Help With New Build: Old AMD Phenom II X4 955 To A . . . ?

[speeed]

Greetings all.

It is time. My current rig has been a reliable workhorse. It has seen 3 video card upgrades, an OS upgrade, and a HD drive upgrade. In it's current state it is as follows:

AMD Phenom II x4 955
4 Megs o' Ram
AS Rock M3A770DE MB
ASUS GTX 660
Windows 7 32 bit

Surprisingly I have been running it clocked from 3.2 to 3.8 for a long time on only slightly better than stock cooling with zero problems. It has run just about everything I have thrown at it surprisingly well. I recently purchased Far Cry 3 and it runs that on pretty high settings with no problems. I play flightsims such as Rise of Flight, IL2 Cliffs of Dover, and Flaming Cliffs 2, all pretty close to max settings at a setting of 1650 x 1080 (which is what I am content with, and it is my 21.5" monitor's max setting).

I am looking to purchase a motherboard, some ram, a CPU, and some cooling hardware.I will be keeping some RAM, my HD and my video card. I may do some minor overclocking, but that is not a requirement. Upon my initial research I discovered that the budget motherboards have 2 memory slots, and I have two 2 gig sticks and I would like to have at least 3 slots for purchase of a second 4 gig stick for a total of 8 gigs. I would however, settle for 2 plus 4 for a total of 6 gigs. I am unsure about whether the OS. I would like to install Windows 7 64 bit, possibly Windows 8?

I am not brand specific, despite my affinity with AMD over the years. It seems at this point, Intel would be the best bet. It seems that an Intel i5 4460 is good starting point. The current landscape of hardware is much more complex than it was the last time I upgraded, so some advice would greatly be appreciated. I would like to keep it ohhhh, say around 370. My MO over the year has been shopping on Pricewatch, and paying for assembly and testing. I of course, am capable of doing that myself.

So . . . . can anyone provide some advice? Thanks!

 

[Outlander_04]

Most likely your old RAM is rated at 1.65 volts
Today you want 1.5 volt or lower .
Matched pairs gives you dual channel , double the bandwidth and a performance improvement

Whatever else you buy you need to upgrade to a 64 bit OS or you will be crippling yourself before you begin

If you want to OC an intel processor it has to be a K sku ie 4670K . If its a 4670 its locked and OCing it just wont happen

What you upgrade to might depend on your games . Some games run better on multithreaded processors [ and can use all the threads available ] , others only use a couple of cores .
AN FX 8 core processor can be beaten in the later game engine just because the game cant use the processors potential

 

[speeed]

Outlander -

Thanks for the reply. I was not aware of the "K" designation. Although I knew I about the RAM specifics, I had forgotten and not given it a though.

Thanks!