A few upgrade questions for better SL performance.

Having a 32bit system (AMD +2500 Barton, 1gig memory, Gforce 6800 GT OC AGP), the obvious things to upgrade to would be a dual core CPU and at least 1gig of ram.
Would it be a mistake to get a mother board that supports both AGP and PCI express, (example: ASRoock mother board), so I can use my existing video card? Also since SL does use a cache file, would there be any noticeable performance gain by using a 10,0000 rpm raptor drive, which has seek times half that of standard SATA 7200 drives? Or would it be worth the expense of getting two Raptors and use RAID 0 or 5 so they will work in tandem? (BTW I also do photo editing and some video capture/editing so the later drive configuration may be beneficial for those applications as well.)

After all this is done I still may not get much SL performance improvement because I’m on the east coast and the servers are on the west resulting in a ping time of around 160 average. I’m on cable modem with good bandwidth characteristics. Example: the SL updates, (now about 20meg), are downloaded in about 30 seconds and I can upload via FTP at a rate of 53k bytes/sec.

With no limit on draw distance, local lighting off, low tree detail and everything else about middle setting I get 10fps in a sim like Furnation during primetime hours, 6fps in a well settled sim with 25 agents. I get 18fps at home sim, which usually has 2-4 agents present on average. I would like to get 20fps in a typical sim after I do the upgrade.

With what you got now you should be seeing more FPS then that with those settings. Matter of fact you should be seeing 20 FPS normally. I got a 32 AMD chip (2600+ Barton), 1 gig of ram, and an eVGA GeForceFX 5500 256MB AGP (I overclocked from 270mhz GPU/400mhz VRAM to 315mhz GPU/483mhz VRAM) with all my drivers up to date and I'm using the latest NGO Optimized nVidia drivers. I'm getting 14 - 18 FPS normally and in highly populated areas like a club I get between 5 - 10 FPS (depending on the amount of people in my view).

My recomendations is to make sure you have the latest motherboard drivers and videocard drivers (preferably the NGO drivers as from my experience they're far better then the OEM dirvers). Also make sure you clean out ALL your old video card drivers using Driver Cleaner Pro before installing your videocard drivers.

As for the upgrade situation I feel for ya, but I'd stay away from AGP/PCI-e hybrid motherboards as you will suffer in performance for the sake of convienance. Having a raptor or raid config you will gain some speed with load times. Personally I find I can get the same effect with a RAM disk without the overly exspensive hardware.

As for connection tuning, goto DSLreports.com and do a bandwith test. There might be some tweaks you can do to lower that ping time a bit. I've found setting up a local DNS server shaves off a few ms time for me and for DSL its been pretty fast (I use a program called TreeWalk).

recommendations?

64bit 3ghz+ cpu/dual core
1-2gig ram , highly recommend min 1gig
agp / pcie vid card dont really do that much diffrence in speed for SL use (cpu bound)

Broadband over 2mbit dont do much for SL , unless youre watching ingame video ,then you want as much as you can get :>

I have a 10.000 raptor drive, it does works faster then a 7200, but again for SL not much point youll spend most of the time waiting for SL to do something before rezzing, its nice for booting up tho, and defragging : p

I have nearly 2 identical pc's except agp/pcie, diffrence in SL fps?, 1-2 at most.

For video capture/editing , get raid 7200rpm drives, alot cheaper and big sizes for alot cheaper, raid just flies :>

Im in norway ping varies according to time (duh) early hours 120-180, late nighters 200-300, only time i have issues with building cause of my ping is usually due to the damn sim hiccups :>