[altair9]

Hi!
I need to upgrade our old Socket A Athlon XP 2000+, but we need a very cheap solution. Of course, I'm excluding the various 2 RAM slots motherboard:

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Specs

So, I was thinking to the Asus M3N78-VM AM2+/AM2 motherboard. It has a GeForce 8200 graphic chip, HD and DX10 support.
About the CPU, I was thinking to an Athlon 64 X2 5000+.

The motherboard costs 55 euro here, and the CPU about 46 euro. Total = 101 euro.

According to you, is this solution good for these kind of works:
1) Heavy web surfing (mainly firefox, lots of windows opened at the same time)
2) Word processing (MS-Word also together with Open Office), also together with several Firefox opened windows
3) Video streaming online
4) DVD playback
5) some good 3D games (not the maximum, but enough heavy, like Star Trek Online...).

The second solution, according to our means, could be another solution, like this:

- A similar motherboard (AM2+, 4 ram slots, sata and esata): like the above-mentioned one, but without integrated graphic (cheaper - about 35-40 euro)
- A cheap PCI-Express graphic card, like this:
Asus Components - EN8400GS 512MB DDR2 PCI-E Silent V2
- the same CPU: Athlon 64 X2 5000+

What do you think will be better?

Thank you!

[altair9]

furthermore:

According to you, a motherboard-integrated GeForce 8200 using 256 MB of RAM is equivalent to a GeForce 8200 PCI Express card with 256 MB ? (exept the little speed of the RAM compared to the video ram)

If not, approximately, a motherboard-integrated GeForce 8200 is equivalent to which PCI-Express nVidia card?

Thanks!

[Spleenharvester]

The 8200 is a poor chip really, but it should be fine for surfing + playing some old-ish games on low (depending on age/requirements really). The 8400GS really isn't any better.

And regarding the above post - it probably will be, don't think you can get 8200 PCI-E cards anyhow.

Video Card Reviews and Specifications - Welcome To GPUReview.com! - GPUReview.com is a good site for comparing chips, have a poke around on there