so rightly said, and the Intel for anything such as encoding, large size database etc.

Steve