Old card, is it worth upgrading?

My current computer is a refurb from two years ago. It has AGP graphics still. My card is a GeForce 6800GS 256MB. I'm running XP with 2.5GB of memory.

I've recently been running into problems in World of Warcraft, that lead me to believe I need to upgrade the graphics card I have or just buy a new machine. In general, I run WoW fine, but for 25 man raids I'm having problems if I have to have the graphics dialed up, which is necessary for certain endgame fights.

So, my questions:

Is there a better AGP card that would be worth getting that would give me a large boost in performance?

If not, I would probably buy a machine from a Dell or HP or some such. Would the cards they have available in their midrange machines be much of an upgrade graphically? For HP it looks like it would be: 512 MB GeForce 8600GT. For Dell: 256MB GeForce 8600 GTS or 256MB Radeon ATI HD 2600 XT.

Thanks for any help.

2.5 gig of memory? Are you running oddball sticks, so it's not running in dual channel mode? There are better AGP cards, but lets see the rest of your specs and see if indeed it will be worth spending the money for a newer card.

Actually it would be a big upgrade if he plays any of the recent games with shader heavy like COD4, Unreal 3, Crysis, etc.

To: OP

You should just upgrade your whole computer. Don't poor money into an old system.

Thanks for all the replies. I'm not sure what kind of power supply I have, but it is most likely as Loser777 guessed, something low wattage from Dell. The machine has two Pentium 4 2.8 GHz CPUs.

I've never built an entire system, but I'll consider it. The biggest advantage to me of building it at home would be that I could use XP instead of Vista. Most of the prebuilt places require you get Vista on new machines.

Are you sure it isn't a Pentium 4 using HT? Is it actually 2 Physical CPUs?

Its a single core, dell or anyother would never make a 2CPU P4.. unless u got a Pentium Dual Core which then would make sense

Thank you, that's exactly what I came here to find out.

I suppose now I'll look into whether it would be worth it to me to build one, or if I'll buy something from HP or Dell.

The sentence after the one you quoted in my original post answered this. To be more specific, my frames per second drops a lot when I dial Spell Detail to full, which is necessary for some fights (Vashj is the problem for me currently.)

Anything more than a Radeon x1950GT will be massively bottlenecked by your CPU

Plunky, you can build a pretty mean machine for WoW for $500.00. I was about to buy a base Dell XPS for $999 dollars but decided to build my own machine and I ended up saving a ton and having a system with better performance. I was having a smiliar problem to your own, bad fps in raids. Heres what I picked up (about 2 weeks ago)

Core 2 Duo E2200 - $90
Gigabyte P-35 Mobo - $90
Western Digital 160 gig - $49
Case - $50
PSU 500watt - $50
2 Gigs of DDR 800mhz RAM - $50
Optical Drive - $30
Video Card: GeForce 7900 GS 256meg - $79 off e-bay, fantastic card.

I can run WoW max everything 1680x1050 at constant 60 FPS. Just make sure you don't skim on the PSU. I had bought a case that came with a PSU but the SATA rails were bad so I had to chunk it.