Upgrading my PC advice..please!!!

[PersianPrince]

Dear Fellow Total war gaming fans.

I need advice in what possibly I can do to increase my PC performance, to be able to accommodate Total war games at a high spec range.

I brought my PC around 3 years ago and don't really want to buy another PC for another 2 years (hoping anyways). Instead I was wondering what I can do to make it perform better, as some of the games can't handle full graphics, and have severe lags in some large scale battles.
My current computer specs are :
Packard Bell iXtreme M5800
Windows 7 Home Premium(64-bit)
Intel Core i5 650 @ 3.20GHz
5GB Dual-Channel DDR3 RAM
ATI Radeon HD 5450 512MB

What I really want to do, is to gear up my PC to be able to play ROME 2 when that comes out and to be able to use the same upgrades and be able to play that.
I don't know much about PC's so would welcome any advice or suggestions.

Thanks in advance
PersianPrince

[Crazyeyesreaper]

ask in 16 months or so when the game launches upgrading now is just stupid for a game that is so far off. and youll probably need to build a new rig anyway

i5 650 is the old socket 1156 its a dead end socket with 0 new chips, by the time Rome II launches it will be a 3 generations behind, your GPU is epically weak weaker than todays Integrated graphics, 5gb of memory sounds wrong should be 4gb 6gb or 8gb for proper dual chanel 5 tells me someone didnt set your rig up properly, regardless the powersupply inside that pc probably can't handle any decent gpus of today anyway,

use the rig till Rome II launches then worry about it.

[Bolkonsky]

I'd take Crazy's advice - wait longer. You could build now, but there's no guarantee that Rome 2 is gonna run well on a rig built now. When Crysis came out, even the 8800 (top of the line card at the time) struggled with it. I doubt Rome II will be that big of a jump, but considering how terribly optimized Warscape already is, and the fact that they're making a new rendering engine, it could really be a big toll on hardware.

Or they could optimize the crap out of it like we've been asking them to do for years, and it could run on what you already have. You're better off just waiting.

If you wanna start saving up for it now, I'd say shoot for $1000-$1200 as that's pretty much the best spot in terms of performance for value.