Your thoughts on my upgrade welcome thanks

[camel]

Hi folks, I'm thinking of making the jump to core2 setup as my my daughter's pc has given up the ghost (and was struggling anyway, it was an old P3-500), so she'll get most of my kit and I get a nice new quieter and smaller machine.

I'm a bit out of touch though, so wondered what you knowledgeable types out there thought of this for about £480 (anything you think I should add or change):

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400
Shuttle SD32G2 Socket 775 Barebones
1GB PC5300 Elixir DDR2
320GB Seagate 7200.10 SATA2 (3Gb/s)
(and keeping my existing floppy, dvdwriter and external peripherals)

I don't do really hardcore gaming but do a fair bit of photo & video editing/encoding if that helps.

I wasn't planning on getting a new graphics card to start off with as it comes with graphics built in, but I not sure how to tell how good it'll be. It says:

\"Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 (GMA950) with PCI-E x1 improved bandwidth, features 333MHz graphics core DX8/DX9 support and enhanced 3D performance Dynamic Video Memory Technology (DVMT) 3.0, shared Memory max. 224MB\"

Any idea how to compare this to the card in my current PC, for example (Ati Radeon 9600 Pro Advantage 128Mb) ?

Many thanks!

[Barley]

The on board graphics won't be anywhere near as good as your 9600 PRo, plus the on board graphics steals memory from the 1GB your system uses, so it'll slow your system down the more RAM you let it have.

you're betting getting a dedicated graphics card. It'll have to be a new PCI-E card though.

Welcome to the forums :)

[camel]

Thanks for the feedback (and the welcome).

So now what I have to work out is what graphics card I can get which won't bust the bank but still give decent enough performance to make it worthwhile ... any ideas anyone?

Also I know that the shuttle has got a 250W PSU, will that be ok to run a separate graphics card on top of HDD & DVD?

[Barley]

It should be able to yeah.

http://www.aria.co.uk/#/Products/Components/Graphics+Cards/PCI-E/nVIDIA+GeForce+7+Series/Gainward+Bliss+7300GT+PCX+256MB?productId=25130

That card everyone raves about being great, it's £70, so isn't mega cheap, but is still good value for money.

[camel]

Thanks Barley.

[mac124]

Should be quite a nice rig when its done, i would recommend the 6400 Elixir though as it will run faster and thefore give better performance.