3850 512mb AGP card

I forgot to add that i wont be playing at any resolutions higher then 720p

Depending on what you intend to play, that 3200+ is going to be your limit, period.

LOL my motherboard fried, and XFX is sending me a new one. In the mean time, I'm currently running an AMD 3500+ on an old motherboard just so I can get internet access. Granted I'm running Windows Vista 64bit with 1GB of RAM, but my system crawls like a newborn.

AMD 3200+ is cutting it pretty slim for modern games.

Well I can give you a little advice on this, since I upgraded a few months ago to an HD 3850 AGP too (it might be a 1GB model, can't remember).

It is certainly the best AGP card you can buy, not too expensive now either. Basically this card will not hit its full potential on the AGP bus with *any* CPU. The bus just isn't fast enough to keep this GPU busy.

You will certainly get the best graphics performance possible. For instance I run Flight Sim X at 1600x1200, w/bilinear filtering and AA enabled, getting around 20-25fps. I have 2 x Pentium 4 Xeon @ 2.8GHz. Actually I found increasing the resolution, enabling AA didn't hurt performance much. That is really just giving the GPU more work. The framerate in this game is mostly determined by the CPU speed and how fast it can load new textures (that pesky slow AGP bus). On the other hand, if I increase the detail settings (scenery/clouds etc.) that loads up the CPU, and the framerate really suffers.

Would you get exactly the same performance with a cheaper card (eg. the X1650XT or HD 2600XT recommended by frozenlead)? I can't say. My best guess is that your 3200+ will determine the max FPS to a great extent. However the faster GPU might allow you to reach some higher resolution/AA settings. So I would say it depends on your budget, how soon you plan to replace this system and how large a monitor you have...

You'll also want to read this article from Tom's:
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 011-5.html