Graphics

I only have experience with the low end, but if the lowest price is your criteria then a good choice is the GeForce MX5500. With rebate it's running around $50. It supports DirectX 9.0C and runs the game fine, but if performance is a concern, I'm sure there are much higher performance cards available. Perhaps, someone else could make recommendations there.

Yeah, need to know your price range and what kind of graphics slot you've got (AGP or PCI-E) before making any real suggestions.

I got Pci slots and 1 agp I went with the pci because it is easier to work with. I got the geforce 4000mx with dual monitor support that works with my monitor so that is handy since this is an old 2002 xp home edition. I know alot of 256 mb cards are high the card i bought from tigerdirect has 64mb of memory and works ok but I want to see more of the graphics of the game.

I don't really know what you mean by pci being "easier to work with" than agp, you plug the card in, install the drivers, and go.

There are several differences between agp and pci. Agp is a 64bit bus, while pci is 32bit. Agp runs at 66mhz, pci at 33mhz. Agp bus rates can be multiplied by your motherbard, 2x will run at 533 MB/sec, 4x at 1066MB/sec. The biggest difference between the two (and the reason agp kicks the snot out of pci) is agp uses your system memory to help with drawing 3D textures....with pci you are stuck with whatever memory the video card has on it. Think of pci as a one lane road, agp as a 4 lane highway, and pci-express as a 12 lane superhighway.

Other things to consider are core-clock frequency, memory frequency, and pixel-shader capabilities. Also, just because one card may be 64 meg, and another 128, doesn't mean the 128 is automatically better. Case in point, the 64meg TI4200 is well known to perform better than the 128meg TI4200 at lower resolutions due to the 64meg version using DDR. The 2 important questions that need to be asked are, what is your budget, and what games do you primarily play or look to play in the near future? I recommend going to www.newegg.com and checking the cards in your price-range. Read the reviews written by people that have actually bought those particular models, you will get a good idea of what a certain card is capable of and how reliable it generally is. Since you have 2 cards already, do a side by side comparison of them by benchmarking them with 3dmark03 ( www.futuremark.com )

I am sorry to tell ya that the 4000mx probably won't run new release games very well, if at all. Even though it was packaged as a Geforce4, the mx series are actually Geforce2 chipsets...I know because I made the mistake of buying a 440mx back in like 2001. I traded it off and got an "older" TI4200 that kicked the crap out of it. As a matter of fact, I just checked the min. requirements for F.E.A.R and the TI4200 is supported, amazing, lol. Now I roll with a 7800gtx512, but not everyone is as picky about graphix as I am   

Well, PCI-E is different than PCI, so from what you've told us, AGP is your only option. That said, your options are a bit limited since companies aren't making many AGP video cards anymore. I think, but am not positive, that ATI's new Radeon X1950 video card comes in AGP. That would be the fastest card you could buy. What I would do is save the money towards an upgrade and move to a motherboard that supports PCI-E. That will give you more options.