So I got a e2180 at 3.0ghz stable. I was thinking of getting a e5200 and let that sit at 3.8ghz. Should I do that, or upgrade my gpu from a 8800gs to 4870?
It will not be overly bottlenecked. A pentium dual core CPU at 3.0GHz will not see much bottlenecking on that GPU. Most games are more GPU/RAM dependent than CPU.
So I got a e2180 at 3.0ghz stable. I was thinking of getting a e5200 and let that sit at 3.8ghz. Should I do that, or upgrade my gpu from a 8800gs to 4870?
^^ +1 to that. No point in grabbing another dual core series, move up to C2D. It would be worth the money. We have someone here on the forums who hit 5ghz on an E8400.
But upgrade the video card first if you really want to game.
I would wait to upgrade anything until the HD 4890 is released on the 2nd. So far it looks very promising and even if it is out of your budget it might cause price drops on other cards.