what can i use my computer for a boat anchor?

Not true about the previous post. The Video card you have is only as good as the GPU that's built into the card. Has nothing to do with your CPU (phenomx4)

You still have a very nice machine. You can upgrade to 4GB RAM for about $25 these days... and a decent video card can be found for well under $100. You processor is still good enough to play any game out there.

There's really no important difference between the Phenom and Phenom2. Different socket is the main difference, and really that's not even different. AM3 motherboards allow DDR3 RAM, AM2 motherboards can only use DDR2 RAM. DDR3 is a little faster. Fortunately, technology has slowed down a little and the quad-core amd's should be around at least for a couple more years.

Check out microcenter.com or tigerdirect.com for inexpensive upgrades !!

I use it myself, I picked it up from an historic pc instructor whilst I used to be in prime university. Although I can not say I could ever use it to explain a Mac, personally such a lot of them are too unpleasant to also be used as a ship anchor.

Its not that dated. In fact its a good midrange card. I have a GTX 470 by NVIDEA and love it. Your video card is only as good as you processor which can process the data in conjunction with the video card.