ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 Series replacement

[Jakatak]

Although my new HP a1230n comes with, what appears to be a decent video card. Because it is integrated on the motherboard, would I be okay with staying with this card? I am an older guy who doesn't play hardcore games on my computer anymore. But I do want to do video copying with my DVD burner. And, if I did replace it, would the installation of another card in a PCI slot be going into my device manager and do some disconnecting?

 

[Sharkfood]

Hi Jakatak,
The HP a1230n's are actually pretty nice machines out of the box. They have PCI-Express slots so you are current with video upgrade capabilities if you ever did want to add a 3rd party videocard. That's an Athlon XP system too with a very fast FSB/memory bus.

As far as the integrated graphics are concerned, the Radeon IGP is actually one of the better integrated chips you can get. They are basically a shared vmem Radeon 7000 in capabilities, so playing a plethora of older DirectX 7.0/8.0 games is possible. They do pretty well in 3d benchmarks compared to other integrated chipsets. Obviously, they are not well suited to modern 3d/directx 9.0 games though.

So if you're not planning on installing any newer 3d games and mainly use the PC for video, audio, web surfing, burning dvd's and only light gaming- the Radeon IGP isn't a bad solution for this.

If you wish to get a fancy, whiz-bang videocard that supports directx 9.0, newest shaders and higher performance- you have a WIDE selection of cards in the PCI-Express you can use. NewEgg.com has selections from both ATI and NVIDIA from $110 to $600 depending on how much 3d muscle the games you wish to play need.