As my old P4 hobbles on its last legs, I once again am faced with the purchase of a new computer.......you beauty!!!!

Now that I've got the means (employments a bitch but it means money), I can spend a bit of dosh on a new machine. In this department, I have two goals:

1) To catch up on the last 3 years worth of games, and then be battle-worthy against at least the next 3 years of increasingly ridiculous system requirements.

2) Have a system that will smoothly run large scale engagements in Warlords at wonderfully high resolutions (might be pipe dream ).

I've got about 5000 or so (australian) bucks to spend so it'll be a reasonably silly (good) system.

Now, here's the question - What would you get? The more feedback, the better the beast.

In the DirectX 9 line, the best value seems to be the Nvidia 7600 GT. That is around $200 now, but it maybe lower if you can get it on-sale. Medium car, can play everything with decent settings.
The lower end is the 7600 GS, which will go around $120 or less now.

Remember to watch what video port it uses. A 3 year old machine may not have PCI express (which is not PCI), it would have AGP.
There are AGP versions of both.

The comparable ATI card is the X1600.. or the X1650 now. It generally specs lower than the Nvidia for the same price.

Higher end, get the 7900 or the X1900 models. It really depends on how much you want to spent, and how high the graphical features you want

---------

But now is coming out the DirectX 10 cards. If you are going for a new computer, you'll want something that can meet Vista's specs. That means a DirectX 10 card. Right now, that's the Nvidia 8800 - but that is still quite costly. Wait until ATI launches its own competition and we'll see the prices go down.

At 3 years, you'll want to get a computer in this generation. Currently the best performance for price is the Intel Core 2 Duo. You'll need a compatible motherboard and such. But wait til Vista is out in Januaray. And see what the comparable AMD has to offer

He's talking about an entirely new PC!

My best advice it to build it yourself, and indeed pick the Inter Core 2 Duo, the new 8800GTS, possibly the creative X-FI and 2GB's worth of RAM. That's what the top of the line is at the moment, you can always go for a cheaper solution of course.