Any idea, where to begin upgrading my pc?

[RKKKK]

Christmas and holidays are behind the door, and what a better way to spend your last pennys, than getting some spirit to your microwave! I'd love to get some opinions, how to get this fellow on the roll again. (Render times are quite terrible (around 8 minutes with the special materials, 720HD settings and such. a little note: I have 2500 simple shapes in my scene, duplicating to 5000 makes me shed a tear or two looking my pc crashing)...

[RKKKK]

More specs:

[RKKKK]

The Direct X features are alright atm, The screenshot was after a fresh driver update.

[Notheonly1]

If your intent is to keep the mobo, check into a graphics card. A spare small drive(ssd would best) would be useful for virtual memory. The graphics card would relieve the cpu's of the graphics tasks. The spare drive would relieve the main drive reader from having to load and reload from virtual to ram while it is busy accessing the main; two readers rather than one. I'm not sure if your BIOS can access more than 4 GB of RAM. That would be first, if possible. If not, an SSD for virtual memory is very much like having more RAM. Since your already dual core, I assume you are SATA not PATA. PATA sucks. Check your Mobo and cpu socket to see if you're maxed out on a cpu. I bumped up cheap. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Gary Pearman, A+ Certified tech

[RKKKK]

Thanks alot for the comment! I actually got myself a new graphics card (HD7850 2GB) from an auction, in which I spend a little too much money, but gotta forgive myself being a first timer anyway. I also upgraded my RAM to 5GB and quite happy with it aswell. I still have some problem duplicating large amount of objects at the same time, but my render time dropped from 8minutes to 30 seconds, which is quite unbelievable! I was about to buy a new processor too, but my friend stopped me from buying an old one (3,4GHz)  because I though only speed mattered.