Opinions on My Future Build

So I've been thinking about upgrading a bit and I wanted to get your guys opinion on what I plan on doing. I don't have a huge budget but I'll have around $500-700 to spend comingup on parts. I am a little bit into overclocking although I don't know too much about it right now but I do plan on getting more into it.

Items marked in red are currently owned.

Case: Antec 900

PSU: 700w thermaltake

CPU: E6850 core duo 2

RAM: 2x1 Gskill drr 2 800 mhz (thinking about getting better ram, the P5-E supports up to 1200 mhz).

GPU: 8800 GTS (320 mb) I am probably going to stick with this until the series 9s come out. I see myself buying a series 9 right when they come out on the market so upgrading to something else for a few months would seem like a waste.

Motherboard: Asus P5-E, comes with SupremeFX II sound card (currently own P5N-E Sli, not such a fan of the 650i and horrible memory compatiblity)

Hard drive: WD Raptor 10k 150 gig oem version. (Currently have Seagate Barracuda 320 gig 7200 rpm, probably use this as a secondary hard drive)

OS: Windows XP home 32-bit (currently have vista 32-bit home and I'm tired of it).

Zalman Fan with Heatsink (currently have a crappy heatsink/fan but it is better then the stock one).

What do you guys think? What would the weak areas be? Any and all opinions welcome, thank you!

Any help would greatly be appreciated.

Personally, I wouldn't bother with any of those upgrades, with the possible exception of an aftermarket heatsink, but I wouldn't go with Zalman for one of those.

The graphics card upgrade depends on how well R700 and the GeForce 9 series perform, your motherboard is just fine for now, stick it out until Intel switches sockets for Nehalem (or if AMD pulls some surprises with future iterations of AM2+ or AM3), your hard drive is not going to get noticeably faster by going from that drive to a Raptor, and I'd just tough things out with Vista.

Thanks for the input, much appreciated. One of my main reasons for wanting a new motherboard is I'm having a lot of issues with ram compatibility. I'vedone some research and many others have had problems. I just can't dual channel ram to work, I've spent way too much time trying to figure it out. It runs perfectly stable in single channel but dual channel gives me lots of bsods. I've entered in the correct timings/voltage and have updated to the newest bios but nothing has helped.

The P5E appears to be a very stable board and good for overclocking. Would you have any recommendations? I don't care much for SLI also.

What heatsink/fan would you recommend? Preferably under 100 dollars.

Thanks again!

The P5E is a good looking X38 board, so if you really must upgrade, that's a good choice.

For the CPU cooler, that depends on what you're looking for. If you want near silence with reasonable temperatures at a low price, the Freezer 7 Pro is a good buy. If you want one of the best coolers on the market out of the box, the Tuniq Tower 120 is excellent. If you want an exceptional heatsink and are willing to provide your own fan, the Thermalright Ultra-120 is one of the best coolers around.

Thanks for the info.

I think I'll skip out on the wd raptor and go for the p5e, windows xp and the tuniq tower 120.