I've been looking at new parts to upgrade my desktop pc since it is several years old and won't play any new games. I got Mass Effect the other day and it would barely even load the cinematics, clearly its out of date. Here are the specs so you can laugh: AMD 1700+, ATI X1300 XT, 768MB DDR Ram, and an 80GB hard drive all on Windows XP.

I want to upgrade the motherboard, cpu, video card, and Ram. So far I have put together the following package on Tigerdirect.ca: An ASUS P5N-E motherboard, Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0 Ghz cpu, an EVGA Geforce 8800GT, and 4GB OCZ SLI ready DDR2 Ram. at $785 delivered. How will this stack up to games like Mass Effect, COD4, etc?

should haul ass.  Be advised that 4 gigs of ram wont do you a lot of good with a 32bit OS.  Also, I wouldnt bother with any ultra high priced memory.  Anything thats DDR2-800 from a decent brand (patriot, kingston, etc) thats cas5 will work fine.

I have an EVGA 8800gts with a factory overclock, it'll run Oblivion at 1200p/60fps.

You'll be good to go.

Yes, you should have no problems at all, running most new games.

The 8800gt's are great cards for the money.

How would a 3.2 Ghz AMD 6400 X2 compare to the Intel chip? I cant decide if I want to go AMD or Intel, or ATI vs. Nvidia for the video card.

It looks solid.

Double check ASUS's website and make sure that ram is one that has been tested with their board.  If not get some ram that is on their approved list.

I bought the P5N-32E a while back and got ram that was one digit off from the approved ram.  Took me two weeks of fiddling with latency settings and such before I got it stable.

Quoted: How would a 3.2 Ghz AMD 6400 X2 compare to the Intel chip? I cant decide if I want to go AMD or Intel, or ATI vs. Nvidia for the video card.

Intel is the way to go these days, the Intel 8400 will stomp all over the AMD 6400. I prefer Nvidia over ATI in this generation of video cards.