how to turn a cheap computer into a gaming machine?

how can i turn my 400$ PC into a gameing machine? whats the best graphics card? i have a:
emachines T5234
windows vista home premium
AMD athlon x2 64
recently bought 2 1G ram sticks
Nvidia geforce 6150SE
320GB hardrive

how can i change this into being able to play games like crysis with no lag?
i even lag playing left 4 dead -_- (even with the lowest settings)
around $300 budget...(maybe more) HELP?

 

more RAM and better cooling system to help the motherboard cool down better. try to get more memory also

 

i just bought more ram
-_-
and what is a cooling system going to do lol...

 

What do you think a cooling system will do?

 

Cooling system will lessen the heat that puts more more pressure to your hardwares. Which makes it hard to for them like in example, video card, it puts more pressure to your video card, because of the heat, harder for them to render and for them to operate, which sometimes will lead to burning (literally without flames). That is called overheat. So cooling system will add more power to your computer which lessens the lag.

 

It would help if you provided a lot more information about your current hardware.

For example, what is the potential difference (wattage, in common terms >_>) of your Power Supply Unit (PSU)? I have a 430w PSU, but I intend to upgrade to at least 1000w, because new hardware demands more power.

Also, what is the model of your motherboard? What is the processing speed of your CPU? What is the clock speed of your RAM and GPU, and so on. I recommend you show me some diagnostics from programs such as CPU-Z and GPU-Z so I can tell you what to upgrade.

For the moment, it is probably worth upgrading your graphics card if you play any 3D games, but other than that I can't give you an informed opinion because I don't know what you use your computer for.

 

If you got the following video card your computer should be able to play Left 4 Dead fine and maybe even Chrysis with decent performance on low settings.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130373

 

definitely plays those games fine...make sure you make measurements though, that card is huge i had to send it back to newegg because it didn't fit my case, but than i bought an antec 900 and bought the card again haha

 

Haha, nice.

 

I have a 512 8800 gtx, it runs every single game out their on max graphics perfectly. So if you want a good investment, I recommend that.

 

If your looking to change it into a really good machine, you might find it better starting fresh as the system you have now, you would have to change almost everything (probably even the PSU)

Edit: Damn, that's a sweet deal for a GTX 260 posted above. If you can afford it that is

 

Yeah, the 8800 chipset is one of the rare cases that's managed to be very competitive with models that have come out after it.

Still... the rest of your PC must be top of the line to make your 8800 able to do max graphics on every game. You're running a high clock quad core and fast RAM?

 

You're going to be pretty fucked

The power supply in that PC is not capable of running a high-end graphics card

 

whats the cheapest PC, that would run most games perfectly?