Upgrade advice needed.

[Steveh_monkey]

Hello

I built my PC about 3 years ago mainly so I could play Oblivion, and it's held up suprisingly well over the years and still is fairly nippy, and handles most of the games I play fairly well. Since then I haven't kept track of the technology releases so I'm not sure what's hot and what's not (DX 11? I thought we were still waiting for the DX 10 revolution? lol)

I'm adding a hardrive soon as well as upgrading to windows 7 and was wondering if there's any upgrades I could do to improve gaming performance on some of the more recent games

Anyway, here's the current spec

E6300 @ 1.86 GHZ (not overclocked)
Gigabyte DS3
ATI X1900 on a 17" 1280 * 1024 res
2GB of Ram
Enermax 500W.

So yeah, Could I maybe upgrade the GFX card to something a bit more recent and overclock the CPU or would the system be bottlenecked at all?

I might consider gutting the core and adding new CPU + Mobo + GFX + Ram but I'd rather not and save a bit of money.

Any advice appreciated
Thanks

 

[Steveh_monkey]

Super news thank you
Any recomendations for GFX cards then? Maybe something one <£100 and £100< just to be me started

+ How essential is new RAM? not sure If I'll be able to find the same or similar RAM again.

One last thing, I've got Windows XP atm, if I buy a Windows 7 upgrade edition will I be able to perform clean install on Windows 7 once I've installed it? I generally find once a year around august my PC goes bonkers and need's a fresh install.
I suppose if I own a Copy of XP and an Upgrade edition of Windows 7 then it's like owning a windows 7 retail, I can just reinstall a fresh XP and then upgrade to windows 7? Or should I just go Windows 7 retail for safety?
That probably belongs in the Software section but no point in starting a new thread me thinks

Thanks again

 

[Steveh_monkey]

It's a Gigabyte 965P-DS3, Chipset P965/G965 according to CPUZ