I want to upgrade my girlfriend's PC to run the Sims 3 better as a kind of christmas present. It currently has no discrete graphics so I'm thinking adding a cheap AGP card is the way to go. The motherboard is a K8M800-8237 socket 754. It has a Sempron 2800+ (1.6ghz) and I recently upgraded it to 1gb ram. I only want to spend 20 or 30 or less as the PC is not worth much and she might not actually game on it that much.
So, has anyone done a similar AGP upgrade recently or have experience of Sims 3 on low end machines? I've found that the game runs pretty badly on my similarly specced laptop but i just about playable so I'm aiming for a nice improvement on that.
Would it be worth getting her an Athlon 64 3700+ or 3400+?