Hi All, first time on the board. It looked like this was the place to go for some help. I recently purchased an HP Pavilion a6700f from Circuit City during their going out of biz sale. Anyway, she's rocking: - 1.8 GHz AMD Phenom X4 9150e Quad Core - 4 GB DDR2 (which I plan on bumping to 8 eventually) - 500 GB HD - Vista Home Premium 64-bit w/SP 1 - NVIDIA GeForce 6150 SE nForce430 - 300W PSU They had it marked down 20% off, and it regularly goes for $559.00+, so all said and done I paid $450 with a $30 gift card. My question for everyone here is: What graphics card should I upgrade to? (there is a free PCI-E x16 inside) And I wasn't sure if the Power Supply was going to be an issue so I had thought on replacing that as well, any suggestions on that would also be appreciated. I'm only looking to spend around $140-$180 on both as my gaming needs aren't that extreme but I do play some WoW, etc., and would like to have a solid card on my system. Also, the current GeForce 6150 SE is integrated I think, therefore when I install the new card I don't have to take anything out, correct?
The 6150se is indeed integrated, and does indeed suck. The PSUs in Compaqs usually aren't too bad, but you should still not use any card that requires a 6-pin PCIe power connector, as 300W with a Quad core and a powerful graphics card is sailing a bit close to the wind. The most powerful card you can get without a power connector at the moment is the HD4670, which is much better than the 6150se, it compares perhaps to the older 8800GTS. These are around $70 from newegg. You will be limited by the CPU in some games, as it's very slow, so there's no need for a top end graphics card anyway. I don't forsee a need for more than 4GB in the near future, even with Vista64.
