I need pro help

I have been try to install better games on my computer and it say that i need a shader model of 3.0 or better and the card the i have only runs 2.0 shader model.. my old card is a Hightech Excalibur Radeon 9550se .. I am looking into buying a new card with 512mb of ram ,so i can run my new games.. Please help and let me know what card would be the best to use
and my spec will be post below...

Games running or trying to use :
Enemy Territory - QUAKE Wars
Bully
Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory
Oblivion
Mercenaries 2 World in Flames
Fear



SPEC-
Motherboard-msi ms-6577
cpu-intel p4 3.06 ghz w/ht
agp4x or lower
1gb of pc2100 ram
19"monitor
200gb hardrive
DVD drive
CD burner drive
80gb external hard drive
480 watts power supply


Thanks again for help
TorqueRanger

Oh whats your thoughts on this card??
VISIONTEK ATI RADEON 512MB X1650 PRO AGP VIDEO CARD

It's a major improvement over what you have.
It's not especially fast compared to modern mid range cards, but it should function well enough, and AGP really limits things, as does the P4 CPU.

If you can get it for $30 or less go for it, if it's more then that then IMO you're better off saving up and building yourself a new computer. Using your old optical drives and hard drive and monitor you can generally put something pretty good together for $300-400.

TorqueRanger said:

Oh whats your thoughts on this card??
VISIONTEK ATI RADEON 512MB X1650 PRO AGP VIDEO CARD

Click to expand...

Like he said, much faster than what you currently have, but to reiterate its simply not worth the upgrade unless you can find it at a very very low price. Because even if you could install a theoretical GTX 480 AGP model into your computer, you'd still soon be running into more problems, as virtually every game released now adays is designed for multicore processors.

Unless you can find one for very cheap, your probably better off buying a cheap mATX AM3 mobo, chucking a dual or triple core into the socket, 4 Gigs of DDR3, and something like a 4870 or 5770. Easily can be done for under $400 and would allow you to play the games you want no problem.