Dell Dimension 4400 help me upgrade from outdate junk to gaming system

[mike12nite]

Hello, I want to make this computer capable of playing Crysis, Gears Of War, Call of Duty World At War, Far Cry or Fall Out on at least mid settings (or a little lower). The kid in this video plays Crysis on mid high settings with a Pentium 4 processor, a Radeon HD 3850 512Mb AGP video card and 1GB of ram(it says so in the information box on the right of the video).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1J4T4LbA2A&feature=related

He also plays Assasins creed on these specs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emlcpt3FpkQ&feature=channel_page


These are about the same specs my computer is possible of having. I'm just doing this for fun, I like tweaking old pc's to it's best possible performance to see if they can work with todays games (a weird hobby I know lol it's just something me and my friends do). The Pc has a socket 478 cpu with intel(R) Pentium (R) 4 CPU 1.60 GHz in there right now, 512mb ram (Max 1gb) and I want to throw in a Radeon HD 3850 512Mb AGP (people say this video card revives AGP motherboards so why not). What do you suggest I do to power this computer to it's most powerful performance. I dont want to buy a new motherboard since it ruins the fun. Is there any better Cpu's for this motherboard (maybe a dual core? Lol maybe..not) I just need any kind of advice on making this best thanks.

 

[itadakimasu]

if you have a 1.6ghz pentium 4.... 512 ram... AGP...

You're better off getting a completely new motherboard, cpu, and ram. DDR is roughly 2x's the price of DDR2 ram, and your board probably can't handle much of an upgrade on the CPU.

I priced out a budget build last week on newegg for around $350 w\ an amd x2 5000+, 4gb, 160gb hard drive, ATI HD 4670 (512mb, 320 stream processor, 128 bit )

Before you sink any money into upgrades on that dell, you should compare and see how much it would cost to just build a new system. if you don't want to build your own, dell has been doing some good deals w\ their Vostro systems. usually under small business section of their page for $300-400