Thanks for the input. As long as I see some increase in performance, it was money well spent.
Hopefully I'll soon be employed full time and can start funneling away some income to finance a new rig. After 3 years of having the same configuration without updating any hardware, I'm pretty sure I'll see a big difference.
Also, another question. If I make a switch from a P4 1.8ghz (OCed to 2.34) to an Athlon 64 3500+ or a 3800+, what kind of processing performance increase will I see? I understand that 64bit processors don't make much of an impact unless you're running applications that support 64bit.