Here is an alternate idea
i think a good upgrade that would be simple would be to drop a
2500 barton into your system, they sould o/c pretty good also. the barton core would double your cache and that would give a very noticable improvement. Then pick up 2 sticks of
512mb cosair pc2700. that would make you have a 2500, which could possibly hit 3000 levels, 1 gig of ram. i think that would give you the same performance boost as a 9700, rember a 9700 is a video card and it would give you only an improvement in games, the upgrade i speak of will give you a performance boost not just in games but system wide in other apps as well. the software side will not be as bad; IE, no driver cleaning or reinstalling windows. The video card market, ATI versus Nvidia, is alot more competative than AMD versus INTEL. Prices and technology move faster than the cpu market and the cpu/memory upgrade would be better for the concievable future, considering the stuff nvidia is about to roll out, ATI will drop its prices.
if you purchase the chip and the memory sticks then your total should be less than 210 shiped.