Hi folks,My old system has served me well but I'm considering upgrading to a new system.I'll be using the sound card and 1 HD from the old system and my trusty old CRTs. P4 2.4 533FSB 1G RAM GeForce FX 5200 128mb SB Audigy 2This is the system I'm considering. My question is what kind of performance increase I will see.Any guidance would be appreciated.CASE : NZXT Nemesis Metal Mid-Tower Case 400W W/ side-panel Window (BLACK COLOR)CPU : (939-pin) AMD ATHLON64 3000+ CPU w/ HyperTransport TechnologyMOTHERBOARD : (Sckt939)EVGA nForce4 SLI Chipset SATA RAID Dual PCI-E Mainboard w/GbLAN, USB2.0, &7.1AudioMEMORY : 1024 MB (512MBx2) PC3200 400MHz Dual Channel DDR MEMORY (Corsair Value Select)VIDEO CARD : NVIDIA Geforce 6600 256MB 16X PCI EXPRESS VIDEO CARDVIDEO CARD 2 : NVIDIA Geforce 6600 256MB 16X PCI EXPRESS VIDEO CARDMONITOR & LCD : NONEHARD DRIVE : (10,000RPM SATA150) (SATA150 - Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM 8MB Cache WD740GD)Optical Drive : LG GWA-4161 16X DVD

Hi Craig,Good to see that you're considering a new system. I see that you have configured an SLI system (two video cards) but FS9 wouldn't be able to take advantage of that at all so I would suggest you spend all that you can on one graphics card instead. That'll probably take you to an NVIDIA 6600GT or an ATI X800GT. I know very little about these two graphics cards; Anandtech seems to think they are neck-and-neck (check out: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2540&p=11). I would err on the side of the ATI solution but that's just a personal preference (having said that, I'm using an NVIDIA GPU right now!)I don't have access to this hardware to give you an estimate of the performance gain you would see. It's especially hard given you are going from one CPU (and GPU) architecture from another. Maybe 15-20%? This is a very very rough guesstimate though. Besides, it would depend very much on what resolution you are using/want to use. Suffice it to say that your general computing experience should be a lot smoother.Hope this helps.Edwin

Edwin,Thanks for the advice. I wasn't sure about the SLI system myself so will take your advice and upgrade to a single and better card but keep the option open for SLI in the future.Thanks,Craig