Dude, I could tell you the whole story of my cheapness with upgrading my pc. And I will. It started out when my mom gave me the AthlonXP 2500+ 3 years ago. I never have enough money to upgrade my pc worth a damn, so I did it in small pieces. I searched for super deals at newegg basically, with good discounts and free shipping. This is a really slow process but it depends on your level of cheapness I guess. Look at my specs, man, this is a pretty crappy ass computer, relatively speaking, but I can still play oblivion and Half-Life 2 and Titan Quest, all at very playable framerates with almost maxed settings. No HDR
First you get yourself a GOOD, NAME BRAND, power supply, about 550-650 Watts, whatever you can afford. Get one with all the cables required for future upgrades and the like. Second (you can do this first if you want) get a nice cheap case, the RC-690 from Coolermaster is a pretty snazzy case for the money, 65 bucks I think. You can cram about 6 120mm fans in it, and it looks pretty cool, no window on the side panel, so people cant see your cheapness, and lack of cable management (cheap people are messy or is that just potheads?) either, I like that. You can probably just use your old hard drive in your new computer, so we'll skip that. Maybe keep the CD-ROMs, if they don't look too "packard bell-ish". When you said "packard bell" I just had to help you out dude. Now that you have a power supply, and case, you probrbly have your old packard-bell crap all hooked up in there and you want to get it out of there, so you need to get a nice spankin new PCI-E motherboard, with Socket AM2, cuz us cheap asses love hell out of AMD, right? amen. Pretty much any cheap NAME BRAND motherboard will do, cuz these guys usually have good warranties that go past neweggs warrantys. And if your cheap, ya. Try to get a motherboard with a new chipset so it will support the new phenoms, so you can buy one of them in 2 years when prices come down enough for us to afford, lol. If you need good cheap ram, get WINTEC AMPO, I heard somwhere that that is pretty good ram, and its damn cheap. If you don't wanna stoop that low for ram, get some decently timed G.skill for like 85 bucks on sale at newegg maybe. As for video cards, it really does pay to do a LOT of research before you buy one, you could pay almost twice as much for a card that "looks" like its supposed to be better, they (dell, packard bell.... etc) try to trick us with the cool sounding "Geforce 7300LE" BLAZING FAST!!! lol... or even worse "Geforce 6150" ooooo! that sounds good! But if you don't know a lot about video cards... yeah its confusing as hell, and by the way those chipsets suck. Cheap gamers like video cards that are something like 100-150 bucks, right? So get yourself an 8600GT, for 100 bucks, on sale of course, with free shipping, or an 8600GTS, I love AMD, but I'm sorry, the 2400, and 2600's suck really bad ass-turn eye candy on (4xAA, High Res) and watch your computer explode... and, despite my best prayers, no drivers will save them. Ive seen the 8600GT in action on an X2 3800+, its pretty slick. Also I've seen a 7950 on the same CPU and it is even better. You can get a 7950GT probably for 150 bucks now, but no DX10, and that doesn't help us perpetuate this long cycle of cheap ass upgrading that can go on forever. Where am I? I think that is it. Well, the CPU of course, whatever you can afford. The 5200+ and up all have 2MB of total L2 Cache. I've seen this CPU run "Two Worlds" on a 7950GT OC, godly. But you can get a 4000+ for 60 bucks, free shipping, the 5200+ runs 129, compare this to anything intel offers for 129 bucks....
The E4400, lol. wow. Unless your a SERIOUS overclocker, they aren't worth it, besides good coolers cost money, and we don't have that crap. Then you've gotta get a mobo with good overclocking options... and, well, those are about 150 bucks or 250 bucks sometimes. A good NON-sli motherboard for overclocking, is the Biostar Teforce 550, I almost cried when I saw this thing on newegg, OPEN BOX for 47 FRIGGAN DOLLARS man. But I don't have 47 bucks its rent week. WOW, what a bitchin deal. ITS STILL THERE BUY IT NOWWWWWWW!!! its 39 bucks...
http://forums.techpowerup.com/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=511557
Wow.
Dude this motherboard will take a brisbane 4000+ to like 2.6 Ghz on stock cooling easy. Thats like buying a 5000+ man, what are you waiting for?
If you want to be a cheap ass like me, you've gotta put forth a lot of effort in your search for the following: name brand stuff, future upgradeability, discounts, free shipping, combo deals... etc. It takes a lot of looking around but you find the deals and get em with free shipping, you can perpetuate this string of upgrades forever and your wallet never really feels it, do it in $100 chunks or something.