At the very least I need Win7 - currently on XP.

But the rest of my system just meets the minimum requirements, or is just barely over them.

System:
Core 2 Duo (Conroe) E6700 @ 2.66 (can overclock to just over 3.0)
3 GB DDR2 Ram (3x1GB sticks)
Radeon HD 4770 graphics card.

Could I play BF3 with the above system if I install Win7? If not, what could I upgrade with only spending around $200 to $250 (including Win7)?

If I can't get BF3 playable spending $250 or less, I could get it for the PS3. But I'd rather have it on the PC for the 64 person multi-player.

 

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The performance you'll get is highly dependent on the resolution of the monitor you will be playing on. The higher the resolution, the more work the graphics card will have to do.

First thing that concerns me is the 3 memory sticks on a socket 775 motherboard. It's dual channel, so a odd number of memory sticks usually means the board will fall back to single channel mode, you are losing about 5% performance that way. Every little bit helps. I'd buy another 1GB stick with the same specs (same brand too if you can) as what you have. That'll cost about $10-15 probably.

Windows 7 will cost about another $100.

With about $130 left over, you could get a Radeon 6770 1GB. It's about 30% faster but having twice the memory, might even improve performance even more with newer games that might use 1GB of video ram.

Resolution of my monitor is 1680x1050. Meant to put it in my original post, just forgot to.

I have a 4th stick of memory. But for some reason when there are 4 sticks in my MB, it only recognizes two of them - I only get 2 GB when I have all 4 sticks in. I tested with 2 sticks of 2 GB memory from work plus one of my memory sticks and my MB registered 5 GB. So it's something with having 4 sticks in. If I were to upgrade memory, I'd have to buy 2 new sticks of 2 GB. But my motherboard uses 2 of the sticks in dual channel mode and the 3rd stick in single channel mode. At least whenever the bios is displaying the start up info, it says it's mixed mode.

 

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Sounds like maybe one of the pins in a memory socket is damaged. Not sure how mixed mode memory works, I've only seen it mentioned with Nvidia chipsets and with them you need the memory in channel A to equal the memory in channel B. So if you have 2x1GB in the two channel A slots, the third channel B slot needs to be 1x2GB. So I'm kinda suspecting that your motherboard might be reporting dual channel just because it sees memory in both channels, but may not really be operating in dual channel mode. But I definitely could be wrong, maybe they did something I'm not aware of, but it would be the exception to how it normally works.

Either way, it's a small performance difference. Mostly 4GB would have been nice to have for Windows 7. Though if you need to buy a 2x2GB kit for your board because one slot may not be functional, then that's going to cost $50. Which might get into that iffy territory if it's worth spending that much on DDR2 memory on a socket 775 board for BF3. So I'm thinking maybe just stay at 3GB.

Perhaps just get Windows 7 and a Radeon 6770 or 6790 for a little more. And the just replace the CPU, motherboard, and memory sometime later.

You could probably even play with what you have now because the resolution of your monitor is kinda modest, with perhaps medium level graphics settings.

I'll probably just get Win7 for now and see how that works. Then if it isn't playable I'll get a new graphics card.

Maybe for Christmas I can build a new system. My wife wants a laptop. Maybe I can use the excuse if she's getting a laptop, I can build myself a new system.

As for the dual channel memory, this is from my MB's manual:




And I don't think I'd be able to get a Radeon 6790 without upgrading my PSU. I only have one PCI-E power connector (SeaSonic S12-430 430W). And my PSU might not be able to power it anyway.

 

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I'm actually debating if I regret buying BF3 at all. Bought and downloaded it from Amazon today. Using EA Origin has been a freaking hot mess. Took me 45 minutes to get BF3 to start installing, Origin kept telling me I didn't have access to the game I just put the key in for. Then it kept locking up (well at least it sat there for a few minutes without doing anything causing me to kill the process).

This is on a brand new system I put together a couple days ago that everything else is running lightning fast on.

Glad they decided to make their own steam.... hopefully the game makes up for it, although I heard Origin just makes a lot of stuff awkward.