I know absolutely nothing about computers. That being said is there a way for folks to explain to me what I need for a decent gaming pc or is it pointless?

I've done a little research and it seems to me that upgrading my graphics card would be all I need to do. I have a ATI Radeon HD 4200 which is apparently in the 7th percentile. I think I was ranked in between a caveman and an amoeba, so not to good.

All of this being said, I don't want to run the latest and greatest games so I don't need anything crazy. I just want things like Legend of Grimrock, Subnautica or the Fall to run smoothly. These aren't huge AAA games, just experiences I can't get on a console.

I don't even know if a new card would fit in my Best Buy bought HP tower! Should I just list my system specs?! To be honest I don't even know what terminology I should be using when talking about computers! Oh God! I just blacked out!

Also if no one wants to help my with this I completely understand. lol

@lime_slime:
You're gonna want to let everyone know exactly what PC you have from Best Buy, and some other system specs, if you can. Specifically, what motherboard you have.
Chances are it's not going to be as simple as buying a video card then *poof* everything's better.

It's an HP Pavilion p6000. I bought it, I don't know, four or five years ago.

AMD Athlon II 640 Quad Core Processor-- Speed: 3.0 GHz

ATI Radeon HD 4200

Ram: 4Gb

Free Disk space: 857 GB

I uhhh...hope I just listed what my motherboard was. As you can see, I know zero about computers. Is it even worth me bothering?

The biggest problem you're going to come across is the power supply. It's anemic. A quick google search gives me the impression that it's a 250 watt power supply.

I think even light weight, mid-grade cards like the 750ti or a 950 require a larger power supply.

While a small 400 watt power supply isn't expensive, if you're not used to working inside a computer, it can be a daunting task to replace. If you have a computer savy friend, see if they'd be willing to swap it for you.

A 500 watt EVGA PSU will run you $50 while the 750ti will run you $100 and the 950, $150.

You should probably also find out what kind of power supply is in that computer before buying any sort of graphics card. If that power supply is just enough to run what's in that PC - and I'd bet good money that it is - then you'll need a graphics card and power supply. No, you did not list what your motherboard is.

Is it even worth me bothering?

That is a question you'll have to answer for yourself. There's a learning curve to it and it doesn't stop once you've got a solid gaming PC on your hands. I built my first gaming PC in 2012 and it's been my main gaming machine ever since. Games look better, run better, play better, and I have access to the vast majority of games ever made. But you're definitely going to have to do some tinkering here and there, you definitely have to be willing to learn a bit about PC's - nothing terribly in-depth, but if you don't know what a motherboard is then I'd say you have a ways to go. If you want a good place to start, unplug your computer, open up the side, and look in it without touching anything (unless you have one of those mini computers, the parts in those things are too tightly packed in to really mess with unless you're determined and know what you're doing).

Here's a little pro tip: When upgrading never go for the latest release and go either one or two below it. You probably won't notice a difference and your wallet will be pleased.
And as a bonus/alternative you can go looking for a tweaked card or a card that has more VRAM that it's default release.

70% (or more) of gaming performance is tied to the Graphics card. While Radeon cards generally tax your Power Supply more than GeForce cards do, your card is probably around 20 watts, not much at all(I looked at a HD 4350 as I couldn't find info on 4200). You should check your power supply first, a GTX 960 requires 120 watts, while a 970 requires 150ish.

You should also look into upgrading your RAM. You don't really need as much as 16gb, but I would definitely upgrade to 8.

Your CPU seems decent enough, but I haven't checked any benchmarks. In any case, you can't really upgrade the CPU without upgrading your motherboard as well, at which point you might as well buy a new computer.

@lime_slime:

As others have said, you're going to need a new power supply also.

There's some helpful documentation on HP's website showing the process you would need to take to replace the power supply and video card:

http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c03037947

http://support.hp.com/in-en/document/c03022682

To be honest, the case is pretty tight which is going to make any upgrades pretty frustrating to install, but it's not impossible.

If you decide to upgrade, just make sure the power supply and video card you choose will actually fit in your case before you purchase them.

One thing to note also if you end up buying a new power supply or GPU: Ensure that they fit inside your case before buying them. You can find the dimensions in most retailer websites for these parts. I've previously had experiences where my new GPU didn't fit inside a pre-built HP-computer case because it was too wide.

If this would happen to happen to you, a new, proper case (Fractal Design's Define R5-series for example) that will fit all your previous parts costs around 50$ usually.

This will look pretty daunting for @lime_slime, since that requires practically rebuilding a PC. Although OP wouldn't have to reseat the CPU, which might be the most nerve-wracking part. A video and knowledgeable buddy will make it a cinch, though!

I've read every single post.

So let's say I do some looking around and see if I can just replace the power supply and GPU (This is the graphics card, yes?) in my current PC. There has to be hardware that will fit into this little case that will suit my needs. If not, I will cross that bridge when I get to it.

It can't be that difficult to swap this stuff out, right? I'm not a complete moron. You unplug some stuff, you plug in some stuff, you tighten some screws and your good, right? Is it that simple or am I being naive about this?

If I swap this stuff out will I be good? Will there be things on the software side I need to know? I'm tired of all this PC stuff feeling like mystical voodoo.

Thank you for those links by the way @betterley

Thank you to everyone actually for being so patient.

Being an off the shelf computer, you probably just need to worry about

24 pin main power. 4 pin 12 volt. SATA power or two.

Depending on the graphics card you get, you might not need power to it. Maybe a single 6 pin PCI-X connector. It's not tough, but some cases are very small and don't give you much room to work in. I'm sure someone's posted a youtube video for replacing your power supply. Would be a good idea to watch one, just to see what's what.

I'm sure you'll have no problems putting in a small 400-500 watt power supply into your case.

Before you uninstall your old video card, clean uninstall the drivers

http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMD-Clean-Uninstall-Utility.aspx

Also, have the latest video drivers already downloaded. It'll save you the headache of trying to surf the web at some wonky resolution with no hardware acceleration.

@lime_slime: The idea behind it is fairly straightforward, true.

You can find parts that will work, and it is essentially just swapping one part for another.

The problem your gonna have is the space your working with. Yes, its not hard to comprehend, but when you actually get in there and physically install the power supply and GPU, its going to be frustrating. Especially managing your power supply cables.

None of this is impossible, though.

And yes, there will be software to install. Just video card drivers. You may have to enter your bios and make sure onboard video is disabled as well.

Zotac has a cute little 750ti for $105 that is sure to fit. Also, it doesn't require a plug from the power supply so bonus points there. > Link to GPU.

Why not just grab this little guy and see where that gets you. If you start having weird issues then maybe you'll need a new power supply but if you don't be happy and game on.

@lime_slime: this might be a "duh" question, but have you looked inside your case?

I upgraded a store-bought PC before I built my own and the PSU was actually built into the case. I Also had to keep the side of the case off or the computer would overheat (it was a slim case, I didn't really plan ahead too well.)

Also make sure to measure everything yourself. Graphics cards can be a bit larger than you expect them to be. Make sure everything has enough clearance. When you find a card you like look at the measurements that are provided, and make sure it would easily fit inside your case.

As other have said you PSU will be the issue...but that damn Dell case will be a pain to work in. The second issue that would concern me is you might have a mobo that ONLY supports DDR 2 RAM.

My advice:

1) Open the case and read off the mobo brand and model number. Look that shit up online to see what they board can do and not do, hopefully is does supports DDR 3 RAM.

2) If the damn thing is DDR 2 RAM...then, my advice is buy a new mobo, power supply, RAM, GPU and case.

You can easily pull the CPU out and put it in a new rig, but do you want to go that far? The chip is fine all things considered, so if you are willing to invest $300 you could bring it up to snuff. It is not fancy or high end, but it will likely blow what you have out of the water.

Re-use your CPU, Media Drive, and anything else it might have had in its PCIe x16 slots

• ASRock 970M PRO3 Micro ATX AM3+/AM3 Motherboard
• A-Data XPG V2 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1866 Memory Kingston Savage 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1866 Memory
• EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Superclocked Video Card
• Corsair SPEC-01 RED ATX Mid Tower Case
• Corsair CX 430W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply
  TOTAL $311.95 as of 4PM EST today.

Okay so I poked around in my PC case.

My power supply is 250W just like @zelyre said.

The case is 14in length and 6in width.

I have no idea where my graphics card is, I'm currently pouring over HP website information. It seems like some of these cards would just fit inside this thing, barely, just like you guys said.

@monkeyking1969 It looks like it does support DDR3. I take it that is a good thing.

As an IT professional and long time system builder I want to put the following out there:

If something were to go wrong do you have the tech support or cash to fix things if you get in over your head? Even if you personally can be walked through to fix it can you handle your system being down for a day or two depending on what's going on?

Back up your data before you start. While you likely wouldn't kill your hard drive attempting any of this it's just smart.

Having said my two cents of caution I got my start in things by doing exactly what you're doing (although in my case it was adding a 3dfx Voodoo 2) and at the time I was flying blind with no forums or sites to grab info so you're already ahead of where I was. You're getting some great advice here so I won't repeat what's already been offered. I would however caution you to learn about electrostatic discharge or ESD before you touch anything. Basically just make sure you ground yourself by touching your case before you handle parts otherwise you can damage things through static electricity.

Also if you're just switching power supplies and video cards then everything should be able to be removed without much force. If something seems hard to move then stop and look carefully to make sure you didn't miss a screw or pull tab somewhere.

Good luck. Once you get over the initial fear and knowledge humps it gets real easy and you'll find it's something you really enjoy and you'll get more bang for your buck out of your system.

Invest in an electronics friendship bracelet as well! They're cheapo and you can't go wrong with one.

Post a picture of the inside of your case so people can get a better idea of what you have to work with.

HP Pavilion p6754y

I think I may be out of luck. I don't think I can even fit one of these in there. Much less I don't think I can find anything that would work with a 250w power supply.

So, the graphics card is integrated? The Graphics card should go into the long, black slot(a PCIe slot). In the middle of the motherboard, under all those cables. You should measure to make sure the graphics card you're buying would fit, but I think you should be fine with most cards.

A friend of mine just put a gtx 960 and a new power supply into a dell but i think it's a bit bigger than this model. Honestly that thing is so old it's time for an upgrade anyway, i would save up and just upgrade the whole thing. Either way, take it up to best buy and they can tell you what you need to do he wanted it to up the graphics on swotr and they were pretty good in telling him what he needed to do. Personally i would just scratch that thing and upgrade

With all those cables in the way, I dunno about cramming a GPU in there. Not to mention how much heat that thing would likely bottle up. Honestly I would just save up for a new PC, either something pre-built that's a bit beefier and capable of playing what you want, or going all the way with something built from the ground up to accommodate AAA games.

Yeah, you should get rid of that thing. Relegate it to Media PC duties or donate it and start fresh with a new build.

If a GPU says it needs 300w power supply, is that final or could I use my 250w?

I just want a small boost here. I don't want to run Fallout 4 at max settings or anything.

500W power supplies are only like 30-35 bucks, I'd just spend the cash and avoid any possible issues down the line.

@lime_slime: If it was a decent power supply, like a Seasonic, EVGA, or Corsair, then... maybe. Though, I would expect random reboots/power downs.

Otherwise, no. I wouldn't chance it. I'm sure your power supply will supply 250 watts peak, but it wouldn't be able to sustain that. Your machine would shut down, or reboot, or the power supply would blow a fuse, or the power supply might try to compensate and end up overvolting your components.

The -really- cheap power supplies? I've seen them get burning hot to the touch when put on a constant heavy load.

Looking inside that case, the only thing preventing you from using a larger graphics card outside of your power supply are those front panel cables - the beige ones. Since they attach to the front of your case, they should have no problem resting on top of your video card. You could even just push them up a few inches right now to clear room for a 750ti.

If I were you, I would do a $50 Corsair power supply and then snag a 950 for under $150. The power draw isn't that much higher, and the performance difference vs the $100 750ti is huge.

I'm no expert but I wonder if the current CPU on that machine would also bottleneck whatever graphics card the OP is going to be adding on to it.

Also I'm going to second what everybody saying in that you should never cut corners with power supplies. If it burns out because it can't provide enough power or it was really cheap (well unless you bought a very good PSU on a great deal of course), you might not lose JUST the PSU because it's connected to every important component of your PC.

Also you have to consider that it also powers the other components so don't just get a 350W PSU for a GPU that needs 300W, you might actually need ~370-400W total to power everything so it always better to have more allowance in case you'll also want to add another part (like an HDD/SSD for storage) in the future

I see a lot of people recommending Evga or Corsair, and while they are generally solid, use caution. Both brands have put their names on a couple of PSUs that I would not recommend using in a computer that will be used for playing games. At the same time, I have an Evga SuperNova g2 in my current rig and I'm really happy with it. I would recommend searching for PSU tier list, there's a forum post that ranked most power supplies last year and any power supply from the top two tiers should be very solid.

The Corsair CX/CXM for instance, is a very poor power supply from an otherwise good brand. It should also be worth mentioning that MSi, while they make excellent motherboards and graphics cards, have a really bad rap when it comes to power supplies, and for good reason.

Getting a good power supply is important, because when you're stressing a system, a poor power supply can damage your system.

So I've been looking around and I don't think replacing the power supply in this case would work. Every psu I've looked at has a fan on the top of it. I just don't think I would be able to ventilate it very well.

My next thought was buying something like a 512MB gpu. I feel like I read that I can use the integrated card and the installed 512MB to get 1GB. I don't know if I'm correct about that though. Even if I am, the cards I've seen require 300w or so, which I can't swing.

I don't know, would it even be worth it to install something like this? Would it speed up anything? Youtube, web browsing, certain indie games, etc.?

No, that wouldn't work.

To run two graphics cards at once, you need a SLI or Crossfire compatible motherboard and since your board only has one PCIe slot for graphics cards, it's not. You also need two cards from the same model, like two GTX 960 would work, while a GTX 960 and 970 would not. Games are also mostly not optimized with SLI/Crossfire in mind, so performance is varied from game to game. I would also guess your power supply would not have enough 6-pin connectors for two cards.

And if you intend to play somewhat modern games on this machine, I wouldn't recommend anything below 2gb. I would suggest looking at GeForce cards over Radeon cards, because they are more power efficient. A GTX 960 only takes 120 watts to power compared with 190 watts in a Radeon R9 380. I think a GeForce GTX 750Ti would be a decent choice for you, as it's a 60 watts card with 2 GB and a high clock speed, and costs a little over $100.

You're also assuming that an aftermarket PSU would even work. A lot of prebuilt PCs, especially older ones, have proprietary power connectors. The PSU enclosure may also be a non-standard size. An off the shelf PSU may not even work.

Just from eyeballing that PC, there are too many cables in the way to fit any sort of decent graphics card in there. I wouldn't call it a junk PC, but it's meant for basic computing. Internet browsing, watching videos, checking Facebook, writing Word documents, etc.

There's also this, I didn't even think to warn the OP about proprietary PC innards.

I'm going to be honest, I think this might wind up being a bad idea. Don't get me wrong, I think it could be done, but I don't think you'll see the gains you want or need and I don't want to see you spend money without getting what you really want. That processor will also be something of a bottleneck anyway. Instead, save your cash and spend some time picking out a desktop that you can just put a decent mid-range card into.

I went to pcpartspicker.com and found similar parts to yours to get an estimate of power consumption, and from what I can tell your computer uses around 220 watts as is. Upgrading the power supply is necessary for further upgrades.

I'm not as worried about your cpu as others here. It's decent, but by no means a powerhouse. It's performance should be on par with a Pentium G3250 or i3-3220 and I don't think pairing it with a GTX 750Ti would cause many issues. However, it will not meet the requirements of some modern games. I would consider upgrading in the future.

I think you can get a Evga 500W power supply and a GeForce GTX 750Ti or a Radeon R7 370 card for around $150. The R7 is a little more powerful, but uses nearly twice as much power.

Here's my personal recommendation for dicking around with computers: Don't ever do anything for the first time to a machine you aren't prepared to lose completely. If you would like to replace components in your main PC and you can't afford a complete replacement PC, or if you don't have spare parts or a backup machine that can tide you over until you can afford replacements, Don't do anything drastic without the help of someone with experience. Doing PC stuff can be super easy! But there are also weird, tiny things you can do that instantly burn up seven hundred dollars of equipment. Buy/offer to recycle old, busted hardware and Experiment on computers nobody wants anyways. Pick up a cheap machine from a pawn shop, thrift store, or from anyone replacing their old computer. Spend some time taking it apart, putting it back together, getting to know whatever procedure it is you're looking to try out on a more important machine. Learn safety procedures (for you, but mostly for the computer), and make all your mistakes on a machine you don't care about, because there is a good chance that something dumb (like trying to jam a card in backwards, or forgetting a screw) can bend a pin somewhere, short out a circuit, or snap a support and totally trash a component.

Just my two cents:

I've built computers since age 5, starting when my dad asked me to set the jumpers he couldn't be bothered to do. That said, looking at your photo, I wouldn't suggest trying to modify this build. While it's entirely in the realm of possibility to get an okay budget rig upgrading your current parts, the amount of fidgeting you'd have to do simply isn't worth the time and frustration for a person who doesn't know much about computers, especially considering the likelihood many of these parts and connectors are proprietary.

Building a PC isn't particularly too hard, especially these days with literally thousands of resources on YouTube and online communities that can pretty much respond to any issue. The problem with a prebuilt machine is that they are designed for one purpose: saving cost, at the detriment of the modularity of the innards. Like many of the other posters here, I'd suggest you save the money for a wholly new build down the line. You'll learn a lot more about computers doing so, and with significantly less stress and frustration.

Okay, you guys convinced me damn it. I was really excited too! Most of the stuff I was looking at wasn't super expensive, which is why I was looking to do it in the first place. I'll say this much though, I've learned a ton just from this thread alone--Hell, I didn't even know what a "mobo" was a few days ago.

Would a prebuilt gaming pc be the way to go? It seems like the gpu in most of these things needed to be replaced, judging from the comments. From this thread I gather that even someone like me could that. I just don't know if I have the skill to build my own rig or not (even though it would save me a few c-notes.)

Also, do they make any gaming pc's that don't look like transformers? Or am I missing the spirit of the whole thing?

@lime_slime:You can always start looking on newegg

Something to consider, if you're considering buying all the components anyway, is to start with the PSU and GPU and just see whether they'll fit. If not, then take the plunge on the rest of the parts. Requires a bit more patience than I have for these sorts of projects, but might be worthwhile. Also, no you don't have to buy the ridiculous glowing skull machines that some folks like to build.

I haven't seen it mentioned here yet, but check out http://www.logicalincrements.com/ for a nice grid of reasonable parts. Somewhere in the modest to fair range seems like what you're shooting for.

As for your question about prebuilt machines, sure, there's nothing wrong with those. They're basically all the same parts you could buy for yourself with some markup.

Prebuilts are okay if you're willing to pay extra. To give you an idea: I own a $2200 gaming laptop (yeah, I'm one of those people). One can usually build a top of the line gaming rig for half of that price plus a bit extra. $800 will net you enough parts for a very decent machine provided that you play your cards right and everything works out. In short, if cost is a concern, building your own machine is always much cheaper than buying prebuilt with the same specs, and knowing how to work around computers is a nice skill to have.

On the other hand, you're going to be investing a significant amount of time into this if you're unfamiliar with the whole process. Maybe start by posting the individual parts here and ask for some feedback first. I'm sure plenty of duders are willing to help you walk through the steps.