Should I upgrade my hp pavilion h8-1214 or replace?

Question

I have recently bought a hp pavilion h8-1214 desktop and have confirmed that the radeon HD7450 graphics card will not play world of Warcraft on high-ultra settings, and I can not add in a second card. to upgrade to a higher performance card I would have to upgrade my PSU aswell. I'm wondering if buying the 7450 and a 300W PSU just to trash em for upgrades would be wise, or returning for full refund and building off newegg or another reccomended source is a better idea for my money. Was really trying to stay under 800$ for high-ultra with 50+ fps in raid. Ty for input on previous posts to get this far!

C-Man · Accepted Answer

Return it and either buy, build or upgrade something else.  Upgrading a starting computer with a better power supply and graphics card is often a good tactic, but you need to start with the right CPU.

The H8-1214 is one weird contraption.  I'm assuming you got the model from Best Buy which comes with 10GB of RAM? 10GB is a strange amount, hardly EVER seen.... probably a pair of 4GB chips and a pair of 1GB chips?  You'd want to remove the lower-capacity chips and have 8GB of total RAM, which would enable dual-channel memory access.  It's not a big difference in performance, but having 10GB instead of 8GB isn't helping anything.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/HP+-+Pavilion+Desktop+-+10GB+Memory+-+1.5TB+Hard+Drive/4602991.p?id=1218501940330&skuId=4602991

The FX-6100 also isn't a particularly good processor for gaming.  It trails behind Phenom II X4 and even farther behind Intel's current generation Core i3/i5 processors.

If you want something pre-built, this would be ok:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883227391

But you'd get better performance buying this:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Dell+-+Inspiron+Desktop+-+6GB+Memory+-+1TB+Hard+Drive/4843261.p?id=1218541285094&skuId=4843261

Then adding this power supply & graphics card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371030
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161384

You could even upgrade to the faster Radeon HD 6870, and just be $10 over budget:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150521

That system has 6GB of RAM (so it also runs in single-channel mode) but as I mentioned the performance hit is minor. You could remove the pair of 1GB chips if you wanted to enable dual-channel, WoW doesn't care whether you've got 4Gb or 6GB.

CPU comparison:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-fx-8120-6100-4100_6.html#sect0

But for gaming, your graphics card is what really counts..

WoW on ultra:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Zotac/GeForce_GT_520/18.html

Notice the top two cards on that chart (Radeon HD 5770 and GeForce GTX 550 Ti).  Here's where they stand compared to the next tier of cards:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-6790-barts-gpu-geforce-gtx-460,2917-5.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-560-amp-edition-gtx-560-directcu-ii-top,2944-6.html

So while a Radeon HD 5770 (now renamed the 6770) or GTX 550 Ti would be sufficient, it's well worth it upgrading to a Radeon HD 6850 or 6870.   And the Core i5 utterly smokes the AMD FX processors.

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Should I upgrade my hp pavilion h8-1214 or replace?

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