Abit's Fatal1ty AA8XE Motherboard

[frankl]

Hi All,
Looking to upgrade my pc. The last time i did this was 3-4 yrs ago. At the time i think i picked the best board going around. Abit's Fatal1ty AA8XE (http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/12/08/abit)
I currently have a P4 3.2Ghz CPU and 1GB RAM, running XP SP2. 1 x 120GB SATA drive. ASUS Extreme AX850PRO video card (http://www.guru3d.com/newsitem.php?id=2134).
What do you guys think I should do?? My first thought is to re-use the motherboard and get a 3.8GHz CPU and throw in another 2GB of ram. Possibly upgrade the video card as well. I use this PC mainly for programming, photoshop, dreamweaver.

[FDIV]

You are not going to get much juice from that small processor speed upgrade and it is going to probably cost you north of $100 because discontinued parts despite being old and slow sometimes can be surprisingly expensive. The ram is a thought it would be cheap and 2 gigs is definitely better than one. As to the video card it is not a bad card. If your not a gamer I don't know if just video editing would benefit. I suspect not. I have 3 thoughts.

1) Try overclocking your existing processor and seeing what you can get out of it. I expect you'll get as much for free as the 3.8ghz would get you anyway. With your motherboard this should also be easy it was a good overclocker.

2) Get more ram.

3) (My prefered recomendation!)

Drop the current mb and processor and upgrade. On the high end for just north of $300 you could have a core 2 quad 6600 chip and a cheap mb. With this one you can even keep your old 533ram and a cheap Asus is better than most expensive boards. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131230

On the low end for $100 you could have an amd athlon x2 and cheap mb. I would keep the video card. I think its fine. Actually for what you do I think its overkill.