Upgrade from a 3200?

[cmf21]

Going to visit my sister next week to upgrade her computer. I would like to get her a different video card if possible since she's buying a new monitor, but I'm so confused with all these different cards. She's not a gamer except her kids play a few stupid online ones, mostly a internet user, watches hulu, youtube, and a little word processing.


Any recommendations? Doesn't need anything fancy, just something that will work. What about that $20 Gigabyte 4550 card that Newegg has been selling or is there something better?

 

[jtisgeek]

Yes that would work. Hard to give any more advice cause i don't know the specs of her computer and any games they may run.

Any stand alone card will be a upgrade so just go with what your budget allows.

 

[RussianSensation]

Ya 4550 is more than enough for basic tasks you described. $20 is a good deal

Again, unless she is unhappy with 3200, she may not even need an upgrade. Perhaps a 40GB SSD is better!

 

[alyarb]

unless the radeon 3200 is defective, it should be fine. "stupid online games" i assume are browser-based and are rendered on the CPU, so if the system is not performing as well as you wanted, then you should upgrade something. but you haven't given us any reason to believe its the GPU.

4550 for $20 is a good deal, but it's not likely you would notice a difference.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Based on what you described as her needs, I don't see any reason to not keep the 3200.

 

[cmf21]

I don't visit my sister very often and like to do small upgrades to her computer when I'm there. Going to be replacing a 5050e with a Anthlon II x2 250 while I'm there. She's still running xp which is fine by her and has 2gb of memory. I would like to do something else at least and thought I could maybe do something with her video card since she's going to be getting a new monitor.

 

[alyarb]

why don't you bump her up to a 2.9 GHz tri-core instead? on one hand, $20 is small enough that the 4550 is hard to ignore, but architecturally the 4000 and 3000 are too similar. you wouldn't be upgrading the video logic, you're just buying more shaders that she doesn't even use. a third x86 core would bring immediate benefits and would carry into the long term.