Upgrading HP Pavillion a430n

[teancumtbh]

I've got a 4 year old HP Pavillion a430n that I am going to give to my son when I upgrade to a better homebuilt PC in the near future. I've never built myself before, and I thought practicing by upgrading the HP might help a bit.

Here's the specs:

CPU - AMD Athlon(B) XP 3200+ running at 2.20 GHz
Motherboard - ASUS P4G533
Memory - Generic 184 pin, PC2700 DDR1-333 SDRAM - 1x512MB
Video - GeForce4 MX440 (Raven)
PSU - Bestec ATX 250-12Z

I'd like to upgrade the PSU to 350W, but what else can be recommended for a cheap upgrade for this?

 

[rodney_ws]

Upgrading the PSU to 350W would only be necessary if you planned on going up to a lower mid-range video card (7600 GT comes to mind) That would definitely have an impact on gaming... and you should really consider some more memory... 1 GB is the absolute minimum for gaming with 2 GB being ideal. It sounds like you've got around a $200 project on yours hands if you upgrade all 3.

Your computer takes DDR so make sure you don't end up getting DDR-2 (the most common type of memory presently) and be sure to verify what type of slots (PCI, AGP, PCI-E) you have for the video card. Based on the age of your computer, it can't have a PCI-E slot... that's ok... AGP should work just fine for you. PCI? Well, that's a pretty wretched slot to be installing a video card... with PCI your options are limited and your performance will be as well.

Sounds like it'll be a good project.

 

[teancumtbh]

Thanks for the inoput. I've actually got an X1300 Pro video card, but no idea whether or not it works. It used to. Are there places that will test it out for me? And would I need the 350W PSU for it?

 

[grieve]

Hmmm…

Does this board have a built in vid card and only PCI slots for upgrades???

Go here… is this your board?
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument?lc=en&cc=us&d ocname=bph07845

 

[grieve]

Just realized you can not directly link to the page I was on...
Search your mother board; the one I found didn’t have an AGP slot, only 3 PCI.

 

[Guest]

Do you still have the Computer?

 

[obsidian86]