Video Card question.?

Question

I'm building a decent (cheap) computer for a female friend of mine.

Its not much its an Intel Celeron 2.60 GHz CPU, 2GIG of Ram PC.

As for video card i wanna buy a "PNY Verto GeForce FX 5200 Video Card - 256MB DDR, PCI, Video Card. Cause its cheap an power full enough for her Movies, Anime's and her other multimedia needs.

Can the PC i'm building support the Video Card I wanna buy?

Or should i upgrade the processor?

Please lemme know.

PS. I also want to know if that Video card supports windows Vista at all?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Youre not gonna have an FX 5200 PCI video card bottlenecked by a 2.6 Ghz cpu even if its a Celeron. I would strongly suggest you not even think about using Vista on that rig.

Answer 2

Better to go in for an integrated graphics solution board rather than the card that you have suggested, which is pretty old. AMD's 780 chipset board is a good choice, although it supports only AMD processors.  

Answer 3

If you're going to make a multimedia PC (especially for video), get a P4 and bypass a Celeron. Celerons are crippled Pentiums and really drag on videos. They're designed for web surfing and light office work.

Get a lower clocked P4 if you're on a budget (2.0 or 2.4Ghz). I was gaming with F.E.A.R. with the P4 2.4Ghz 533mhz model, so it's powerful enough without breaking the bank and can do almost everything but play Crysis.

And make sure the FX5800 videocard has a good fan. If you're making it for someone else, they more than likely don't understand much about cooling (and they will bug you to no end to fix things like that...good if you're in the business, but calls to fix cooling don't bring home the bacon. Time is precious).

Such a rig won't support the functions of Vista Ultimate. It wouldn't even pass the Vista Business recommendations (the rig above I mentioned couldn't make the Ultimate recommendation, and it had very good hardware -- even a RAID-0 to speed things up).