Upgrade choices

[Jheusse]

Continuing with my research and planning.

My current system (the big pieces):
ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe Motherboard
XFX GeForce 8600GT XXX 256MB Card
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ Windsor 2.8GHz S Dual-Core Processor
OCZ Platinum 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel
XP Pro

I'm guessing memory is the current bottleneck, am I right?

I'm guessing I can easily run 2-3 accounts as is with lowered settings. True?

Is this the right upgrade priority if my goal is a main and 4 slaves (likely pally and 4 shammies, I have a 60 pally on main acct) for PvE?

Double my memory to 4GB. Mobo has 4 slots, can go to 4x1Gb for 45 bucks. Don't think it's worthwhile to spend the money to go 2 x 2GB since I think my mobo is limited to 800 MHz memory.

Upgrade graphics card max of about $125-150.

Upgrade processor to a quad core phenom, which will take a BIOS update and careful choosing of processor, $150-200 bucks, and at that point we're on the brink of new mobo/cpu/memory and I just did that 6 months ago.

For pure PvE how am I looking for going 3-5 accounts as is and with the memory upgrade? The other upgrades are big wife aggro magnets.

[Hachoo]

If you upgrade the memory to 3GB you can easily run 5 accounts at low settings.

I have the same video card, a slower processor (x2 but only 2.2GHz), and 3GB of memory, and I 5 box just fine using 5 separate wow folders, and the lowest res/settings on the 4 clones. The primary I up the res to 1024x768 and leave sound on and its fine.

Another bottleneck when you run 5 wow accounts is the hard drive = having a second hard drive is very good, put 3 on one and 2 on the other and theres a huge lag decrease.

[Jheusse]

Cool. I have 2 hard drives in the current box as it is, eking out the end of the IDE standard. Will probably get the 2 sticks, even though XP won't handle all of it, the dual kit is more re-usable in secondary boxes. And 45 bucks (25 if I do rebate) is pretty easy.