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Ask yourself:
• What do you use your system for now?
• If you upgrade, what will it do for you:
- what do you do now that upgrades will improve?
- what capacity will upgrades give you to do new things?
So, what are the most resource intensive applications you use? Games? Video watching/encoding? Photoshop? Make a list for yourself and study it carefully.
Do you play with linux or other OS's (I kind'a assume you're on Windows, but is it XP @32-bit or Win7 @64-bit?).
My reaction:
Your system is still plenty powerful. Maybe things you can do to push it some more, but I would focus on cheap things. Your power supply is plenty powerful; if it was 500 watts you still wouldn't
need an upgrade. If it dies and you are forced to get a new one, 600W would remain plenty, although if a 650W was on special, y'know, certainly grab it. But, wait for it to die; no need to get preemptive for this component.
Your CPU is a limit, so if you found a replacement chip that was cheap and jumped you by ~0.5 GHz you could certainly gain a nice performance boost there. Including the OC, if you can get in the 3.3-3.5 GHz range that might be the one single thing that would really bump you up a worthy notch. Cheap is the Keyword.
Upgrade video, you can
do this for $30 right now, and it would be some improvements over your GTX9800, but in other ways it would be a wash. A GT430 or GTX430 would be the minimum upgrade that would actually bump you up, but that GTX 9800 is a pretty rock-solid, sweet card. Maybe you can find something more powerful and still be at maybe $60-$70 or under (like ~$45), then might be worth it.
What I liked about that Galaxy card (I got one for myself, BTW) is that it handles DirectX 11 and openGL 4.1, in addition to working very well under numerous linux distros. The newest nVidea drivers make it openGL 4.2 compliant, so it'll have maximum flexibility into the next 3-5 years or more.
However, since you're on a DDR2 system, keep in mind your upgrade path is fairly limited in the big picture. You will not be able to get a lot of extra performance no matter what you do or how much you spend.
Is your system 64-bit compatible? And here, I'm thinking: do you want a machine that will be a linux box?
Where I'm going with this is, I'd wait a year & save up and buy the most I could afford in new tech at that time. The strategy would be that the new system would be Windows and intended for high-performance Windows stuff (games, etc.).
The system you currently have, I would very carefully acquire some cheap tweaks during the year, with the intention of converting it to a linux playground, something that I could experiment w/ 64-bit (which is finally getting better) and using a virtual machine to maybe run something legacy, like a WinXP install
IF I had old software/games that I wanted to run in a native WinXP environment. It would also be a real motherpowerful fileserver and general home server system to handle firewall & and anti-virus duties, maybe home video surveillance(?), generally construct a iron-clad demilitarized zone for your home network. Especially if you decide to play with linux/freeBSD/etc.
DDR2 is now legacy, obsolete hardware, as Freedom Kira notes. If I ran across a really good deal on it, I'd consider getting the system up to 8 GB just so it had the capacity, but 4 GB should still be plenty for just about any needs into the next couple years. The only reason to jump to 8GB is if you feel the system will be in service for more than two more years, because DDR2 will only get more expensive and in 2 years even linux might really perform better with more than 4 GB, especially if you play with virtual sandboxes.
That's kind of it. Envision how long you will keep this system, and exactly what you will use it for. If you don't go linux, it might also serve very well as a legacy WinXP system, if you have such a need.
In my case, if I had a system like that, I would plan on keeping it for 3-5 years, but I would save my money to buy a much better system in 12-14 months while upgrading this along the cheapest path possible during that time. As I said, the CPU upgrade, if possible, would be #1 priority. RAM upgrade I would take if/when a really good deal turned up. GPU upgrade I would wait at least three more months, maybe 5-ish ... probably get something like a GTX530 or better card by then for well under $100, and that would be more than that system could ever truly utilize.
Afterthought: You can consider an SSD, like a 90 GB or so drive. It would be the main boot drive and have reserved space for the most intensive applications on the system. I've seen these go as low as $75 for a 90 GB drive on special w/rebates, so shop hard & buy smart if you go in this direction. It might be the single most impressive
speed upgrade you can perform on your system, with the CPU upgrade being #2 (if possible) and the greatest general
horsepower upgrade.
Your mobo is probably limited to SATA II, and SATA II SSDs right now are dropping pretty quickly in price while reliability has gone up significantly in the last half year or so. Look at Intel, Plextor, Samsung and Corsair brands first, and look for 2,000,000 hours before failure specification. Look to greatest reliability here rather than highest performance numbers; save the bleeding edge performance for the new system when you can saturate a SATA III controller with whatever is available in a year.
