Sounds good. Like I said, the Boss(by which I mean my wife) put me on a pretty tight budget, but I think I could squeeze the extra $50 for a 9600GT. Suppose no thoughts on trying to ressurect the old beast, or is it pretty much not worth the effort&expenditure?

If you need, I would cut the CPU to a E2180 or E2200 rather than going down to an 8600 GT. An E2200 with a 9600 GT will blow an E4600 with an 8600 GT out of the water, resurrect it, and kill it again.

You can take a look at my $750 PC build, which is with monitor, case, and everything - it's easy to get it to $500 if you're recycling some parts. Basically it's an E2180, 9600 GT, and the Gigabyte P35 board you've got spec'd. The 9600 GTs are even cheaper now, so I'll have to tweak it for the April version.

Don't know about fixing the old PC, figuring out random problems like that is a trial and error process.

The Asus P35 boards are all more expensive. And the one that is cheapest, the P5K SE, has been complained about for insufficient chipset cooling, higher than normal DOA, and shaky memory support. But mainly the bad chipset cooling. The SE strips off the heatpipe cooling of the better ASUS P35 boards. At the price, the Gigabyte has much, much better cooling.

The more expensive Asus P35 boards are kickass, no argument, but on a $500 budget it may be hard to justify spending more than necessary on the motherboard.

Nice work, I think you've maximized what you can do with $500.

Quite probably. However, one of the things I was wondering about is whether a 380w PS will be enough to run all of that, plus a pair of optical drives, and at least two hard drives. So with that in mind, should I upgrade the PS anyway?

The budget is fairly tight, but not so much that I can't toss in a power supply on top of things. Basically it means I don't get a second new harddrive. As to HDDs, I checkdisk'd em all, with no errors returned. I didn't get a chance to run memtest before it stopped booting though. Given the fact that the PC won't even POST, but it will power up, the most likely culprit is the motherboard(quite possible that it's burned out, the CPU fan has likely been dead for a while, which I didn't notice until the day it stopped booting) or the power supply. If it's not the motherboard, well, I'll likely never know; the new box is intel, not AMD. If it's the power supply, Best Buy sells em fairly inexpensive, and picking up a new one there isn't a big deal.

Yep, that's generally when I build a new PC. I built the last one on hardware under a year old, on double the budget of this one. It's still rock-solid, although starting to lag a bit. Most of that is my stubborn refusal to wipe the main HDD and reinstall everything. Guess I have to now

Right now? Budget. We've reached the a limit of what single cores can achieve to the point where increasing the power isn't going to get you the returns you might wish for. The industry is coming up with multi-core and many-core options for both CPUs and GPUs but the developers have to start making use of them for us to see the real benefit. Also, we are at a point now that 3d graphics are so powerful that increasing the complexity doesn't scale well with the processing power. Look at Crysis for that as an example compared to CoD4, Bioshock and the Source Engine. Ray tracing is heralded as the next big thing that solve all the above headaches but even if it was, its years away from mainstream.

Going out on a limb, I'd say a good P35 or 690G (if you're into that) could see you for a very long time. Toss in 4GB of RAM and a good powersupply and you have the guts of a decent machine going forward. As Legion as points out in previous builds, tossing in a cheap processor and a 8800gt is going to give you 99.99% of the same experience of a quad-sli/crossfire rig over all the games you'll play. Best option is to save your money for next year and upgrade either or both your CPU/GPU if you need to or if at all.

Yea, I was kind of figuring that myself. Any suggestions on how big I should go?

Often one of the first things that happens when a mainboard is dying is the USB ports begin to get wonky. My first suspicion here is your old mainboard is dying, although if I had a spare PS laying around I'd certainly try that first.

And 50C as an internal case temperature is a bit high. If that's your AMD CPU temp, it isn't alarming, but for the internal case temp to be that high, I'd be concerned about what your cpu temp must be in that hot an environment.

Anime, this should help you solve your power supply questions:

http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

The nForce4 is still a very good chipset. The issue is that once you start adding a Vista-DX 10 upgrade into the mix, you are already more than halfway to the cost of a brand new PC. Hardware wise, you could upgrade the processor to a faster Dual Core Athalon X2, for less than 100 dollars. An ATI 3870 can be had for under 200 dollars, or an Nvidia 8800GT would run you about 250. I have seen Vista Home Premium go for as low as 90 dollars with Google shop. That is about 450-500 in Upgrades. When, assuming you salvage things like hard discs, optical drives, case, a new build would be around 800 dollars.

With no real software reason to have Vista 64, 2 Gigs is about the max you will be able to use with a 512 MB or larger video card.

If you do go the new build route, I suggest staying away from SLI or Crossfire chipsets, unless you really plan on a multi GPU configuration. Look for a P35 based motherboard if you go Inten, or look into the new AMD chipsets. The 780i chipset based motherboards are showing to be very impressive, especially for the price. Also remember that for these processors and graphics cards, you want a power supply that is a minimum 600 w. At peak load this hardware will need it.