Gentlemen,
I did NOT buy cheap. I built that system about 4 years ago, jsut before PCI-E came out. Paid about $1600 total. I wanted a Gaming machine that could also handle video and 3d rendering on a budget. The machine runs Oblivion on highest settings, World in Conflict on Medium settings over 30fps, Supcom on Highest settings without a hitch. Still handles 3d rendering at lightening speeds for its age. It has served me well, I'm just trying to eek a little more life out of it.
Originally: Tiger K8W, 2 Opteron 1.6 ghz single cores, 1 GB of Kingston PC2100, Radeon X800 XT (saphire version), 550watt power supply, 2 Western Digital Hard Drives, Coolermaster case
Currently: 1 Opteron 2.4 ghz dual core (room for another), 2 GB PC 3200 RAM
Upgrade Options:
running Windows XP 64 Pro so room for 4 GB Ram if I switch to 128 bit sticks, new HDDs (a must I think as the C: take eons to defrag), maybe a new video card since they STILL MAKE AGP cards. I'm mostly looking for advice on whether I should go ahead and do some of that, all of it, or delegate this to a rendering workhorse and build a new system from scratch.