About a year and a half ago, a friend of mine got something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16856119058
Except his had an old Intel board in there with dual core Atom. The onboard graphics were very underpowered, and there was only VGA out. We got a Radeon 6450 low profile card, but despite the fact that I searched specifically for PCI (not PCI-Express), it turned out that the card that was sent was the latter, & would not fit. We did not find this out until it was too late - ~ 2 months.
Anyway, looks like it would be about $80 for a 6450 PCI low profile card to update the system graphics-wise.
I had heard recently about AMD's upcoming cpu refresh, and was wondering if we might be better spending $80-$100 to upgrade his motherboard, rather than just the graphics card. I've seen FM2+ boards for about $50, though I'm not so sure that was mini itx. They also didn't have an onboard processor, but I've seen a number of fm2 cpu/graphics combos for about $55. That route might actually be rather overpowered for what he is wanting..... but could it be the best option?
He's wanting to do video streaming, play local video files, and he wants to install a Blu-Ray drive in the 5.25" bay so he can very occasionally play a movie that way.
At this point, I may just suggest that he buy the new AMD system linked above for $110, rather than trying to upgrade the old Intel system with a new board. I was going to suggest XBMC for him, but I'm not sure it will handle playing Blu-Ray from an actual Blu-Ray disk without spending a lot of extra time & $.
Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions for upgrading the system, we are all ears!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16856119058
Except his had an old Intel board in there with dual core Atom. The onboard graphics were very underpowered, and there was only VGA out. We got a Radeon 6450 low profile card, but despite the fact that I searched specifically for PCI (not PCI-Express), it turned out that the card that was sent was the latter, & would not fit. We did not find this out until it was too late - ~ 2 months.
Anyway, looks like it would be about $80 for a 6450 PCI low profile card to update the system graphics-wise.
I had heard recently about AMD's upcoming cpu refresh, and was wondering if we might be better spending $80-$100 to upgrade his motherboard, rather than just the graphics card. I've seen FM2+ boards for about $50, though I'm not so sure that was mini itx. They also didn't have an onboard processor, but I've seen a number of fm2 cpu/graphics combos for about $55. That route might actually be rather overpowered for what he is wanting..... but could it be the best option?
He's wanting to do video streaming, play local video files, and he wants to install a Blu-Ray drive in the 5.25" bay so he can very occasionally play a movie that way.
At this point, I may just suggest that he buy the new AMD system linked above for $110, rather than trying to upgrade the old Intel system with a new board. I was going to suggest XBMC for him, but I'm not sure it will handle playing Blu-Ray from an actual Blu-Ray disk without spending a lot of extra time & $.
Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions for upgrading the system, we are all ears!
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