I agree "...upgrade in huge leaps..." My current system Asus Crosshair motherboard, AMD Athlon 64 x2 5600+, 8 GB Corsair RAM, Geforce 8600 GTS, Originally with Vista 64 but I upgraded to Debian. Built this system 10 years ago, and it is still running strong. After building many systems for others I've finally decided to build myself something a little less archaic and turn this system into a NAS.
Only real reason for a new build is I can not dvr my tv shows on this system it doesn't have enough balls! Oh and I can't stand waiting 2 seconds for OpenOffice or Firefox to load!