Looking to extend custom build life

[Steve Canham]

I have an old custom build that is reaching the end of its lifespan (well it was due for upgrades a few years ago but i've never done any computer building/upgrades before).

My system has the following specs:

Asus PK5-VM Motherboard
Core 2 Duo E6750 @ 2.66GHZ
1334 MHZ FSB
2x 1GB Corsair DDR2 RAM
NVidia GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB
545W Power supply

The question is, im at the point now where 99% of the games I want to try and play (even ones that my system meets the minimum requirements but not the reccommended ones) End up with the Kernel Crash error, it was very rare before but now it is very frequent and some games I used to be able to run now I cant even on the lowest settings (Civ 5, Skyrim are two I can think of). I was wondering if upgrading my GPU would help extend the lifespan as there are several upgrades to the GPU which my motherboard would support, which according to sites like pc-specs would be a double rated upgrade (My GPU rates a 2.8/10 on their scale) and can I play this rates it in the 14th percentile for graphics.

Or would this create a bottleneck or is this a whole different issue that im not seeing. Also how hard is it for a beginner to change a GPU. I am only thinking of getting just the GPU for financial reasons, and would probably save up for another more in depth upgrade within a 12-24 month period (MoBo, CPU, GPU, Power Supply, RAM at minimum)

I just noticed my +12V was sitting at 10.48V does that mean my power supply is about to die?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, I would love to use my case/hdd ect and just rebuild the guts but im worried about the cost and my own technical ability

 

[TStahler]

To be honest, That system is financially not worth upgrading. I mean, You could throw a couple more gigs of RAM into it, replace the Core2 Duo with a Core2 Quad processor and upgrade the graphics card to maybe a GTX 550 ti, but that is about it.

If you want a cheap upgrade, Get a solid state drive. Load your games, operating system, and programs onto it. Then enjoy the faster loading speeds for what you load onto it as compared to a 7,200 RPM hard drive.

Cheers!