Enough juice?

[delta555]

Thinking of doing a major rehaul of my system when i get back to uni next term.

Current spec:
MSI Neo2 865G motherboard
Pentium 4 C Northwood 2.4GHz (has been clocked to over 3GHz on normal voltage)
Stock cooler for CPU
Radeon 9600 Pro EZ (128MB i think)
60GB Matxor IDE HDD
160GB Maxtor Plus 10 SATA HDD
DVD/RW Benq 1640 (i think)
2 80mm fans, one is old and a bit noisy.
Old carp case that has bad airflow, so i have one of the fans in a space i made from 2 empty 5 1/2 inch drive bays under the dvd drive

And powering this old beast is a 2 year old Antec Truepower 430W PSU from USA

Now, thinking of upgrading to a pentium core 2 duo system, not decided on GPU yet, or what other gubbins im going to put in, probably a couple of new HDD's

Will my current PSU be able to handle this new stuff, of would i have to invest in a new one. I have had no problems with it and new it cost $80 (£45 about) and i dont really want to have to shell out on a new one when i can just use this one.

On another point, is there any reason i should wait, like if there is a price drop due because of new tech coming out.

Edit/ also, what should i be looking at if i want to upgrade to vista anytime soon?

 

[Quixote]

It's a pretty good time to buy the CPU. I doubt core 2 duo's will drop very significantly any time soon. They are already very competetive.
Motherboards are another story. At the moment they are highly priced & severly flaky. If you can hold off a month or two (ie late sept) I think you can get more features & reliability for your money.
The core 2 duo will consume less power than your current CPU, so your existing PSU will be fine, unless you go for a crazy-stupid graphics card (ie a 7900gt or x1800xt will be fine i think). Use the money saved to treat yourself to a decent £40-£50 case.

 

[delta555]

It's a pretty good time to buy the CPU. I doubt core 2 duo's will drop very significantly any time soon. They are already very competetive.
Motherboards are another story. At the moment they are highly priced & severly flaky. If you can hold off a month or two (ie late sept) I think you can get more features & reliability for your money.
The core 2 duo will consume less power than your current CPU, so your existing PSU will be fine, unless you go for a crazy-stupid graphics card (ie a 7900gt or x1800xt will be fine i think). Use the money saved to treat yourself to a decent £40-£50 case.

Pretty much what i was thinking of doing, thanks for the info on motherboards. Would be doing this upgrade when i get back to uni in october, probably start this project late oct.

Checked on the stats of the conroes and my cpu, seem to both consume about 66W, so safe there. Really want to get a better case than mine now, not ugly but it is cheap and not good inside the case, not enough internal bays, bad cooling etc.

Wasnt thinking of going crazy with the GPU anyways, not thinking of SLI or XFire at all. Not going to be a dedicated gaming rig, will have to be good at video editing, so thinking of 2gig of RAM, not the cheap stuff i have right now.