[SOLVED] What kind of graphic card should i buy?

Solution
The cheapest thing you can find to make it usable if you absolutely need to make it usable and all you are missing is a GPU. I wouldn't spend more than $50 and would aim for at least a GT710.

My first choice though would be to just save the money, upgrade to an i5-11400 when possible and use the IGP for the foreseeable future.

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
The cheapest thing you can find to make it usable if you absolutely need to make it usable and all you are missing is a GPU. I wouldn't spend more than $50 and would aim for at least a GT710.

My first choice though would be to just save the money, upgrade to an i5-11400 when possible and use the IGP for the foreseeable future.
 
Solution

Udyr

Honorable
Mar 3, 2021
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GT 710 or GT 1030.

I'd personally get a refurbished prebuild like Dell, HP or Lenovo with a 3rd-5th gen i3 or i5. It would make monkey dances around your current setup.
 
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What graphics card does the system have now? I don't believe the E5400 has integrated graphics, so it must have something. Are you looking to upgrade for improved gaming performance, or some other reason?

A GT 710 is so low-end that even some cards that were under $100 back in 2009 (when the E5400 first came out) can outperform it. I wouldn't recommend paying anywhere close to $50 for that card if one is hoping to game on it, as it was not really a good option for anything but a display adapter even when it came out 5 years ago. For that kind of money, one would probably be better off picking up an older used card offering multiple times the performance, like maybe an HD 7770 or something. Though that's just an example, since I don't know exacly what the best options are on the used market right now, or what the power supply in your system is capable of.

On that note, knowing what power supply the system has could be useful, along with how much you might be looking to spend.
 
If all you are using it for is normal os things unlike gaming I would suggest a GeForce fx 5200
They would have to get a PCI version of that card, since AGP would have been the only other option at the time. It would also lack modern ports like HDMI and DisplayPort. And even for regular desktop use, it would be lacking video decoding acceleration, leaving that up to the CPU to handle as best as it can. So there wouldn't likely be much to gain over integrated graphics, if that's what they were using now.

Systems this old still had the integrated graphics installed with the motherboard Northbridge.
Ah, yeah, I guess it wasn't until the following year that Intel moved their integrated graphics onto the CPU. My point still stands that there are significantly better options than a GT 710 if one is looking to the used market though, and I don't see much point in buying new for hardware this old.