I've inherited my late mother's eMachines EL1333G-01w. For those who are not familiar with it, it is a well-cursed small form factor machine from 2008 sporting the following specs:
- 22w 1.8 GHz single core AMD Athlon 2850e processor
- cruddy integrated nVidia GeForce 6150se graphics processor
- 2 GB DDR2 RAM
- 320 GB SATA 2 HDD
- 32x DVD-RW
- Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
All in all it's not an awful machine for an ordinary daily driver desktop for basic tasks, even in 2020. It handles Chrome just fine with plenty of tabs, the included Office suite is fine, YouTube is OK for 480p video. And it's nice and quiet.
I want to push this out to the max for as cheap as possible, because honestly it's not really worth that much when you can easily get a much better used desktop or laptop for $100, even decent performing tablets coming in at that price. I've already bumped up the RAM to 4 GB for $0. I've got an SSD on the way to become the primary boot drive, another $19. I also spent $12 to replace the CPU with an AMD Athlon II X2 9750, a 95w 2.4 GHz quad-core AM2+ processor which is backwards compatible with the AM2 socket.
I want to upgrade the graphics, and that's where my problem comes in. The 220w power supply is not going to be upgradable, the only replacement is $90 for a 250w of the same form factor, so that's just a no-go. I'm having a lot of difficulty in finding a low-profile card that's going to come in under the power requirements, most of them want at least 300w, and considering I'm going to be adding another 70w of load from the new CPU, I'm pretty sure whatever I can find is going to make it pretty tight.
Would any of the experienced members here have suggestions on a graphics card that will fit the bill? I'd like to keep it to under $20 since obviously this will be used and it's probably not going to be one that was for serious gamers. My most intense planned activity is watching streaming video and I'd like to possibly do that at 720p, maybe even 1080.
Also, any other suggestions for upgrades? It comes with memory card readers, USB 2.0 support (I can't see why I'd need 3.0) with plenty of ports, and also integrated 5.1 stereo (probably not using it, it mostly stays connected to my headphones). I may add a wifi dongle to it, but it's currently connected to ethernet and I'm happy with that. I honestly can't think of anything else I could add to it or would need, but if you can think of something novel I'm interested in hearing about it!