Upgrading CPU

This is a little bit of a sore subject, so play nice

About 10 months ago I gave in trying to upgrade my old AMD Duron 900 anymore and bought a new machine: with an Intel P4 3.0ghz CPU and 512mg DR ram, then a month or so ago the CPU/Mobo fried and I had to replace and at the time (being right before Christmas) had to settle on a mobo/cpu bundle involving a Sempron 2600+, not expecting a significant performance change, but prepared for some drop.

Instead I find I have noticed, not for 90% of the things I do, but I'm a Sims 2 addict, and have a fairly intensive neighbourhood with 90+ houses and more than 350 playable sims (not counting townies and npc's) which my machine as it was could handle perfectly and now has trouble with, it's slow and sluggish and some houses are totally unplayable (the larger ones of course). I upgraded to 1gb of RAM hoping to be able to nurse things along, and if I drop a detail setting or two I can but it's still less than ideal for me.

So with the season and the fact everyone else was too much of a cheapskate to get me one for Chrimbo I am now looking at upgrading again.

I have been looking at more cpu/mobo bundles, but I'm not sure that's the best way to go, I don't even pretend to understand a lot of the specs given and am wary of asking advice from the same friend who said I would be fine with the Sempron 2600+.

I will need to keep using my AGP NVidia GeForce 5700LE graphics card and the memory I have now since replacing either of those is beyond my budget right now. The Mobo I have has a 754 socket (So I'm told).

Would it be better to replace the mobo and cpu again, or just the CPU, and any advice on what I should go for in either case.

Just to make things a little more difficult I'm in England and have a budget of no more than £200GB.

TIA

 

I don't know any uk sites that sell computer parts but I'd upgrade the mobo and cpu since socket 939 is the latest right now. And then go with AMD Athlon 64.

Or maybe another option is you could get a new heatsink and fan so you can overclock your processor to make it run faster, that would be a much cheaper option. You need a new heatsink and fan to keep the temperature down so it doesn't fry.

 

http://www.komplett.co.uk. Good UK site for components