A8S-X based PC upgrade advice?

[redrumloa]

You guys are always good for some quick advice, so I hope you don't mind another few questions. My youngest 2 sons share a computer which is a hand-me-down from me. It is simply not quite up to par for Dead Rising 2 (legal, store bought) and some other new games, so I am looking to upgrade it within budget. Here are the current specs.

A8S-X
AMD Athlon 64 3800 (2Ghz)
Geforce 8400 gs
2GB PC2700 DDR
Windows XP 32bit (legal, registered)

I'm guessing the the #1 performance upgrade will be the video card. There is a birthday in Nov, I am thinking a video card upgrade for the birthday and maybe a CPU upgrade for X-mas.

So, what are the suggestions? I am asking because as years pass, I am falling further and further behind the times on system building.

It has a PCI Express x16 video slot and the current video card is weak. What is the best value card that will play recent games and won't have exploding capacitors? What is the best CPU this board will use? I assume it is an Athlon FX? I am not very familiar with this CPU.

Finally, the ram is 2GB of PC2700. Should I look at upgrading this to PC3200 and higher than 2GB? Budget is a definite issue this year, but I want them to be able to play modern games.

Thank you in advance.

[redrumloa]

What a nightmare this has become! I bought THIS gfx card for them for Christmas, installed it, and was stuck with 100% CPU load on one of the two cores. I checked bios, latest update. I used the latest Nvidia driver, no help. The card worked fine in my main PC for testing, so the MB must not like it right? I assumed it was failing to DMA to the card.

I returned that card and bought THIS one, hoping the issue would not be present with a Radeon. I have the same problem, actually worse as the system is unstable.

As stated before, this motherboard is a A8S-X which has a PCI Express x16 slot. It is not a 2.0 compliant slot, but both video cards say requirements are only a PCI Express x16 slot.

I really hate to return yet another video card. Please tell me there is something stupid I am missing:angry:

[redrumloa]

Decided to re-install XP AGAIN. During the install, everything was fine UNTIL I installed SP3. As soon as SP3 was installed, CPU load went to 50% on one of the cores. Since this appears to be specifically a SP3 issue, I may simply upgrade to Win7 on this system...

Anyone here experience this odd issue?

[redrumloa]

Process Explorer shows the problem to be Interrupts.. How to fix...

[redrumloa]

Hmm - PCIe 1.0 vs 2.0 usually is no problem, but my nForce570 based M2N-E didn't particularly like an HD5750 Radeon either...

Any shared interrupts with non-onboard HW? Any additional PCI/e cards?
Latest BIOS?
Tried MemTest86? Sometimes it's the obvious...
Have you tried deactivating SoundMax audio? I've had my share of fun with those...

Latest Bios, no additional PCI/e cards or other PCI cards. Built in sound disabled. Hardware a-ok. I'm going to start a new thread to give this one more shot...