Advice needed about Mobo buying

Hi all.

I have a major decision on my hands I am looking at you to help me decide and spend my money most wisely.

Firstly I have currently:

1. Intel® Desktop Board D865GBF
2. Socket 478
3. Radeon X800 AGP
4. 1.5GB DDR SDRAM
5. 3.0ghz p4

I did look for a Mobo that had a socket 478 and PCI-E but I could not find any, and the ones I did find were very rare and hard to get hold of, so I gave up. That was about 6 months ago now.

Now I want to know with a budget of £400 ($700) would I be able to get better performance out of my PC. I can currently play most of the latest games on max graphics, TOCA 3, Oblivion, COD2, etc but my PC really fails down on FSAA and special bits like that, which is a shame.

I was thinking of getting a new Mobo, new CPU and using the same RAM and Grfx card. The new CPU would be a 64bit one.

Is it worth it, or should I save and get a new Mobo and a PCI-E card?

Thanks, Jake

Your current system isnt to shabby... how does it benchmark with something like Aquamark3 OR even better something later like 3dmark05. Because the biggest gains you can get are when you do the entire package. For instance getting a PCI-E board you will probably put in DDR400 dual channel memory and be able to run a 6800 - 7800 GT at x16 transfer speeds. it's the combination of all these things without any bottleknecks that will give you the results that you want and anything less will probably leave you unsatisfied. I run an Athlon 64 3500+ socket 929 PCI-E with a 6800GT, its a pretty cheap system to slap together and runs stable and reasonably quick.For a comparison im getting around 65000 on aquamark3.

Dirk

Hmm Aquamark crasahes on my PC half way through a test.

Not good.

Your graphics card is still decent enough to run anything out there, in fact your whole system seems pretty nice. It seems like hardware isn't your problem.