I've recently got accepted into a college and I am just gandering around for some PC parts to get an idea of what I want for college come July. I am getting into gaming and I know you need a real nice setup to run them, but I also need a nice application pc to run design programs like dreamweaver and photoshop etc all at the same time.

Can anyone help me build one that will be upgradeable for the future and last quite a few years down the road? Will PCI-Express take over quickly? What about 64 bit?

I currently have an ASUS A7n8x-x motherboard with a radeon 9600SE agp 8x video card. Basic onboard nforce sound with 1 512 pc 3200 RAM and 2 40 gig hd's. No floppy and just a cd rom.

It's real basic. But I want to know, what I can look to save up for for when I go to college. I'll answer any questions that will help me build a ECONOMICAL computer

If i were you go with something mid range that you can easily expand upon.

Personaly i would hold off for the release of the new nForce 4 chipsets that are on there way out, and purchase a GForce 6800GT which has SLI capabilitys. This will give you some head room in the future, a nice mid range GFX card to start with, then say a year down the line when you want a bit of a boost you can buy a second 6800GT and pop that in with your current 6800GT and run them in together bumping your performance up a bit.

CPU wise the 64-bit CPU's are looking rather tasty these days, it's just the 64-bit support in windows that is the question, i dont have any experiance with 64-bit under windows.

What i will say though is if your thinking of doing a fair amount of GFX work, get a nice monitor as this will last you through a few evoloutions of your PC.