Time to upgrade again?

[Japhez]

Hey there, thanks in advance for helping me out.

The situation is that modern games are once again poking me to upgrade, and I'm wondering what would be most performance enhancing area to upgrade. I recently bought Bad Company 2 to play with my clanmates, and lo and behold, my mid-high PC is no longer mid-high. I find myself running at native resolution (1280x1024) in DX9 mode with all the graphical settings on low to stay above 30 FPS. The game is playable like this, but not as purdy as it could be.

My current system:
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-MA790X-UD4P

CPU(s): AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Windsor 3.0GHz

RAM: OCZ Reaper HPC Edition 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800

GPU: EVGA 8800GT 512MB


What I've considered thus far:
Buying an AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition dual core, and attempting to unlock the two other cores. I know this isn't a sure-success, but from what I've seen my mobo has been pretty good with it.
Buying 2x 2GB of 1066 ram. This would run me about $100 I think. My ram might be bottlenecking my computer at the moment, I'm not sure.
Buying a new graphics card. I really haven't kept up on the budget market, so I'm not sure what the best choice would be here.

What part could I replace for under $200 to get the best performance upgrade?

 

[captaincharisma]

under $200? buy a 4GB ram kit

 

[jack_attack]

I personally wouldn't buy a ram kit, I'd look more toward CPU at that resolution. I actually just got done playing some BFBC2, at 1680x1050, everything on high, I averaged 48fps.

Q6600@3.42, 8800GTX, 2x1 Corsair PC26400 - 4-4-4-12.

Might be an idea to look at, as that game does recommend a quad, and at that low of a resolution, your 8800GT should be able to handle it.

EDIT: Nevermind. Drop a 955 in there and be done with it. It will transfer over to a DDR3 build, and is one of the best AMD's got right now.

 

[Japhez]

Best answer selected by Japhez.