£150 Upgrade - Socket A to ??

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I have £150 ready to go for an upgrade, just not sure what to do, I want to see an improvement with general running and games.

Current System:

Socket A 2600xp Athlon (166 * 12.5)
MSI KT4V Mobo
1024 MB (2 x 512mb Samsung) DDR 2700
ATI x800 Pro 256MB GFX Card
Akasa Ultra Quiet 400W

Standard cheap case, dvd & cd rw.

What would give me the best upgrade improvement. I don't really want to spend £100 on RAM if its going to be useless when I finally upgrade to DDR2.

Thanks for suggestions, really helps.
 
Given what you already have I'd probably opt for something like this, you can't upgrade all of it so you are stuck with AGP graphics for the moment and you will need to re-use the Ram(run it on a divider I think) but this should offer you a fairly decent boost and you can get a PCI-E graphics card when you have more cash.

MB-002-AK Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 (Socket 939 & Upgradable to AM2) AGP & PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-002-AK)
£37.99 £37.99
CP-134-AM AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ (Socket 939) - Retail (ADA3800BVBOX) (CP-134-AM)
£91.99 £91.99
Subtotal £129.98
Shipping (City Link Parcel Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri)) £8.25
VAT £24.20
Total £162.43
 
Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 (Socket 939 & Upgradable to AM2) AGP & PCI-Express Motherboard £44.64

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego (Socket 939) - OEM £63.44

Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro CPU Cooler (Socket 754/939/940) £16.44

Total inc VAT £124.52
 
Well the 3700+ would be better for games but the X2 3800+ would be better for general apps, depending on whether they're multithreaded or not.

If I were in your situation I'd personally go for the X2 but that's because I tend to do more work with applications than playing games. The X2 is likely to last you longer but the 3700+ is cheaper and means you can save money to get a new graphics card sooner. It's quite a tough choice really :) At the end of the day, they're both fast chips.
 
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