I decided to try and upgrade my processor from a pentium 3 and after some research I'm looking like I'll be needing enough other parts that now I'm looking at building a system from scratch. I'm a bit clueless about what's inside my box so I was hoping for a bit of advice. I'll be using it mostly for internet and school work, with some gaming that I do on windows.
I'm planning on keeping the same floppy and cd-drives and network card.
Parts to change:
Processor = Pentium 3 1.1 Ghz
Mobo = Intel 810E with integrated sound and video
Hard Drive = Western Digital 40 Gb
RAM = 256 MB (not sure of type, Harddrake just calls it a DIMM2 Memory Module, if I can I would like to use this in addition to an extra 512 MB)
Case = Narrow tower that makes it a bit of a pain to find things that fit, but it has a powersupply that was replaced by Gateway last year just before the warrenty expired

Today I stopped by a store that specializes in selling custom computers and got a quote, though I hadn't done much research at this point yet and was just following whatever the salesman said. There's two extremes I'll include one cost $583 and the other costing $692. I'll include as much info as I can but they're a bit vague on some details
Processor = AMD Athlon 64 3000+
RAM = 512 MB PC3200 400 Mhz DDR
Case = Mid tower only sell with Antec 350 W power. I found similar ones costing $60
Hard Drive = 80 GB to be used in addition to the 40 on my old one.
Mobo ($692 system version) = MSI K8t Neo2 939 Dual Channel
Video Card ($692) = GeForce 4 MX4000 128 MB DDR
Mobo (583 version) = MSI K8MNeo -V 754 with integrated video

After a little looking on my own I came up with a couple other options. It will cost ~$125 for the parts to be assembled. If I did the math right this totals to 538 including the shipping listed on the site
Processor

Mobo

Video Card

Hard Drive

RAM

case

Let me know what you think about this, I'd especially appreciate advice about the mobo and video card

Are you hard set on AMD? The chip I like and bought 4 of them now lol is the Northwood P4 2.4B (2.4Ghz) w/ 512kb or 1mb cache. They're down to $124 theses days. Such a great chip in my honest opinion (not to sound like a salesman). I have a laptop that runs at 3.4Ghz from Extremenotebooks.com and i can rarely tell a difference in speed... So if you wanna save a few bucks and go from 154 -> 124 dollars on chip you can get that of course you'll need a motherboard change, 512mb ram is plenty. As far as video cards I recommend the ATI 9700 Pro as a good base line they are like 130 bucks now these days as well, once you start going 9800PRO AIW or X6/800 line you start getting into 200-300 range, I have a 9700 Pro and a ATI X800 in the laptop the 9700 is good enough for the games i play except DOOM3 of course. Did you select a 10/100 card? Make sure its kosher with your system.

- Justin

I'm not necessarily committed to AMD though it seems like everything I've read has been saying that these are better than the penitums. I don't do too much that would require really top stuff so I may not even notice the difference but I've also seen that penitum compatible boards seem to be a bit more expensive even though the processors themselves are a bit cheaper. It seems that I would just be transfering the money from one thing to another. I could be wrong and comparing a really cheap and not so good AMD board with better quality pentium compatible boards, I honestly don't know enough about these to know what I really should be comparing.

As for the video card I'm wondering how basic I should go. I don't think I tend to be using real graphics heavy gaming (Baldur's Gate 2, Age of Mythology are examples of what I seem to play the most).

I know 512 MB is probably plenty, just if this one is compatible I figured it wouldn't hurt to plug it in and extend a need for further upgrades a bit longer. If nothing else when someone is putting things together they can see if it fits or not.
I was planning on using the same network card, which I got the impression shouldn't be a problem, though I'm starting to see that a lot of the mobos I've looked at tend to have a card built in, unless I'm misreading something.