This is good advice if you have a decent size hard drive and a decent case.  If you don't have a DVD burner, you might as well spend 30 bucks and get one.  You can even reuse your power supply IF it has all the proper connectors and is beefy enough, but don't try this if your current unit is out of an HP or Dell or something -- they always provide the bare minimum. 

Ya it is true about 8x throttling back to 4x, so the concern might lie more with power supply constraints.

investing in AGP is a waste of money right now, heavens forbid your Motherboard dies out, you are stuck with an AGP card. Upgrade your computer and the AGP card does not fit into the scheme, all new mobos come with PCI-Express.

@Gameboy and Fazz

Those suggestions are great and I'll keep my hard drive and DVD-drive but I had a few questions regarding AMD/ATI and NVIDIA/Intel. From what I hear NVIDIA and Intel is the way to go but I don't know if its true or not.

Also with the upgrades could I play COD4 and CRYSIS, lol.

I recently picked up a radeon x1650 pro and it runs CoD4 fine on average settings. Crysis also ran alright, though there were a couple points(at least during the demo) of slowdown.

I'm not sure what the rest of your system specs are, but in addition to the card, I'm running a p4 3ghz with 2 gigs of ddr333, so I would imagine any comparable system would be able to run those games.

well, 250$, u can buy a NEW pciX mobo and a decent 8600 for taht mcuh.

but, otherwise id recomend a HIS x1900 series, or even a 1950, they are pretty fast for old technology.

but if u want PCIX then get an ASUS mobo (micro atx) if u have an AMD AM2 cpu, and it has HD outputs on the mobo, and get a 8600 series card from Nvidia, or ill build u a new computer that will kick ass for years.

for a price (over 600) 

 idea for cheapish cpu.

$50case (any will do, with at least a 500 watt PSU)

$100-150 get a decent sli mobo, about 100-150

$220 (110 a piece) dual 8600 GPUs

$<200intel core2dual, prolly about a 2.66 GHZ core for this much

$160 19" DVI moniter

<$50 7.1 sound card 

$<100 7.1 audio speaker set

$<70 aroun 800 MHZ ram, 2gb

$<100 a fricken huge HD

$30 a DVD RW

and you have a kick ass computer, everything here is available from www.newegg.com or www.tigerdirect.com, and if u need any tips send me an email or wall post, im a computer technician. 

Yea I got a new computer a while back. Sorry for the late reply and thanks for all the help.

Here are the specs if your intrested.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Brisbane Black Edition

SAPPHIRE 100225L Radeon HD 3870 512MB

GIGABYTE GA-MA69VM-S2 AM2 AMD 690V Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

Thermaltake TR2 W0070RUC ATX 430W Power Supply

G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM

 Wow nice, how much was it?

It was pretty cheap since I ordered most of the stuff off of newegg so around 600 bucks if you include the import fee. I had to get a guy from buffalo to receive the stuff then I had him send it to me, so it was a bit of a hassle.