Some equipment advice please...

I am running an AMD XP 2400 ( 2.0 GHZ ) 1 Gig am w. GeForce 3 board and
SATA drives doing primarily simple solids with no interior part work (
Industrial Design )

This machine is dragging during rendering in PW2 as these are presentation
style renderings. I cant upgrade this board or OC the chip so I am looking
at some new machines and need your expert advice. One option I have is to
go to a P4 630 chip, 1 gig ram, 2 MB cache system using an Intel on board
video. Another is to go to a 3.2 P4 640 chip. 1 gig ram, 2MB cache with an
ATI Radeon x300. OR I can add a GeForce 6600GT to either machine.

Are either on board video 'is adequate for what I am using them for and will
there be any significant speed increase between what I have now and ether of
the two new chips ? I need to go this route due to financial constraints.
TIA

 

Before you go and throw out the baby with the bathwater have a look at
this:

http://www.tweakguides.com/XPTC.html

Read it through and tune up your present system. Before you do that run
some benchmarks on your current system and do so again after tuning it
up.

http://www.engtran.com/SWBM001.html

If you can benchmark the systems you intend to purchase.

FWIW neither the on board video nor the ATI card are going to do you
much good. A 3.2Ghz Intel is not particularly fast.