i have the dimension e521 and i'm looking to upgrade the cpu and possibly the graphics card. Currently i'm running on the athlon 64 x2 3600+ (AM2 940) and am curious what the best cpu to upgrade with would be? the newest flight simulator game FSX doesn't run the greatest on my system and am open to suggestions to upgrade my current desktop without purchasing a new one.

well since you have the am2 socket that makes it a tad bit harder. I haven't found any website still selling am2 processors and they are all selling the am2+. It also depends on how much you are willing to pay because you can get a quad core am2+ processor and motherboard for less than $200. I don't know what kind of ram you have so if it is ddr instead of ddr2 you have to buy some ddr2 with a new motherboard. As for the graphics card a Radeon HD 4670 1G card would be a decent graphics card and the lowest I have found was $55 after Mail In Rebate. I hope this helped.

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Motherboard: ASUS M4A79 Deluxe
CPU: AMD Phenom II 940
Ram: 6 GB ddr2 pc 6400 800mhz
GPU: 2 ATI Radeon 4890
1.2 GB HD space RAID 0
Rosewill Xtreme Series RX850-S-B 850W
Cooler Master Hyper 212+ cpu cooler
Cooler Master HAF 932 AMD edition
Windows 7 64-bit