any suggestions on a good system

[CAP1]

ok......i've looked through the threads and don't see anything(or missed it) about my question.

the machine i'm running now is a 1.8GHZ amd athalon processor, with 1.5GIG ddr2 ram. geforce6800gt video card with 256meg of its own ram, 80gig harddrive, windows xp service pack 2, and i think the front side bus(which i'm told is VERY important)is only in the 300 MHZ range.  in general, the system works ok. when i get into a furbal, my frame rate drops to the mid 20's. even offline practice it only runs in the 20-30's. this puter is about 5 years old. oo..and i think it has a 375watt powersupply......

 so now the question.....assume i'm going to build my own machine(never done it yet, but i can figure it out), and am lookin to stay in the $400-700 range.

what would be a good setup? where would i find decent prices?

thanks!!!!!

john

[Tigger29]

I spent under $400 on my upgrade.

I bought a:

Conroe E6300 core-duo processor
ASROCK Dual-VSTA motherboard
2 Gigs DDR2 ram
CDRW/DVDrom combo drive
160GB SATA hard drive

I reused my old:

Case/Power Supply
GeForce 6200 AGP Video card
Wireless PCI Network card
USB Surround Headset
Keyboard/Mouse/Monitor
XP Home

I get at 512 Textures, 1280X1024:

60-75FPS normal flying
40-60FPS heavy dogfighting
20-25FPS during thick smoke/fog/fire

Yes I know I could use a better video card, but that'll happen down the road, but this system is worlds better than the old XP2200 AMD system I used to have.