Upgrade when your needs exceed the capability of the machine. I mistakenly bought 007 nightfire - BUGGY BUGGY BUGGY game [unless that patch i saw advertised will help it immensely]. I had a 750MHz athlon @ 825 [112FSB on a KT7], 512mb of ram, and a geforce 2 gts. well the game dind't come out right initially even at the lowest settings. So what did I do? tried my hand and got a ge force 3 ti200 w / 128MB of ram and overclocked that to ti500 levels. now taht didn't work. so I thought, cpu - got what i thought was supposed to be a 1.1 thunderbird turned out to be a 1.6GHz athlon XP [since i';m on a kt7 that's underclocked per se] for 38 bucks. and the game still came out whacky but i'll tell you what my mp3 encode times were cut down significantly . But yeah upgrade on what you think help you do your desired task at a satisfactory speed. Don't need the latest and greatest just need what will get you there without any roadbumps.