Worth an Upgrade?

[Hamusta]

Hey guys, I am looking into an upgrade of my old desktop computer - mainly to be able to play games such as Half Life 2 - Orange Box and Guild Wars to the best of my little computer's ability.

However, with it being an older computer - I don't want to waste the money to not get much of a performance upgrade due to the other pieces of my computer. The computer is about 3-4 years old.

I have an

AMD Athlon 2600+ ~2.1GHZ
Nvidia GeForce 5200
512 RAM *I plan on making 1Gig

Would I be gaining any performance by switching to a GeForce 7 Series card? Upgrading my RAM?

I do admit that just purchasing a new computer would be the best idea, however, with my recent purchase of a nice HDTV... money to blow on computer parts may not come for some time, and I really do want to utilize this Orange Box... I do enjoy it!

(But at the same time, I don't want to throw away money)

Thanks for any advice! I really appreciate it!

EDIT: I nearly forgot, yes, this is an AGP computer... No PCI-e slot... **cry** But they do still sell video cards for my little dinosaur

 

[superman22x]

Well, what I would really recomend would be to build a new computer. But, that is proly too much. How much do you want to spend? Upgradding RAM would be good, and the graphics also, but agp is old, and there arent many great cards for it, maybe a 7 series, or high 6 series would be good.

 

[MikeReiner]

Get this graphics card.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150210

Upgrade your ram to 1 gig.

Thats all you really need to do in order to play Half-Life 2 and Guild Wars.