Good point! There's a few other things that can be disabled in most games with little effect on anything other than increased framerates. Aside from the sound, also look for fancy shadowing, etc. There should be a whole list of options in the video settings of the game, as well as the sound settings. Also try www.battlefield1942.com to see if there's a section in there that might tell you anything.

If you did upgrade, I'd target the video card first. Seems to always be the biggest bang for the buck. So much runs off of just that, that I think if you kept that card and went to the 1 Gig CPU I dobt you'd notice a single bit of improvement. But go to a Geforce 4 card for example, and it'll be night vs. day on speed.

I'm not up on the ATI cards, I had one ages ago and hated the lack of support for it. They are a lot better now, and one of those would work as well. As was mentioned, check Tom's hardware site and see how they compare performance vs. price. While you're there, notice how changing CPU's with the same video card does almost nothing for frame rates...