Bring out your dead ! Updating old system.

[Phat Momma Hoe]

I've rather stupidly offered to ressurect my (very) old tower to allow her to play The Sims 3 at a decent level as I dont think her laptop will do it much justice.

Currently, under a mountain of dust is a -

CM Stacker
OCZ 550w PSU
DFI Lanparty SLI-DR
AMD 3500 +
PCI-E X850XT-PE
2048 Corsair Ram

Cant remember the rest as its not been fired up in ages.

Idealy the new system will be running off a 19" or 20" TFT running at either 1440x900 or 1600x1050 so I'd like to run everything in its native ress with good performance.

Originally I'd considered yanking the lot out and replacing with a low/mid C2D setup with something like a 8800gts. But being that its really only going to be used for 1 game do you think I could get away with getting one of the faster 939 Opty's and shoving a faster graphics card that currently is in there and it would be ok ?

I moved over to laptops a long time ago and really not sure about how to do the cheapest upgrade for performance so any advice would be greatfully recieved, just bare in mind I'd like to do this as cheap as possible

 

[ChrisLX200]

I would try it first to see how much it lacks in performance. Clock that chip to the max and it might just do the job.

 

[Ice Rich]

That's not a bad system, the only thing holding is back it the single core cpu. Wack a x2 in it (you should be able to pick up a 3800 for a small amount) and you'll have no trouble with sims 3.
That motherboard is one of the best you can get on sk.939. You should be able to clock the 3800x2 to around 2.3 - 2.4ish.