Hey guys, I just got my hands on a dirt cheap system with an ASUS motherboard with an integrated ATI Radeon 2100 and an AMD Athlon II x2 240 CPU. I was thinking about getting a cheap mother board like this one and upgrade to like an ATI Radeon HD 4670 like this I'm not looking to spend more than $200 bucks for this. Should i do this upgrade now or wait till I'm ready to upgrade the CPU as well and spend big that one time? -EDIT- I just found out that its running on an ASUS M2A74-AM motherboard. Now this has a PCI Express x1 and x16 and 2 other PCI slots. Can't I just get more RAM and a better video card for now? Would that make videos and games play smoother? Thanks
The 4670 video card alone will be a major improvement over the onboard video. The one in the link looks like a good one with the large fan(quieter), the hd4670 I bought had a small loud fan on it. As far as RAM, just get 2gb unless you have a windows 64 OS, then get 4gb. As long as the motherboard has a PCI-e slot, no need to get a new motherboard.
Well I already have 2 GB RAM. The motherboard lets me expand it to 8 GB but if 2 is really enough then thats great cause I'm running Windows XP - didn't like Vista or 7 too much. Yeah I think I will do just that. Upgrade the video card. Quick question - whats the difference between PCI Express x 16 and PCI Express 2.0? Are they the same thing? Will that video card fit into the PCI Express x16 slot? Thanks for the reply jony
The HD4670 is a vast improvement over the HD2100, tens of times more powerful. The CPU may be low end, but it's still reasonably powerful by modern standards. You won't have any issues running games and so on with that CPU, it would only need an upgrade if you want to reduce video encode/rendering times, if you do that sort of thing. You already have a compatible motherboard for the HD4670, but cheap Asus motherboards are renowned for unreliability, so be aware you may need to replace it in the not too distant future anyway. 2GB of RAM in Windows XP, while not perfect is still plenty enough for most uses. PCI Express 2.0 is just a newer version of PCI Express that's faster. New cards will still work in old boards, just not as quickly, and to be honest, the HD4670 isn't fast enough to be affected by it. Only today's top end $400+ cards are in any trouble.
Well thanks for your advice guys. Unfortunately I went in to pick up the card at the closest store and they didn't have it. They did however have a really good salesgirl who sold me what she called an 'equivalent performer' - the PowerColor Radeon HD 5570 for $90. Installed it yesterday and it was beautiful. It even comes with a HDMI port which is great for my monitor. I mean you can REALLY tell the difference a discrete card makes when upgrading from an integrated one. But thanks to all of you for your help.
