Please Help Me

Y

yeralo

Geek Trainee
Hi,

I am looking for Desktop. By the time of surfing I get one desktop - Dell Dimension E521 - at Direct2Deal.com. I want to buy desktop for gaming and general purpose. My budget is $500.

Here is configuration:
AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core 3600+
Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium
19 inch SP1908FP Silver Flat Panel Monitor w/TrueLife™ (Glossy Screen)
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz- 2DIMMs
160GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
48X CD-RW/ DVD Combo Drive
NVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE Integrated Graphics GPU
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
Price: $553

What is your suggestion about this computer? Does it need Any Upgrade?
 
For general purpose that's more than enough. For gaming, you're not going to get very impressive results. The graphics is integrated into the motherboard chipset, which aren't intended for gaming. This isn't to say you can't, but their placement is for value. The other thing is that integrated graphics lack their own buffer memory and siphon off some of the system memory.

A separate video card has it's own buffer memory, which, regardless of the graphics chip, doesn't use the system RAM. A decent graphics chip is the GeForce 7600GT or Radeon X1650XT (any other X1650 or X1600 doesn't come close), and both run in the $80-130 range. Do not purchase a video card based on the amount of RAM. This is like purchasing a vehicle and basing the performance by the capacity of the gas tank. Cards that you're looking at with a low price and decent performance really don't show gains with more than 128MB on them. If there is a 256MB version, fine if you want it, but don't pay more than a few bucks more for reasons already mentioned.

There are faster cards that do make use of larger memory buffers, but you're looking at something at least $150-200 or more.
 
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