Advice please - desktop purchase

[Polixenes]

I wonder if anyone with some computer-savvy bones can help me out.

It’s time to upgrade my 5 year old graphics card, along with the entire 7 year old desktop PC. My dinosaur uses a graphic card with 256MB and system RAM is 1GB.

The computer shops here are poor for customer service (not enough demand I suppose) – they won’t help me with research or build it for me even if I select the components for them to order in, so I’m stuck with buying something off the shelf.

I looked at Alienware and their ‘build a pc’ pages and I can get system RAM starting at 4GB and going up to 16GB. For graphics I can buy a 1GB Radeon card, or a 1.5GB Nvidia card, or either option with 2GB.

I just don’t know enough to make a smart choice. Does a 2GB video card blow you away compared to 1GB? And how much RAM is enough?

Bearing in mind I’m not much of a FPS gamer (my layman’s assumption is that the higher end hardware is aimed at those games), but let’s say I’m interested in playing MMORPGs and 2011-2013’s single player games with all the graphic option sliders turned up to max.

Let's assume money is no object (or rather, let's assume my wife never sees the credit card statement). Any wise words?