I don't see that you are going to get much of a preformance jump just for upgrading your 2400 proc to a 3000. It being a 64 bit proc isn't going to give you much of a gain since there isn't much support for it (trust me, I'm running a AMD64 3200+ at home). Windows x64 is going to hit the shelves here soon but it will be awhile unitill all your 3rd party apps are compiled in 64bit.
As for your RAM, it would be wise (especially since you like games) to go with at least a Gig of RAM. Some games that are comming out now (like Doom 3) can use up to 500 megs of texture memory alone. Also please do NOT get generic RAM... the AMD 64s have been notoroius for how finicky they are. You will want your ram to have a CAS Latency of 2.5 or better (the lower the number, the faster the timing).
As for video cards... I have an ATI Radeon 9800XT and am pretty happy with it. My only gripe with ATI is their lack of support for Linux. Nvidia is pretty good with driver releases for Linux. PCI Express is only a novelty at this point as well. Since the AGP 8X bus still doesn't get completely saturated using today's games.
Well, hope some of this helped.
Later
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