[skifter]

Hi. I'm looking to upgrade my HP Pavilion a520n (Yes, I know, pretty outdated)
and I'm worried about compatibility issues. My comp's pretty slow.
I have a AMD Athlon XP 3200+, MMX, 3DNow, ~2.2GHz
My ram is 702 MB
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce4 MX Integrated GPU
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Chip type: GeForce4 MX Integrated GPU
DAC type: Integrated RAMDAC
Display Memory: 64.0 MB.
I'm looking to upgrade the video card and the ram. How would I go about doing this, and are there any specific things I should know about compatibility before I go about searching for parts to buy?

 

[emosun]

The parts you get really depend on what you plan to do with the pc. Also your budget. The video card it has now is a good pair for the cpu since the cpu will pretty much just bottleneck anything faster. It could use more ram , but other then that I wouldn't put alot of money into this machine.

 

[skifter]

Could you specify why?

 

[Wrench97]

It's an older system, it appears you have almost the maximum ram now I'm guessing a 512 and a 256 stick the max is 2 512's for 1 gig.

It also has a AGP 8x slot which is outdated you could gain some performance by installing a low to mid power video card but would most likely need to upgrade the power supply to run it, since it's a socket A motherboard there are not any meaningful CPU upgrades, Basically your better off putting the money towards a newer PC with at least a Dual core CPU and a PCIe video slot.

 

[skifter]

okay then, what would the cost be to just buy a new decent gaming PC?

 

[Wrench97]

You can build a very nice system with hi-powered graphics for the $800-$1000 range or a system with good performance for $600-$800 either will be update-able for 3-4 years before they start to fall into the same category your in now.