System upgrade, need some wise advice

Stigmata

The Freeman
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I've narrowed down my potential upgrades to sets of specs, within which I haven't been able to decide on a specific part.

Current specs:
Mobo: Asus M4A78 PLUS (AM2+/DDR2)
CPU: Athlon II X2 240e (2.8GHz)
RAM: 3GB (2x1, 2x0.5) DDR2-800
GPU: Radeon X1900XT 512MB

Future potential specs:
CPU: Phenom II X4
- 925 @2.8GHz, $180
- 955 @3.2GHz, $210 (Black Edition)
- 965 @3.4GHz, $240 (Black Edition)
RAM: 4GB DDR2-800 (as high as my mobo supports for dual-channel)
GPU: Undecided
- minimum 1GB
- overclockable, reasonably quiet heatsink
- pref DX11

I actually purchased a GTS 250 the other day (which I took back), as my first experience with Nvidia cards, and it was pretty good. I like those drivers a lot better. On the other hand, my board is Crossfire-enabled.

On the other other hand, my motherboard is only AM2+. Do I gain anything good or noticeable by upgrading to AM3? Is DDR3 that much better? Do AM3 processors take a performance hit in AM2+ slots?

[edit] I picked a good time to upgrade - I just experienced a crash-to-boot during which BIOS took 3 seconds to detect my hard drive.
 
y'all jerks! I settled on this:

Phenom II X4 955 3.2GHz BE
Gigabyte GTX460 768MB
1TB WD Caviar Black 64MB HDD

Currently full-formatting my second petition, and it's taking forever.
 
Didn't even see the thread. Actually I was asleep the entire time, so it would be really freaky if I did see it.
 
I never saw this one either.(until now)

I think the choices you made were good for what you had. The 460 is a great card! I wouldn't mind having one. And the X4 should give you enough power so it's not bottlenecked.
 
just got the 1GB version of that card and its godly! I can play Metro 2033 in glorious 1080p in Direct X11 on a 5 year old rig with it looking as smooth as butter on my 23" monitor
 
It really does run fantastically. I'm just putting the finishing touches on installing something like 60 mods for New Vegas, and a lot of them are for textures and shaders to see how far I can push this system. I already ran vanilla NV for about forty seconds on max settings and it was smooth as a baby's va.... bum.
 
The 965 didn't cost anywhere near $240 for me. The hell.
 
I dunno, it was expensive on the website but once I got to the store they were back near newegg prices. Makes no sense.
 
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