@SMC: The Athlon 3700 was the best bang-for-buck when I bought it, and it probably still is. You get a 1MB cache, which is nice, and it overclocks well (if you're into that sort of thing). A few months ago, the 3800 was touted as the best bang-for-buck. It's not going to be much different now.
A 3700 can equal an FX55 without really pushing overclocking too far. I did it for a while but then just gave up faffing around, a plain 3700 is fast enough for what I do (Painkiller included).
Painkiller runs fairly well (at 800x600) on a GeForce FX5900XT, so pretty much anything you buy for more then £50 in the way of graphics cards will be able to impress you.
If this upgrade is going to last you a while, I would suggest 2GB of Mushkin RAM. Even if it's the 'slow' stuff (no DDR RAM is really very slow). 2GB of slower RAM will be better than 1GB of super low latency stuff when Vista is around.
A 3700 can equal an FX55 without really pushing overclocking too far. I did it for a while but then just gave up faffing around, a plain 3700 is fast enough for what I do (Painkiller included).
Painkiller runs fairly well (at 800x600) on a GeForce FX5900XT, so pretty much anything you buy for more then £50 in the way of graphics cards will be able to impress you.
If this upgrade is going to last you a while, I would suggest 2GB of Mushkin RAM. Even if it's the 'slow' stuff (no DDR RAM is really very slow). 2GB of slower RAM will be better than 1GB of super low latency stuff when Vista is around.