MaithuRuadh

Thanks again for all the help! I picked up the recommended pieces and got everything up and running this morning. Now to reinstall Skyrim ...

Thanks, gentlemen. The original Intel board I was considering, I'll admit, was because of the good rating from Newegg. I've been out of the loop for a long while on hardware, so I assumed most good boards are around $100 these days. I'd say $330 or less would be my budget for board + CPU + GPU. But it definitely sounds like the AMD setup will get me the best production for the money. The AMD processor looks great. I didn't realize they came with their own cooling fan. I have a pretty nice (by 2006 standards) fan on my current CPU, but I wasn't sure if was compatible with non-socket 775 boards. Any recommendations for a non-"piece of crap" AMD board? Like I said, I don't really play around much with the processor ... in fact, I'm not ever sure how to go about changing its settings. That's really reassuring about Windows XP, though. I was afraid with all the newest technology, XP would be horribly incompatible. Nice to know it's better, at least for gaming, than the later Windows.

I built my own computer several years ago, and while it was never anything special, it has served me well. I play just Skyrim on it now, as far as games go, so I'm looking for some advice on upgrading -- on a budget (as I'm sure you guys have heard many times). I have: ASUS P5ND2-SLI board Intel Celeron D 352 3.20Ghz CPU Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT Antec 500W PSU 4GB RAM Windows XP (I know ...) Going from there, I'm the usual low-on-cash guy looking for a good, but not bank-breaking upgrade. Skyrim runs pretty well on my system on medium settings (aside from the 6-8 minute wait to get to the main menu on startup and the random freeze-ups). I never really have any FPS problems or stuttering, even in dragon combat. I'm not interested in overclocking the CPU or running Skyrim on ultra -- just trying to get the game to run smoothly on standard settings. - I've had my eye on the ASRock z77 Extreme4 board, although I've heard it might be superfluous for someone not planning on overclocking. It's right in my price range, though. - Quad core CPUs seem to be way out of my price range. Is there anything decent for $100 or so? - Any recommendations for a decent graphics card, again in the $100 or less range? - Hopefully at least upgrading to Windows 7 in the near future. Thanks for any help you can offer.