Hi,

I'm in the current stage of upgrading my gaming desktop (by 3 stages), and I've come to a question of what of the CPU/GPU to upgrade first, and what CPU/GPU combo to buy.

I'm looking for great looking gaming of any of the modern games, and also good performance in multimedia projects that I do.

The system is in it's second stage out of three and currently has:

CPU: Intel PENTIUM D 805 2.7 GHZ
RAM: GEIL 2GB DDR2 800 SDRAM
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA II 1 TB
PSU: Antec TruePower New 550W
MB: Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3LR

I was thinking of a:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8xxx/E7xxx series
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 SP

Thanks in advance. What MBoard are you planning on ? ?I have already bought and installed the planned motherboard ~ Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3LR

(My old MBoard was an AsRock 775i945GZ)I've researched a bit, and found maybe an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 could be a costly, but good option for the CPU.

I'm also thinking that because I game at lower than 1900x1200, I should upgrade the CPU first for a significant improvement.

[EDIT: I was also researching POSSIBLE graphics cards, looking for price/performance factor,

So I ended up with either:

*ATI RADEON HD4850 512
*NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 512

With their respective price/performance being 7.59/7.60.

I also tested the ATI HD4870 512 in the same method with:

7.85 as the price/performance factor.

Any suggestions?]Personally I would update the CPU first. Chances are they won't get that much cheaper over the next few months, in that time PERIOD the price of a GPU can come down far more.