Hey everyone!

I don't know how many of you remember me. I was pretty active a few years back (think around 2005-2009ish), and then about a year and a half ago, you folks really helped a friend of mine out (NeoJabez) when you built him a machine with your generously donated spare parts. (See these threads:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...-to-get-rid-of
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...rtunate-person

I just wanted to say, thank you SO much for that. Since you folks helped us out, Neo has been instrumental in keeping our little community afloat and well-led.


I also wanted to ask for some help again, but of a different sort. I'm looking to upgrade my current machine, but I've been out of the game for a while, being a broke college student. I'm not sure when I'll have the funds to make this happen, but if/when I do, I would like to be well-informed.


My current specs are as follows:

DFI LanParty NF4 UT SLI-DR Expert motherboard (if any of you remember that one, lol)
AMD Athlon64 4000+ San Diego single core CPU
1 GB DDR RAM
XFX 8800GT Black Edition pre-overclocked video card (seems a bit old and tired... every now and then it artifacts at stock speeds, and freezes when playing high-intensity games )


Anyway, I built this myself, and have the knowhow to do it again. But I don't know much about modern hardware. I'm looking for a build that will be decent, able to play modern games fairly well, and have the ability to upgrade in the future. One of my biggest mistakes in my current build was to go with a Socket-939 build just before they were being phased out, and to get a single-core CPU just as dual core CPUs started to get cheap.

And of course, if anyone wants to throw any previously-used-presently-unused hardware my way, I would appreciate it, and it would certainly be helpful, but that's not really my aim in this post. I'm just looking for some advice.

Any tips?