Currently my system comprises of 8Gb of DDR2 1066 MHz, a Phenom ii 965 and an XFX 9650 DD and 1 x 64Gb Crucial SSD and 1Tb Samsung spinpoint drive..

Is there anything to be gained for me to upgrade the motherboard and ram for DDR3 ? or do I just stick with whats there at the moment ?
I may look at getting a better heatsink and O/C the 965 slightly, as its on 3.5Ghz at the mo up from stock

If it is worth it, any suggestions on boards that wont break the bank ?

You would not gain any thing. Does your board support DDR2 and DDR3? I see the CPU does but does your board? Your money would be better spent on a newer setup.

Upgrading that 9650 would be the best money spent.

Board is DDR2 only, the CPU is the 965 Black Edition, not the 9650... though I have one of those sitting on my desk at the moment!

The mobo is a Gigabite GA-MA770-UD3 rev 1, bought it along with previous 9650 chip 2 years or so ago...

Cheers

I think he was referring to you GPU; which should be 6950
As for DDR3, you won't see any significant difference (except maybe higher prices lol) than DDR2. Maybe look for an SSD or some decent cooling to OC that CPU.

DDR3 has a higher bandwidth, but typically higher latencies too. Just not worth the price vs. performance IMO

There's several articles benchmarking DDR2 vs. 3 on the www, here's one for example: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1782/amd_phenom_ii_ddr2_vs_ddr3_performance/index1.html

As you can see there's even very little measurable difference between the two

Ooops.. typo by me, yep should have been a 6950 DD for GPU.... So keep the board and RAM as is, and get another SSD to stick my other games on it is then... only have Windows and DCS A-10 on the current one, and that takes up a large chunk of it!

Will look into a new heatsink, would like one that ramps up and down with temperature as per stock CPU cooler if possible, but that means it plugging into the board itself other than being seperatly fed ?

Cheers

Right, bought a new heatsink on the way home that supports PWM, so its variable depending on temperature etc...
stuck it on (just about fits in with case shut, and I mean just!), setup the catalyst overclocking stuff, and it crashed once it got to 4 GHz, temperature at that point was approx 50 Celcius, so once PC rebooted itself, selected 3.8 GHz on the slider scale, and its been rock solid so far.... runs very very cool... idles at about 23 to 24 celcius, and Cliffs of dover after an hour had it up to 42 celcius... not too bothered about getting it up to 4 GHz, as 3.9 should still be available if its needed... so for the grand total of 25 quid I have got my PC to run faster

As a comparisson, with stock heatsink, I got it clocked up to 3.6GHz but that got fast approaching 60 Celcius under overclocking, so that shows how much better this heatsink is!

This is what I got:
http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/cooling/cpucoolers/8-7276700379-8.html

bit of a PITA to fit onto this motherboard, as it doesnt have the 3 lugs per side of the processor to clamp onto, only the 1.. so was very carefull in tightening up the screws!

Cheers