Graphics Geforce 5500

PCI is sloooooow. AGO v.s. PCI-x you wont notice a difference with the same card but there are more options and cheaper choices with pic-x. Plus it'll be around for a few more years as agp gets phased out. Now I know someone will flame me and say agp vs pci-x is not the same but I've tested two 6800gt's on 939 3200 winchester systems both with a gig of ram and an sata hd yeilding the same results. Yes the pci benched a lil higher but realworld performance is the same. That being said I'm running a 7800gt in my pc-x machine and I couldnt be happier.

 

PCI-E != PCI-X.

Anyway... I'm just reiterating what's already been said, but good luck even trying to play Battlefield 2 on anything below a 6600 and have it look good and run smoothly. PCI is a complete and utter dead end when it comes to graphics cards... I would seriously recommend replacing your motherboard with one that has an AGP slot (preferably PCI-E, but that means upgrading everything).

On high settings @ 1280x1024, I've seen BF2 consume a gig of RAM just to itself! 640MB is nowhere near enough, and you're looking at 1GB at least to run it nicely - 2GB if you want to get the most out of it.

 

Lol i dont understand what you guys consider good quality graphics? If i can play with the graphics being fairly decent and not skip around everywhere then i consider that fine. I dont know about you guys, I dont need 2gb or ram to play BF2 i used to play it on 512 with no problems. And that computer had a fx5200 in it also, I guess you guys have higher graphics standards then me