Well, with the season coming to a close, I think the time to completely upgrade my computer is now. I've already made my mind up about getting a new video card weeks ago but it took a while to really decide if I want to blow 700 on just replacing its guts. It was probably a forgone conclusion that I was going to do it anyway, but "when" was the question. Right now, it's probably a perfect opportunity...prices on CPUs, VCs, and MBs are cheap and I've got a nice long week to fiddle around with it before S9 starts.

So here's my shopping cart so far (Newegg):

Intel E8400 3.0ghz CPU
Asus P5Q Pro MB
Asus ATI HD4850 512mb Video Card
Corsair 750W power supply

The processor I am really keen on, don't think I'll be changing it.

The motherboard and video card come in a combo package which saves me money, but, I am not entirely sure I want to stay with the 4850 or go with the 4870. I'll probably go with the former because the 4870 I highly doubt will be below $200 bucks which is my budget for the video card and I am not sure I need all the doodads that comes with it.

The power supply was something I just grabbed since I liked the wattage rating and it had a strong single 12v rail and decent ratings. Will do more research on it tomorrow.

In regards to memory, I think I have a lot of good options there. The motherboard I am looking at has a standard of DDR2 1200 ram, but is it imperative that I use that kind of ram or could I use something slower and cheaper for the time being?

Any comments and suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

The e8400 is a beast at 3.0 should be nice for you.I love my x2 6000 @ 3.0 so you will love your c2d at 3.0 and should be alittle faster.The mobo asus make some of the best mobo out there.They are really rock solid.The 4850 looks like a really nice bang for the buck when it comes to price.I had the 3870 a few months back and loved it to death.Also you dont need ddr 1200 you could go with ddr2 800 or something else..Just dont go cheap on it and get some junk.I have also used corsair ps in the past and not had a problem with them.I also need to up my rig.Iam using a 600gt right now had to send my 8800gt to bfg for a rma.A big storm a few months back to my 3870 with it was a sad day.

Ram might not be a good choice. ddr2 1066 might be a little better, because its all oc'd 800 and 1200 might not be worth the $ or be stable speed.

Finally finished the upgrade today. Actually, I pretty much bought a whole new computer. Last minute before purchasing, I decided to get a new case and the only things I kept from the old one were the dvd drives, hard drive, sound card, monitor and network card.

Damn thing is fast! On everything max I am getting frames close to 300 on rFactor and it hovers around 200 in GTR (solo of course). I've never seen frames over 100 before let alone 200 so I am very pleased with that :). The 4850 gets quite hot though, but that wasn't too much of a surprise. It idles around 75C and climbs into the 80s under loads. On my previous card, 65C was considered pretty high. I'm not so much afraid of it melting on me as I am for its long term integrity. But maybe ATI raised the threshold and it's supposed to run that high...dunno.

Overall, this was well worth the purchase ($800). It took me a while to get most of the kinks out as I switched over the hard drive from a AMD system with different drivers and system files compared to this one. Wasn't as bad as I thought it would be but I probably would have saved some time and sanity and just gone out and buy a new HD.

I am having one problem though and was hoping you guys might shed some light onto this. It actually has nothing to do with anything new but my master DVD drive isn't working properly. I am running a dual DVD drive system that is hooked up by an IDE cable to the MB. The slave works fine but everytime I try to do anything with the master, it just refuses to autorun or run anything at all. It acts like it tries to load something and spends a lot of time and takes up a good amount of resources doing it, but eventually it just quits and does nothing. Looking under Explorer, it calls it the "DVD-RAM" drive which I have never seen it called that before. The other one is the "DVD/CD-RW" drive and that one works perfectly. I've made sure all the connections are secure and that nothing was wrong with the terminals so I am not sure what is going on here.