Recommendation for Dwight Silverman's $300 PC upgrade

Dwight Silverman'sin the mood to upgrade his Windows desktop PC. He's looking to refresh the CPU, motherboard and RAM, and doesn't want to spend more than $300 ... let's see what's out there!

Note: No GPU required as he's moving the ATI Radeon HD 4850 from the old system to the new one.

In a situation such as this my advice is to spend money on a decent CPU, run of the mill DDR2-800 RAM and then spend the rest of the motherboard.

Dwight is at the moment looking at an AMD X3 or X4 (not the newer Phenom II X3 or X4 CPUs) and a motherboard that supports tweaking and overclocking - that's a mistake as the headroom for overclocking the first-gen Phenom CPUs is pretty small.

I'd take a different approach and go for the Intel E7400 2.80GHz Core 2 Duo CPU. If you want a cheap CPU that you can overclock, then this is a good buy because you can push this puppy to 4GHz with the right motherboard settings (Google is your friend here). If you want to play things conservatively then overclock it to 3.6GHz instead - this is easier and requires far less trial and error messing about. This processor retails for around $120.

RAM? Well I'd go for cheap-as-chips 2x2GB Corsair modules for $55. This RAM is rock-solid reliable.

Now for the motherboard. Two come to mind and which you choose comes down to how much you want to know about the overclocking process. If you just want a very simple overclocking experience then I'd go for the MSI P45 Neo3-FR motherboard, which retails for around $120. If you want total control over the overclock then go for the amazing BioStar TForce TP45HP, which retails for some $110. Sure, you need to spend some time getting used to the board, and the crazy amount of control that you have over different settings can start to make your eyes water, but it'll let you push the CPU harder and more reliably than the MSI motherboard will.

All that comes in at $295! There you go Dwight, that leaves you $5 over for a soda or something!