hello, I am somewhat of a newbie hopefully not a noob,
 
I need to buy a new graphics card as the one i have is well to say the least crap geforce fx 5200, i need some ram as well.
I am looking to spend about £150. I am looking to play more games on my pc, hopefully some of the more recent ones as well.  
 
Can anyone advise on what would be a good setup and what would be the best graphics card and amount of ram to buy?
 
my setup is as follows; windows xp, pentium 4 cpu 2.93ghz and 512 ram
 
hope someone can give me some good advice,
 
regards beezley

I'm guessing it's an AGP FX5200 you have now?  You should have loads of options that are a huge upgrade from that card.  And even more options if it's pci-e instead of AGP.  
 
You should make sure you know if you need PCI-e or AGP and then look over this article: http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/0 [...] uary_2008/
 
It will help you get a start deciding what to look for.   Then find some cards in your budget and we can help you grab the best one for your needs.  
 
One thing, you will want more RAM if you spend money on a new gaming card.  512MB is too little for most modern games.  In Win XP, think of 1GB as a minimum for gaming now and 2GB better yet.  
 
I should add, You will need to determine if you have any DDR Dimm slots available on your motherboard, and if you are running dual channel on two sticks of 256MB.  And think about adding 512MB minimum or 1GB better yet as 1.5GB would do quite well.  

 
I agree. 512mb of system RAM will slow you down in the majority of today's games. Get at least another 512.  
 
As for upgrading your card, you could get the AGP versions of the X1650 or HD2600 and not bottleneck your system too badly and still see significant performance gains over the FX5200. If you have a PCI-E slot, you have many more options.

Tell us what type of motherboard and power supply you have.  
 
If your motherboard has PCI-E x16 and your PSU is powerful enough you could get an HD 3850 with that budget.
 
Edit: but first add RAM, absolutely...