Thinking of upgrading graphics card...?

B

baerriey

New Member
I'm posting this to help out a friend of mine who is thinking of upgrading his graphics card but doesn't know how to choose one. He has said, I quote, "I know my computer won't ever be the best at gaming, I just want games to look better than they do right now." He's been talking about wanting to get a better graphics card for ages and he's asked me but I'm a software person, I know jack shit about how to upgrade hardware, so I'm here asking for help on his behalf. Here are the specs that he's sent me:

Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Acer Aspire X1301
BIOS: )Phoenix - Award WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) II X3 425 Processor (3 CPUs), ~2.7GHz
Memory: 4096MB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 9200, integrated
Click to expand...

Let me know if you need any more info and I'll ask.

I asked this on another forum this morning but I wanted to get a second opinion or two...
 
well he has to get a new power supply before anything, and what does he want to spend, he could be fine with just a corsair cx430 and a HD5670 for about 100 or less with mail in rebates.
 
Just about any dedicated graphics card is going to be an upgrade. Of course, having a pre-built system, you'll need to upgrade the power supply so it can even handle the upgrade. What kind of budget are you looking at?
 
Called him and asked, this was the response I got: "Don't want to spend more than 300 for the new power supply and graphics card together. If I spend more than that I might as well just buy a new computer."

So uh... 200-300 range for the two of them, I guess. Is that doable at all?
 
what settings does he want, with that budget he couls be able to max out most games with full 1080p hd resolution, although for that the cpu may bottleneck it and prevent that. and i looked up the comp, and it supports up to a phenom quad core, which is the thing i would have rec'd, so ask him, he can either get some pretty good settings with that cpu and we'll just aim for a lower gpu than the ones that will max games since it wouldn't be used all the way, or for about 400 he can max every game out today.
 
Let's go with the cheaper option - and thank you so much for helping by the way, I was half expecting to be ignored :)
 
He's not planning to upgrade the CPUs at this time but I'll definitely show your links to him and bookmark this post in case he does decide to do it in the future. Thanks for the help!
 
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