Time for an upgrade

It appears after the tax attack from Nebraska & the Fed, my bonus wasn't so good. Originally I planned on upgrading my main PC to a sweet new one with multi-core/mega RAM/Windows 7 64bit uberness but that's not gonna happen.
Instead I will pay a little love and attention to my crusty but trusty old Windows XP Pro eMachines W3050 I picked up about 6 years ago which has endured the likes of World of Warcraft and other games and was also my main programming box. Honestly, it is a good machine. I'm really surprised and proud at how well it's endured over the past few years. I know it's time to upgrade but I just can't afford it right now, maybe next year.

So my plan is this, I'll talk it over with the boss (a.k.a. the wife and financial specialist) and see what we can do. I would like to pick up a new case, power supply, video card and the sweet NXT Sentry LX LCD fan controller. Now you may be saying "Dude, why waste all that on an old machine?" well it's a pretty simple answer, I'll keep the core components like the motherboard, CPU, RAM and hard drive and just swap them out. Then over time, I will replace those pieces with newer ones in my new case. I'll turn my existing system into a pure gaming system since I have my new laptop which I'll do all my other stuff on. When I'm ready to upgrade the other pieces I can give it a thorough overhaul.

The existing core components aren't to bad actually, an AMD (single core) 2.33Mhz processor and 2GB of RAM. Now it doesn't have the lightning speed that the new stuff has but it's solid. Enough for running WoW so I'm good there. Since it will be set up purely for gaming there's not much else that I'll have running to eat up bandwidth on it. I'm not a high end gamer but my wife and I play together as our "together time" so I don't need anything awesomely fast.

So what am I looking at for upgrades?
Well lets start with the case. I found this case and Power Supply Unit combo from Tiger Direct, the Diablotek Mid Tower Case and 450Watt ATX PSU Bundle.

I like this case because of it's cooling features. 120mm fan in the front and back and top, side panel vents, and the PSU is located at the bottom which blows the heat up instead of down. I like this because with the other fans (back and top) it will help remove it from the case.

Video Card
I'm going with the 1GB EVGA GeForce 9400 GT Video Card. My existing board doesn't support PCIe and this one is PCI compliant. I figure it will get me through for a couple more years and help take some of the load of the existing 2GB of RAM I have installed.

Finally...THE UBERNESS!
Ok, I know it's probably not really that uber but to me it is. The NZXT Sentry LX LCD Fan Controller.

The LCD readout, the cool graphics, oh, and it controls the fans too! Just looking at it makes me giddy with glee especially when I hear my wife ask "What the heck is that thing? You launching missiles or something over there?" Although after doing a little research I found that it only supports fans with three prong connectors and not four. From what I can see in the pics for the fans that come with the case those are four prong. That’s ok though, at least I’ll have this part out of the way and can still use the other features and can upgrade the fans at a later date.

After totaling up these pieces and my wife’s new CPU the total comes to about $300. Not to bad for a start of a great system build. As the project progresses I’ll be sure to post updates and pictures along with reviews of everything.