I currently own a AMD 3000+ with 1Gb RAM and a Visiontek Xtasy 9600 256Mb graphics card. Civilization IV and Dark Crusade handle great on that configuration. Railroads also handles fairly well (until the memory leak rears it's head late in the game). I have noticed issues with Age of Empires III (which surprised me as the requirements are not high on that game) but I believe they may be caused by the older Catalyst drivers I am running. I upgraded the drivers but I was not entirely happy with ther results so I backed them out (I have no other issues with the other games I am playing).

I would like to try Medieval 2 Total War and Company of Heroes but I'm not sure I have enough with my current configuration to play them. I am not against an upgrade of the graphics card, but with an AGP bus, I don't want to go crazy on upgrading my card when I will probably have to replace the motherboard in a year or so with a PCI-Express board. $100 is the limit to what I want to spend to upgrade.

Does anyone have a similar configuration and does it handle CoH and M2TW OK? If not, what would be a good card to upgrade to for $100?

Any thoughts are most appreciated...