Upgrading

[chowpappy]

Recently I decided to retire my PentiumII 400 and Soyo motherboard- a hard and sentimental decision because it was the first comp. I ever put together myself and I was proud of it. I bought a used KT7A with a 1gig processor and figured that by more then doubling the processor power, and compared to what I was used to, it was really going to scream.
Now that its finished I'm not impressed at all. In fact I don't notice any difference. It seems to open large photoshop files at the same rate, play games the same, etc.
So now I'm looking at the Abit NF7-S with an ATI 9500pro and something along the lines of an XP2200 processor. What I'm struggling with is for the money is this comp. really going to set my world on fire or am I really going to notice much of a difference? At what point in the chain of upgrades am I going to go from "yeah, I guess this is a little better" to "holy cow, this monster screams!"
I could give a rats *** about a higher benchmark if the realworld difference is insignificant.
I do love putting a computer together though and have had my finger on the order button trigger a dozen times. I keep backing off, talking myself out of it and rethinking everything.

[Sharkyfan22]

Everytime you upgrade your hardware you should format/reinstall windows to notice big performance gains.. also you should install your chipset drivers. My last computer was a 1.2ghz, Radeon 64, and 256mb RAM, when I upgraded to current system it really SCREAMED..