Upgrading my Emachine!

[Røbin Hood]

I have this GForce graphics card and a emachine and im wanting to put it in my slim small tower emachine and i was wondering if the graphics card was better then what i have in it now? THe graphics card model is....GeForce FX5500PUD. and i was also wondering if i should downgrade my windows operating system to xp bcs using windows 7 is making my computer **** and laggy as heck. I was thinking downgrading bcs there isn't enough ram to have windows 7 on here and i am a gamer so i need good graphics, i play wow and Champions online but mainly champions online! Please help! This is the only computer i have and i have to make do so please no slamming just a teen trying to game!

Emachine
Computer model: EL1200

Bump it up

Come on people help me out! I wanna game!

 

[Trotter]

It has been less than 30 minutes since you posted, mate. There is no need to bump, nor do we allow it here.

Actually, that GFX card is worse than your current onboard graphics. I don't see anything about the motherboard having a PCI-E slot, so you would have to go with a PCI card.

Your computer should have 1GB of RAM but can handle up to 2GB. Here's a cheap stick you could put in it:
Newegg.com - Rendition by Crucial 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Desktop Memory Model RM12864AA667

You need to check and see what wattage your power supply is (open up the case and look at the side of the PSU) and let us know. You also need to let us know what you potential budget is so we can see what we can find that you can afford and that would do your best for your money.

 

[Røbin Hood]

sorry im trying to do alot of things at once tryint o make my website and run a guild lol! But should i downgrade to windows xp just for safety reason and more room?

 

[Trotter]

There's no way I would go back to XP from 7. ::shudder::

You are running a single core CPU. You won't be able to handle too much of a card (current technology) without bottlenecking with that. Even so, a good low profile PCI card will be hard to find... and you have to have the power to run it.

Do you have an overall budget? Maybe we can piece something together that will help you out all the way around.

 

[Røbin Hood]

There's no way I would go back to XP from 7. ::shudder::

You are running a single core CPU. You won't be able to handle too much of a card (current technology) without bottlenecking with that. Even so, a good low profile PCI card will be hard to find... and you have to have the power to run it.

Do you have an overall budget? Maybe we can piece something together that will help you out all the way around.

Okay well the card is out of the quesiton anyways now lol~! but about the operating system.. should i go back to xp bcs what im thinking is that my pc will perform better and not **** up so much ya know? RSVP

 

[Trotter]

Like I said, I personally would not go back to XP. If you really want to go back you should be able to find all the appropriate drivers, but I would make sure before I took the plunge.

Download Advisor and run it to get a complete listing of your components. Then check the manufacturers' web sites to make sure that there are XP drivers available for everything. If not, search the web for them. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary as far as hardware earlier, but the specs listed were pretty basic.

Advisor will also give you a complete list of all your programs and license numbers, too. It would be a good idea to print it out for a record to refer back to later on.

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

According to eMachines' site, the EL1200-05w has:

CPU: Athlon64 1.6GHz
GPU: GeForce 6150SE
RAM: 1GB DDR2

I'm pretty sure that if the motherboard uses a GeForce 6150SE integrated chipset that it would have a PCI Express slot, the 6150SE is part of nVidia's nForce 430 chipset. The nForce 430 does support the PCI Express (PCIe) interface and thus should have a PCI Express slot available for a better graphics card.

However, a GeForce 5 series is not as good as the GeForce 6150SE at least in terms of compatibility (the 6150 is a GeForce 6 series chip). If you do have a PCI Express slot, you are best off buying a new PCIe supported graphics card. It is true that a single core CPU will bottleneck a fast graphics card, so you shouldn't look too high. I would think you could get a considerable performance boost with a sub-$100 graphics card.

Looking at the under-$50 range, you can get a GeForce 9500GT which is considerably newer than your 6150SE and supports DirectX 10. It should be plenty for World of Warcraft and anything based around the Source engine (I play Team Fortress 2 on my 8600M GS laptop frequently, the 9500GT should be better or at least very close to the 8600M GS).

Newegg.com - SPARKLE SFPX95GT1024U2H GeForce 9500 GT 1GB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card

There are some better cards if you go for the under $100 range, but you'll probably run into bottleneck issues above that.

 

[Trotter]

While the 6150 does support PCI-E, I can find nothing that lists that model as having a PCI-E slot. Dropping the slot to save a few bucks is not uncommon on lower end machines. Maybe Røbin Hood can open it up and post a pic for us to make sure.

The PCI-E slot, if it has one, will be the very first/top expansion slot (closest to the CPU). These are the slots that align with the removable slot covers on the rear of the case.