I am planing on getting a new system probably by the end of this month or the next.

My system is about 2-3 years old at the moment.
MSI Neo 8 (forgot rest of mobo specs)
Pent 4 2.6 800mhz
x2 512 XMS Corsair 3200
MSI Nvidia GForce TI 4200 128mb (replaced heatsink for copper one)
Maxtor 80gb 5200rpm

What I am wondering is if I can get a decent upgrade to this on a $1500 budget. I need something that will let me run BF2, Oblivion, HL2, etc. Is there anything you could recomend from newegg for around this budget.

Also I have been reading that within the next month or two there might be some drops in prices for processors and GPUs so I don't know if I shuold just go ahead and buy something now or wait a month and maybe get a budget of $2000 and hope for some price drops.

I am not quite sure abuot all the technicalities so I am in need of serious help.

Thanks in advance

-JG

$1500 should be plenty to build a new PC. The processor drops should be this month. Conroe comes out this month which should be an interesting CPU to watch. DirectX 10 video cards should be out by October/November. You don't really need to wait that long.

A decent processor, 2GB of RAM and a 1900XTX or 7900GTX is all you really need to play those games at high res/high quality.

HL2 is easy to run, Oblivion is a beast on current hardware but it'll play fine.

You could just get a good AGP card and play HL2 and BF2 just fine on your current machine.

im buying my new comp at the moment and im getting

foxxcon winfast mobo - $120
SAPPHIRE X800GT PCIE 256M DDR3 - $253.44
120gb hdd - $122
1g ram - $130
AMD athlon 3200 cpu - $210
dvd/cd re-writer - $98
case - $120
speakers - $150
17inch lcd monitor - $350

thats costing me about $1553 and thats good enough for me

I would advising waiting a month or two. I know peeps are shouting that "you'll wait till the end of time if you think like that" i'm not telling him to wait till the end of time!!! I would say let that conroe come out at the least.

Well, If you're a gamer, you can buy an Alienware PC with $1,500!!!!!!! Its enough to buy a really good PC for $700 even...

Wait for conroe you can get one for the amount of your cpu your currently getting. Were are you getting these parts they way over priced.

On newegg.com http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103535 a 3200
retails at less then $100

The guy who posted those prices in in Australia. Much more $$$ than the US.

Why are u buying only a 1GB stick? Get a dual-channel kit or use ur previous RAM if it's dual-channel. Will give u more performance. And if ur going to use the 2x512MB cards from before with the new 1GB card, I wouldn't recommend it. Sell the old kit in that case and get a dual-channel 2 GB kit instead.