Recommended upgrade thread

One of my friends thinks his comp is too slow practically the same exact setup as me, which i think its fine, but he recently went to a lanparty and his comp was choppy running BF2, i had a rough time playing with all those people on his comp but my comp was good enough (so i could play without disturbance)... He says when he plays BF2 at home on a 32 player server its fine but at lanparties (64 players) his comp has the above symptoms, everything else runs fine on his comp... He's recently been banned from the internet by his parental units and asked me to help him out... heres his setup:

ASUS A7N8X-X
512MB PC3200 DDR400 RAM Corsair value select
PNY Verto Geforce 5200 AGP 128MB
AMD Athlon XP 2600+ Barton core
ASUS CD-ROM with Quietrack technology
Sony floppy drive
Maxtor 40GB Harddrive
400 watt PSU thermaltake i think

 

"AMD Athlon XP 2600+ with L2 512MB cache"

Anywho, you didn't state a budget. But 512mb more and a new video card are a must for running BF2.

 

I called him and he says he is willing to spend any where from $0-250 area for either the video card alone or both ram and vid card (i told him to get ram from zipzoomfly for about $48 and free ship) but the video card im stuck between something like the 6600 since its inexspensive and good. And i think the 9800 XT is like $250? Which seems like a ripoff since nVIDIA is coming out with better cards for less... Pretty much just recommend some video cards and i'll tell him about them, and of course once he isn't banned from the internet im gonna recommend him to this site Like we need anymore people lol j/k