PC upgrade question: onboard graphics or dedicated graphics card?

danmanchester

Hi all,

I'm updating my ageing self-build pc from:

AMD Athlon x2 4400 cpu
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard
4GB DDR memory

to:

AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition
Asus M4A88T-V EVO/USB3 880G Socket AM3
Corsair 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 memory

which in total comes in at about £300ish. I'm intending to reuse my antec P180 pc case, antec 550w psu,hard drive and dvd drive etc, but I'm wondering whether the onboard graphics of the motherboard I've chosen is as good as/worse than or better than the graphics card I already have (a 1GB GeForce 9500GT) and could therefore reuse. Or whether getting a newer dedicated graphics card would be the best option?

I'm not any kind of gamer, so that's not an issue. The most intensive video use would be viewing HD files/MKVs etc and video encoding, using photoshop and displaying of tv card.

The motherboard specs of the onboard graphics are:
Integrated ATI Radeon™ HD 4250 GPU
- Supports HDMI™ Technology with max. resolution up to 1920 x 1080
- Supports Dual-link DVI with max. resolution up to 2560x1600 @60Hz
- Supports D-Sub with max. resolution up to 2048x1536 @85Hz
- Dual independent displays support with HDMI / DVI and D-Sub
- Supports DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 2.0, Shader Model 4.1, Universal Video Decoder (UVD) 2.0
- Hardware Decode Acceleration for H.264,VC-1, and MPEG-2
- Maximum shared memory of 1GB


Any advice/suggestions welcome, thanks :money:
Dan

Edit to add: I also chose this cooler which brings my total cost to just over £300.

beanys

The best thing to do is try the on board gafix first see how it runs , then either pop ur other card in or buy a better one, but if you do buy a newer grafix cards i thing your power supply will need upgrading to at least a 700w psu
regards

RussJK

The 9500GT is a much better card, so you can just re-use it.

Both will meet your needs.

ChrisPNE

I would recommend posting your proposed build on the forum at this website.

buildyourown.org.uk

Those guys are really knowledgeable.