Do I need to upgrade? (lost touch with components)

[Clipsey]

Fellas,

Built this system I wanna say 2years ago now and at the time it was certainly no world beater. This is a rig to play games on Over the past couple of years it has ran COD series and BFBC2 just perfectly (not maxed out - but still runs real smooth).
Question is, would a new graphics card or more RAM make it that much better?
Not looking to spend a whole lot (if any).
What do you guys think?
List:
Win XP
AMD Athlon X4 2.8ghz
ASUS M4A78 Plus mobo
MSI Radeon HD 5770 1GB 128bit
WD Caviar black 500gb 7200rpm
4GB RAm

Any tips or suggestions would be welcome.
Also, would it be a good idea to install Win7, or would that slow things down?

Thanks

 

[Clipsey]

Yeah I was thinking of waiting (but you know how it goes - want to be ready!)
If I were to upgrade, what would be the first on the list?

 

[Clipsey]

Unfortunately his motherboard will only support X4 on the second PCI-E so Crossfire is out of the question.

Going to Windows 7 64-bit will mean you can utilise all 4GB as opposed to just 3GB with a 32-bit OS. So that would be a good upgrade. Increasing to 8GB wouldn't be worthwhile, games don't use more than 4GB at present.

Have you tried overclocking your CPU at all? If you can overclock to 3.5GHz your CPU shouldn't be holding you back and shouldn't be too much of a bottleneck for a higher end card.

Best upgrade you could do would be to get a new graphics card to boost gaming performance.

What make and model PSU do you have? Budget for upgrade.

Think I'll have to have a look at overclocking CPU first off (is this easy?), then look to upgrade gfx - not really set a budget - if there is a decent card out there, I'll get one (to match the rest of my system)
Pretty sure I have a Rosewill 600w PSU.

I'n no expert but I would say upgrade your graphics card and overclock your cpu as much as you can safely and see if that gets you what you want. If that fails you can always take the graphics card with you to a total new build.

As above I guess, seems most logical.
Then get more RAM and load Win7
Thanks chaps

 

[Clipsey]

Just used AMD Overdrive, and I think I cranked it up a little? Seemed far too easy
Went from 2800mhz to 3017mhz - didn't really mess with anything else as I'm unsure.
You guys recommend anything? Can probably crank it higher?

 

[Clipsey]

Ok thanks Shadow, I'll try that later tonight.
That Overdrive seemed to work pretty easy and well, my benchmarking improved loads
Currently at 3.2 (I think lol) but will have a look at the BIOS later.

Cheers

 

[Clipsey]

Tested o/c'ing a bit in the BIOS, going from CPU frequency 200 to 240 - was not stable and wouldn't boot into windows (went from 2.8 to 3.3ghz). Currently at 215 (3.01ghz) and is fine. Pretty sure I'm not doing it right though, as when I use AMD Overdrive, goes up to 3.2ghz easy and stable?