can my current cpu run a radeon 4850

I'm new here and I'm currently upgrading my Dell xps 600 and I wanted to know if my current cpu could run a visiontek radeon 4850 512MB.

My current cpu is a Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz(I new it's weak)
2 GB ram
and current card is a nvidia 8600 gt 512mb ( don't no if that mattered).

it has a 650 watt supply and if i were to change my cpu what would i go with.

is your chip socket 775 or 478

You might not have a lot of options on a chip. If it is 775, then you should be able to go to Pentium D of some flavor. (I have a 3.4 D running on an ABit aw8d. I am running an 8800gt on it and it runs any game well except crysis with settings high).

If it's PCI-e, then your motherboard should be LGA775, not Socket 478.

As far as running the card... Of course it will be able to. Of course, where the bottleneck will lie will depend upon the game you select and the settings you use; you obviously, like most gamers, never use specifically what was used for generic benchmarks; you'd want to adjust your settings to try to balance the load as best as possible.

In your case, though, the "balance" would wind up being pretty absurd; with a 4850 on a 3.0GHz P4, you'd wind up getting a low framerate in a lot of games, though you'd wind up being able to crank the graphics and resolution rather high, without any noticable decrease from your already low framerate. Which, of course, may not be ideal.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ 3.0GHz Socket AM2 125W Dual-Core Processor good or should i get something better if any ideas please tell.