Help upgrade my PC

[finnerandr]

I have a bone stock PC I bought from Best Buy a few years back before I knew any better. About the only thing I know about computers is how to turn em on and run my games. I was hoping I would list out the specs as they are now and someone could chime in and make suggestions as to what I could do to make FS2004 run better. I am pulling anywhere from 5-20FPS right now, and the graphics are crappy on a good day. I am willing to purchase new cards, memory, whatever would help, and find someone to help me install everything. The only thing is I would like to keep it under $500 if possible(I am a full time student now, not a lot of cash).
Anyways, here are the system specs as best I can figure out:
VPR Matrix Intel Pentium4 2.26Ghz
512MB RAM
GeForce2 MX200
ACPI Uniprocessor
Intel 82801DB ULTRA ATA Controller
WINXP Promise Fasttrak 100(tm) Controller
Like I said, I dont know what most of that is, but I do know GeForce2 MX200 is bad!!! Anyone care to chime in and let me know what they would do if they had $500 and this crappy system to work with? I would greatly appreciate your insight!!!

[RyanbATC]

Open up your case and look on the motherboard (the large card with lots of little capacitors and stuff...look for a brown AGP port...it is a skinny and long (about 3 inches maybe) port where you could put a new AGP graphics card.

[finnerandr]

I was searching through some other posts on here and found what I think would be a good setup. Although it goes over my $500 budget by almost $150. It would be as follows:
AMD Athalon 64 socket 754 3400+ Processor
ASUS K8N-E Deluxe MOBO
1Gig(2x512mb)DDR 400 PC3200 RAM
420 Watt Power Supply
6600GT Video Card
Can anyone tell me if this would be worth it to go over budget with? Or can anyone chime in and tell me where I can trim some fat a little and still get decent performance? Thanks for looking everyone, I appreciate all input because I am just learning about these things.

[loki]

With the socket 754 Athlon processors, 1 stick of RAM will work as well as two and is usually a little cheaper. You could also look at the MSI K8N Neo Platinum motherboard. I'm not sure if it's cheaper or not, but it's worth a look.

Otherwise, that would be worth the extra money.

loki

[aigean]

>I was searching through some other posts on here and found
>what I think would be a good setup. Although it goes over my
>$500 budget by almost $150. It would be as follows:
>AMD Athalon 64 socket 754 3400+ Processor
>ASUS K8N-E Deluxe MOBO
>1Gig(2x512mb)DDR 400 PC3200 RAM
>420 Watt Power Supply
>6600GT Video Card
>Can anyone tell me if this would be worth it to go over budget
>with? Or can anyone chime in and tell me where I can trim
>some fat a little and still get decent performance? Thanks
>for looking everyone, I appreciate all input because I am just
>learning about these things.

yeah, i think a graphics card/CPU upgrade in your case as you have described above would be much better than blowing $400 on one or the other. looking at your specs, and remembering my upgrade experience, you should see a huge improvement over what you have. IMO, the athlon 3400+ and 6600gt combo is a sweet spot for performance/cost ratio on a limited budget.