Looking to upgrade, need opinions

I need some advice from all you tech savvy people. The core of my computer is running on over 4 years old and I think its time to start planning my upgrades. Pretty much ANYTHING will be an upgrade over what I'm running right now, but I still want to go for a pretty modest upgrade so I'll still be good again for a few years before having to upgrade most of my pieces. Unfortunately, I'm not that well-versed on hardware and had a friend help me out last time.

I'm looking to upgrade my video card, memory, motherboard and processor, unless something is salvagable in the upgrade (such as my current memory sticks). Here's what I've got:

Mushkin 2GB DDR2 800 RAM
BFG Tech GeForce 7900GT
ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe AMD Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 2.2GHz Dual-Core Processor

In case I'll end up needing more space for new parts, this is my case and this is my power supply. I'm currently running Win7 64-bit for an OS. Let me know if you need to know anything else.

So... that's my computer. Where can I go from here to get the most bang for my buck? Newegg links would be helpful.

It depends on what you budget is. I just finished building two new pc's recently
and after all my exhaustive research this would be a list of the parts I would recommend.

1. Core I5 750 lynnfield processor. ~$195.00 from newegg.
2. MSI P55 GD-85 motherboard. ~$229.00 from newegg. Note: You could probably find a cheaper buget budget board instead of this. I chose this due to build quality, one button overclocking, usb3, SATA 6gbs. It also is sli capable.
3. Nvidia 460 gtx. ~$229.00 from newegg. It runs cool and fast.
4. G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 ~$99.99 from newegg.
5. Intel x-25 mainstream 80gb solid state hard drive. ~$219.00 from newegg. Note: I went with a solid state drive because it is one of the single greatest noticable upgrades that you can get for a pc nowadays.
6. XFX Black Edition 750W MODULAR 80+ SILVER ~$119.99 from newegg.
7. Spire TherMax Eclipse II Five D.T. Heatpipe [cpu heatsink] ~$60.00 from newegg.
8. Case, monitor, and other peripherals depend on your preferences.

This build will allow the following upgrade paths:
cpu = i5 --> i7 lynnfield
video = 460gtx --> 460gtx sli or faster single card like the gtx 480.
harddrives = intel x-25 --> next gen intel solid state drives with SATA 6gbs.

In compiling this list I tried to find the best quality parts that would provide the most bang for the buck. Hope this helps...

I'd like to aim for $800-900, but obviously I wouldn't mind less. This could be the current pricing of it and I'll just watch for the prices to go down. The NVIDIA GTX 460 is sounding like a good card to go for, but I have no experience with ATI, so I don't really know how it all compares overall. I really only am looking to replace the 4 pieces I mentioned right now as my hard drives, DVD-R drive and (probably unneeded) sound card are probably fine for now. If it'll last me a long time, I'm fine with paying a bit extra, but I'm not worried about being top of the line good. I play a lot of games on my computer, but its usually RPGs like Dragon Age and Mass Effect, along with CoH of course. So if I can run them well and other programs on my computer, I'll be happy.

But there is always that satisfying feeling of creating a big, powerful beast of a PC that you really don't need too.

(I hate it when the browser crashes and takes a long post with it )
Great case, PSU is old and limited with only a combined 22 amps at 12 volts available. Current generation 450 watt PSUs, at least the high quality ones, are over 30 amps. The reason this is important is because both the CPU and video card draw their power from 12 volts.

If you are trying to keep the price down, dropping $200 on a small SSD isn't the best way to spend your money.

SATA III (aka 6Gb/s) not going to matter a lot short term and then only on SSDs. Conventional HDs barely exceed SATA I transfer rate limits.

Ideas

The MSI P55-GD85 is a nice motherboard at $230, the P55-GD65 is also nice but $70 less.

There is a factory OC GTX 460 1GB card from eVGA for $240.

The i5-760 is $210

4GB, 2x2GB DDR3-1333, Cas 7 for $100.

And as fugly I may think the XFX PSU Zen recommended looks, it does get great reviews from sites I respect that tear a PSU down, analyze it's parts and do proper load testing. Currently the XFX Black Edition 750 watt is $130.

So that's $910 with the GD85 motherboard, $840 with the GD65 motherboard.

Yea it was a comment about Zen's. I dislike it when someone gets all excited about "must have" tech in game systems, whether that's SLi, RAID 0 disk arrays or nowadays, SSDs. SSDs murder conventional hard drives in drive benchmarks, even the latest 10K RPM WD VelociRaptor drives, but that improved performance doesn't reflect nearly as much in actual application benchmarks. That money is better spent on a better video card and/or CPU than an SSD.

As it is today, a standard 7200 RPM hard drive is under $0.10 a GB, the 10K RPM VelociRaptor is near $0.50 a GB but an SSD is over $2.15 a GB for "large" SSDs, closer to $3 per GB for smaller drives.

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A place to get an estimate about PSU size is the PSU Calculator. It is reasonably up to date with the current crop of CPUs and video cards. I always select "high end - desktop" for motherboard and set capacitor aging to 30%. 7200RPM SATA drives are "Regular SATA".

I then take the minimum PSU size it gives, divide by 8 (6 if you like a lot of spare capacity) and that's what I use for my minimum amps at 12 volts criteria. Also for me a PSU needs to be 80 plus rated (efficiency standard) and at least 80% of it's rated wattage needs to be available at 12 volts. Then of course it needs to have enough connectors of the types I'm looking for, reasonably long cable lengths, etc. LED fan, glow in the dark cables, glossy paint job, transparent or with a window isn't even a criteria.

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As for the two motherboards. The P55-GD85 has two SATA III and two USB 3.0 ports, the P55-GD65 doesn't. USB 3.0 is a great thing for the new generation of external drives, with USB 3.0 as this bumps their performance from 30-35MB/s of USB 2.0 to nearly the same speed as an internal SATA drive. SATA III doubles the transfer rate of SATA II (which doubled SATA I) but only high end SSD drives are bumping up against the SATA II limits and most hard drives are barely exceeding SATA I limits.

NewEgg has a misprint, the P55-GD65 doesn't have any USB 3.0 capability at all.

The P55-GD85 is missing the PCIe x4 slot, which isn't that important. It has a somewhat different card slot arrangement with the two old time PCI slots found between the video card slots, the P55-GD65 as them as the last two slots.

The P55-GD85 adds an internal reset button while both have an internal power and MSI's One Touch OC set of buttons. The P55-GD85 also has a reset CMOS button on the rear connectors. These are niceties for OCers.

Probably other "premium" tweaks for hardcore OCers on the P55-GD85.

Thank you both, Zen_Watcher and Father Xmas. You both have helped me learn a lot.

You both mention a bit about overclocking though. While I've heard about it and know it can lead to performance gains, I've never had an item that I OCed personally, only factory OCed. Even then, its only been OCing a graphics card, never a motherboard. Other than trying to push your hardware to its limits, why would you do this? And, if I wanted to, how would I go about doing this? Is it a recommended to do?

Thanks for letting me abuse your knowledge. This'll be my very first time actually putting the vital hardware together, so learning all of this will be really helpful.

EDIT: Heh, Texas Justice posted as I was typing. Yes, I'm not looking for all the pretties and the shiny stuff right now, since they're usually more expensive, but I agree that they're nice to have when you can afford extravagance. As for the OC part, you hit it right on the nail. I'm still open to learning though and having the potential in the future, especially if it'll help me retain the usefulness of the parts longer by being able to gain better performance from the parts.

Let's hop into the wayback machine.

Well in 1998 some clever bloke discovered that if they changed the FSB clock from 66MHz to 100MHz on an Intel BX motherboard, they could make the $200, 300MHz Celeron A run nearly as fast as the $750, 450MHz Pentium II. The only difference was the Pentium II had 512KB instead of 128KB of L2 cache, and cost $550 more.

Ever since DIYers have looked for a way to get high performance from inexpensive CPUs, sometimes to the point of insanity. Intel helps by pricing their fastest CPUs multiple times that of their cheapest in a particular CPU family. Take the i7-9xx quad cores for example. The 2.80GHz i7-930 is $290, the top end 3.33GHz i7-975 Extreme is $1040. So best case 20-25% better performance for 3.5x the cost? That's part of the motivation, the other is simple bragging rights.

It's become the de facto assumption that any review of a CPU, motherboard, memory or video card has to include overclock testing. Overclocking has also spawned entire industries and feature sets.

• The primary reason for 3rd party CPU (and video card) coolers is to dissipate the additional heat generated by extreme overclocking. This including liquid cooling, refrigerated liquid cooling and full immersion liquid cooling (remember, insanity!).
• One of the reasons the industry went from a 4-pin to 8-pin main CPU power connector is to provide more power safely to the motherboard due to extreme overclocking.
• Higher end motherboards use a more complex CPU voltage regulator with increased number of phases to handle the extra amperage while maintaining clean stable power. This also require more extreme cooling measures for the voltage regulator so you will find large heat sinks, some connected together by heat pipes (looks like a metal tube), all located around the CPU socket where the CPU voltage regulator circuitry is found.
• The faster the CPU, the faster the RAM you need to keep it well fed. Faster, low latency memory also tend to use more power so it generates more heat and therefore come with more complex heat sinks, some even with optional cooling fans or even liquid cooling connectors (remember, insanity). Actually the amount of additional heat is trivial compared to the CPU for maybe an extra 5% of performance.

You could wait for some deals. Got my i5 750 with motherboard gigabyte ud3 for $240 including tax from Fry's. They don't have that deal anymore, but check out micro center. Great prices for processors these days. BTW, built my bros machine with an amd 1055 and motherboard (an am2+ so he could use ddr2) for around $280 including tax.

So, the power supply that Zen_Watcher listed before is currently in a pretty good bundle with a pack of 3 sticks of 2 GB RAM. They're the same product line as the ones that were listed earlier too, but listed as compatible with the Intel i7 rather than the i5. The motherboard lists that it would accept these too. But if I go for the i5 processor (which is what I'm planning), would these not work? In the end, I'm paying (with the combo) $5 more for an extra 2 GB of RAM. Is it worth it and would it work?

Well first Zen_Watcher recommended it, I simply concur, despite it's fuglyness in my eyes due to some very excellent reviews.

Second, the i7-9xx series CPUs fit in a totally different socket (Socket 1366) and want it's memory in groups of three. The i5-750 and i7-8xx (as well as the i3 and i5 dual cores) use Socket 1156 and want it's memory in groups of two. Sticking in a third stick will force the CPU to access memory only half as fast because of the odd number.

Haha, you're right, Zen did. When I was looking to remind myself, I just saw the links and went with it. Sorry Zen. I'll correct my post for proper credit.

Thanks for the reply though. That really clarified a bit about memory that I didn't know before. I always under the mistaken impression (although not entirely incorrect) that more was just simply better. But if it can't really fully utilize it, it's pointless.

Since City of Heroes is primarily a graphics intensive game you would do best with spending the majority of your budget on a new GPU and PSU, unless you like to offload physics to your CPU then you want atleast a 2.5Ghz Phenom II. 4-6gigs of DDR2 or DDR3 running at 1066Mhz would be more than enough to rock the socks out of your CoH experience, however, if you can afford to go with 1666Mhz by all means do that. You can get a fairly good AMD Quad or Intel Quad for around $100ish. I run a AMD Phenom X4 at 2.4Ghz and rarely exceed 10% CPU load, maybe 20% if I have a ton of browsers open. So focus on RAM and GPU, Can easily get an awesome system going for $500. Spend $250 for a superclocked GTX460 and the rest you can spend on some nice ram and you'll be pwning your fps rate all over the place, unless you want to max out the Crysis physics engine, in which case you will still fail hard.