Upgrading pc

[croden]

I am looking into starting a parts list for an upgrade on my pc, it is a couple years old now. I use it for gaming and video streaming primarily. I have an Asus P45 paired with an Intel E6400, using 4 gigs of Corsair DDR2, although only 3GB of it registers. I'll definitely have to buy a new graphics card also, after poking around on newegg for a bit it seems my Radeon X1950 is severely out of date. I built this pc primarily from recommendations on this forum and it's worked great for me.

The main question I have is concerning DDR3 motherboards and RAM. Is DDR3 going to be the main standard in the near future? I like to buy parts with the future in mind, while staying on a good mid price range, around $500-700 for mobo, ram, pcu, and graphics card. The hard drives, monitor, peripherals etc that I have are all fine for reuse, so I'm sticking to the basics for now, but I'll probably upgrade my hard drives from 2 250 GB to 2 1 TB drives in the near future.

I definitely want an Asus board I'm just not sure if I should stay with the DDR2 one so I can use all the ram I currently have or get a DDR3 supporting board and all new ram.

Can anyone give me a recommendation on a good DDR3 board? I think I can figure out the rest from there with no problem but suggestions on a good processor and graphics card would be nice also. Thanks a ton.

[glc]

If you have a P45 board, just keep it and your ram, and get a E8500 or Q9550 processor and a new video card. Radeon HD 4890 is the best card for the money.

[croden]

Thanks! Your plan saves me a bunch of $$, I like it much better.

Any idea how I can get the board to register more ram? I have 4 sticks of Corsair 1G, but only have just under 3GB of Ram registering, and the P5B supports up to 8... Someone told me this was a limitation of Windows XP 32 bit causing this, is that true? Do I just need a new OS?

[glc]

Correct, you need a 64 bit OS.

A P5B is not a P45 chipset, it's a P965. However, it DOES support those 2 processors with the latest bios update. What speed is your ram?

[croden]

That's good to know, I was planning on trying Windows 7 when it hits so I can upgrade my ram then too.

So I would have to update my bios with one of the 2 processors you mentioned...that's scary I've never mucked with the bios much out of fear of screwing it up.

The ram I currently have :
CORSAIR XMS2 DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)

[Khalil]

That is great Ram, honestly that E6400 is still a powerfull processor, any Core 2 Duo is plenty fast for most applications, some of them are over kill. I would like to second glc's recommendation for an ATI 4890 video card, you will see a huge boost in gaming performance.

[glc]

Updating the bios with Asus EZ Flash 2 is simple, all you need is a USB key. Download the bios update, if it's a zip file, unzip it and copy the rom file to the key. Turn the computer off, insert the key, start the computer, enter the bios setup, and go to EZ Flash 2.

I think you would notice quite a difference upgrading the processor - the new ones have a lot more cache and more efficient architecture than the original Conroes in addition to a considerably higher clock speed.

[croden]

I'm definitely ordering that card, and probably an E8500. I was thinking it was time for a whole new pc but I guess some of my components aren't as out of date as I thought.

I think I can manage the bios update, that really doesn't sound as bad as I thought it was.

Thank you very much for your responses! Wonderful information as always.