Picking a video card for my computer illiterate brother

[BuckNasty]

Hey everyone, my older brother is a Doctor. A surgeon no less but he is as useless with computers as if he were born in 1927. He saw one of his friends running two saw one of his friends running two monitors off of a single GPU and I was wondering if you guys could give me some opinions on what would be best for him.

He wants to watch HD movies and hook his PC up to a widescreen HD tv to do busy work. He doesn't play games (well maybe solitare) and doesn't do any video editing or encoding. Finally, he's lookin to spend around 150-200$. The only requirements is that it supports dual monitors and full 1920-1080i HD resolution. Also a model with a regular HDMI port would be preferable.

 

[Perkomate]

maybe a 6870 2gb? or something a bit more substantial like a 6950. anyone else?

 

[ktec]

By the sounds of it he doesnt need anything mroe than 5450 which is like $30. Had HDMI and can run 2 monitors.

 

[mihir]

What are his current PC specs and PSU?

 

[Perkomate]

haha yeah i heard "graphics card" and put my gaming computer pants on and immediately suggested the most expensive. my bad!

 

[BuckNasty]

These are his current specs:

Asus M2N68-LA motherboard (http://www.serversupply.com/MOTHERBOARD/DESKTOP BOARD/SOCKET AM2/ASUS/M2N68-LA.htm)

AMD Anthlon 2 64 x2 2.8GHz Dual Core CPU

4GB DDR2 1333 RAM

BestTec ATX-300-122 288w PSU

Windows 7

 

[Perkomate]

you're going to need a new power supply to run it. AMD website says 400 watts required for the 5450. Try going for Antec, Corsair, or other good brands of power supply. A good way to tell is to first read reviews of it, then when you get it pick it up and see how heavy it is. If it's heavy, then usually it's good quality.

 

[BuckNasty]

The only problem I can see now is that all of the suggested cards run on PCIe 2.1 and I'm pretty sure that my brothers motherboard only supports 2.0

 

[mihir]

PCI is backward compatible

 

[BuckNasty]

Neat

 

[linkin]

you're going to need a new power supply to run it. AMD website says 400 watts required for the 5450. Try going for Antec, Corsair, or other good brands of power supply. A good way to tell is to first read reviews of it, then when you get it pick it up and see how heavy it is. If it's heavy, then usually it's good quality.

That's for the entire system with a 5450. To find real usage look up the TDP for the card. The 5450 uses 20 watts.

I'd be suggesting a GTS 450. Decent performance, only needs one power connector.

 

[Benny Boy]

Or a 5670 w/ no power connector? Don't some IGP's do those tasks?

 

[linkin]

5670 is another good one, yeah. It's roughly equal to a 9800GT/GTX/GTS250