Alright, just picked up FEAR yesterday, which is running on a hot 6-10 fps on my system. WoW cruises along at 12 fps, and earlier, Oblivion just pointed and laughed at my box, so I figure it's about time to grab some new parts.

What I'm looking for is a new mobo, processor (Intel probably, but open to negotiation) and PCI-E Video card that will all play nice with eachother.

My current system is:

P4 2.4 GHz, 1.5GB RAM, GeForce FX 5600, ASUS mobo of some kind

I'd like to spend about $500 on the upgrade. I still have PATA HD's, so support for those would be spiffy as I don't plan on switching to SATA until later. If you have some parts you have experience with, or have just built a similar system, let me know. Additionally, if there's some industry changing technology coming out soon that it would be better for me to wait for, also let me know. (Yeah, I know DX10, but eh).

If your looking for a cheap upgrade you CPU and RAM look decent for now, just upgrade the GPU and you should run them decently. Right now.. no offense to current games your video card is a joke. right now that is your "bottleneck" go for that first.
You can get a Nvidia 7900 GT for about $200

I pretty much figured my GPU was the bottleneck, and considered only upgrading that.

The thing I was worried about, was if I bought a nice AGP card now, would I be forced to dish out for a PCI-E card/mobo in the near future. Do you think an AGP card can get through next year's games? If so, I'll probably heavily consider that route.

Edit: after researching the 7900GT, it's PCI-E only (unless I missed something). But I am seriously considering the Radeon X850PRO to tide me over until I find an oil field or something.

AGP owners are in a sucky position right now. You would think AGP cards would be less than PCI-E right now since its outdated, but no, an AGP card is considerably more than its equivalent PCI-E card. Its rather absurd in my opinion, but its probably some sort of ploy by the industry to get people to upgrade.

Yeah, maybe eh, but get your X850 or 6800 for now and watch the prices of current DX9 cards get driven down by DX10 cards. Oh, for the record, when I had my 6600GT, it ran Oblivion fine on medium specs.

The reason i mentioned the 7900 was because i thought you were looking for a PCI-E card I forgot that it was for a new setup not your current one sorry. But anyway you could get by with a 6800. Either way your going to have to upgrade sometime, thats just the way it works.

Here is a combo list on Newegg.com for a core 2 duo and mobo
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductCo ... d=0&Page=1

you can get something in a range from $220-350
then just add your video card, ram and other necessary parts and you have a whole new system.

there's a really easy method to unlocking pipelines in the AGP 6800... that brings it up to the GT level... the same core in the not GT version is used for AGP 6800 GT.. this is not the case with the pci-e 6800.. which blows for me...

buy a used/cheapo decent nvidia 6 series or radeon Xx00 series, dont spend more than a bill. i'd upgrade my whole system if i were you in about a year. after dx10 and all that new hardware have had time to settle and drop in price.