Here's what you need to get BF2 to run well..

I ended up getting another gig of ram, so now i have 2 gb of OCZ PC4000 running at PC4000. Cpu is a 3200 sckt 939 winchester oced to 2.5ghz, ran for 19 hours on prime 95 without any problems, then i just shut it off cause i figured 19 hours straight was enough.

Anyhow, i've discovered two things that impact BF2 performance the most, Memory and PCI latency. You need at least 1 gig for running on medium and 1.5gig for high at high resolutions. Also use PCI latency tool on guru3d and try setting your AGP latency from 246 down to 64 or 128, it really helps. BF2 still has occasionally pausing, especially in very intense action despite my 2 gigs of ram, and my FPS were at least 60+ the entire time as i didn't notice any framerate decrease at all. So i did a little research and found that many of the new card hog all the PCI bandwidth and PCI priority, thus other important periferals such as HD and Sound card must wait. I set mine to 64 and now it doesn't get any pausing and runs absolutely perfectly, and i was in a decent sized server(32 players).

Asus A8V Deluxe(rev. 2.00) / A64 3200 (winchester) / 1024mb OCZ DDR500 (2.5-3-3-8) / BFG 6800GT@stock / Baracuda 120GB / Lian-Li PC-65 / Syncmaster 700NF / OCZ Power Stream 520