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Hmm, the RAM generally used in the Dimension 4550's is 333DDR which is in no way great, but isn't that bad either.
generally the motherboard won't make that much difference, the only real limiting factors are the Front side bus capacity and the maximum memmory speed, but you should be fine ASSUMING! that the board has an AGP slot, I would think that it does, but the Geforce 4600 ti was available as a PCI card, but wouldnt be that great. (You said you used a 9800 Pro so I guess it does)
But I cannot even begin to imagine why the card would perform worse than the 4600, unless the ati drivers were diabling the AGP speed (often happes, that's why I want to kill the people that invented fastwrite)
Next:
Your CPU, is it a Pentium 4 or is it a Celeron?
The P4 would be good and probably perform fine, but i'm not so sure about the celeron, whilst their performance isnt a huge chuck less, they are a bit slower and could slow down your gaming.
Next again:
PSU, I am a HUGE Dell fan, but if there is one annoying thing about their systems, its the power supply, luckily you have a dimension, so it is possible to get a more powerfull PSU *I think*
Where from, I couldn't tell you (becasue I don't know [img]tongue.gif[/img] ) but you can always try ebay or somewhere similar.
In reality, you should be able to run a 6600GT from that power supply, now before all the so called "hardware nuts" come after me, I know this should work, I work on a mine site with over 400 Dell machines and I have many myself, Azeral and horsimus (users here) both use Dell's with standard PSU's (generally about 210/250w) but they both run ATI x850's perfectly, and as long as you aren't using too many other non-standard devices, you should be fine.
But don't take my word for it, as I have never used a Demension 4550 and it might not work.
Hope this helps, I will try and give some more details later, but for no I got heaps of work to do!
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