I got anxious and bought a replacement Gigabyte Motherboard rather than wait on the defunct Asus RMA.
Everythings up and running...
Hopefully some future readers will find this comparison info helpful.
OLD system (Intel Celeron 3.2g, BioStar MoBo, ATI Radeon X1300 (AGP, 256mb), 1GB DDR
I can only monitor cpu temp.
Idle Temp: Cpu 41C
Max Temp: Cpu 56C (During benchmark tests)
PcMark05: 2126
3dMark06: 676
On my old system, I would get about 45 fps max on LFS, but would drop down to around 15 fps at the start or in real heavy traffic. Avrage fps with a few cars around would be somewheres around 25-30 fps.
Microsoft flight simulator was unbearable.
NEW System: AMD5200+, Gigabyte MoBo, EVGA 8800GTX (PCI-E, 768mb), 4gb DDR2
I can monitor cpu cores and grafix card temps;
Idle Temps: Core1: 36C, Core2: 34C, GrafX: 64C
Max Temps: Core1: 46C, Core2: 43C, GrafX: 77C (During benchmark tests)
PCMark05: 6316
3DMark06: 9492
I realized during my first benchmark, that my brand new SATA harddrives were horrible in speed. I had to re-install XP, this time installing the RAID drivers during the install (I didnt realize this was necessary even though i wasn't using RAID), and then everything was up to spec. I probably should've gone for the Athlon 6000+, but oh well...
The difference, is amazing. LFS with everything turned on (Inlucding all the bells and whistles in the nvidia software), and full resolution gets me around 65-70fps average (100fps if traffic is light, down to around 50 on the start). The details blow me away, as I never realized there were little things like the patterns in the taillights of the cars before! Temperature on the card & cpu doesnt raise hardly at all compared to the benchmark test temps.
Flight simulator runs smooth with all the features turned to super high quality.
overall, well worth the investment. I know it wont make me faster, but it's alot more pleasant to drive and experience the details in this game. This system should last my gaming lifestyle for a while.