Gaming Rig Challenge!!

[ragingejido]

Hello Tom's Hardware. A couple of weeks ago I bought an HP Pavilion p6-2375ea. Specs are:

Motherboard: MSI 2AE0
APU: AMD A8 5500 with Radeon HD 7450
RAM: 8gb DDR3
Storage: 2TB
OS: Windows 8 (x64)
Resolution: 1920 x 1080

I want to (if at all possible) turn this into the best possible gaming PC (Skyrim, Battlefield, etc.) for around £150. At around the same time as I bought my HP, I inherited a Radeon HD 7850 2GB, and a Powercool 650w Modular PSU.

What are my options? Is there any way to get the 7850 working with the current setup or should I go for a new mobo and CPU?. Is £150 wishful thinking? I have minimal experience with the inner workings and what's compatible and what's not hardware-wise so any help would be appreciated!

Thanks in advance

 

[dsventimiglia]

Ragingejido, how much did you get the HP Pavilion p6-2375ea for?
I cant fined the stats on that MSI 2AE0 I wouldent put $ into this set-up, save and build yourself a new system for those games... just my apinion

 

[tiny voices]

Just throw the PSU and 7850 into your current build and enjoy playing most games at high-ish settings.

 

[ragingejido]

The retail chain I worked for closed our shop so I lost my job, on the plus side I got my HP pavilion for 10% of the original price (£55)!!! So I don't mind spending a bit more to get it to a good level. tiny voices - I'm probably wrong here, excuse my noobish-ness but is it possible to just swap out the Radeon HD 7450 for the HD 7850 with it being APU? I've tried swapping them before, the card fits and I hooked it up to the 6 pin PCIe but didn't get anything?

 

[tiny voices]

No, the APU has integrated graphics so its park of the CPU. Just stick the card in a free PCIe slot and install the drivers. from AMDs website.

 

[ragingejido]

My board only has 1 PCIe x16 slot and it currently holds the HD 7450. I've tried the 7450 for the 7850 a few times trying different things, uninstalled the old drivers, made sure my BIOS version and mobo drivers were up to date, which led me to believe it wasn't compatible? It fits in the slot and when I power up the fan works and it sounds like it should but no display?

 

[Guest]

My board only has 1 PCIe x16 slot and it currently holds the HD 7450. I've tried the 7450 for the 7850 a few times trying different things, uninstalled the old drivers, made sure my BIOS version and mobo drivers were up to date, which led me to believe it wasn't compatible? It fits in the slot and when I power up the fan works and it sounds like it should but no display?

The Problem, HP insert a BIOS with disabled advanced settings. You cannot switch from the internal graphic to the pci-e slot. No way to tell the bios initialize the pci-e slot first. So during POST (power on self test) bios found two graphic-devices and stop with error beeps or initialize one graphic devices with the result of no display because of the present of the second graphic-device. No way to unlock the disabled bios settings. HP wants to be safe, afraid of overclocking the processor or chipset, but leaves customer who want to upgrade the graphic-card totally frustrated. HP tells a customer who wants to upgrade the BIOS: »you have to buy an new motherboard«

So f**k the HP-PC Developers. Never buy a HP-PC again or ask for the possibility of upgrade the garphic-device in the front.

 

[ragingejido]

That's exactly the answer I was looking for. I still have the graphics card and still can't get it to work, I tried everything so I knew it was something like this. I have another question then.... how is it that the card in the PCI slot works and not the new one when I swap them? Is there something built into the system that tells the machine ONLY to see a radeon HD 7450 card?