Upgrade Reccomendations Needed For HP Pavilion p7-1154.

[AVCCNY]

Current setup:

HP Pavilion p7-1154

Windows 7 64-bit

No internal upgrades made yet.

Currently, my system seems to have tracking problems while displaying games at medium graphical settings. It's not enough to upset gameplay, but often when heavy movement is going on the portions of the screen that are displaying that movement will stutter slightly in some games. I'd also like to record some gameplay here and there, so that would probably be important to mention.

I'm looking to upgrade the processor to the max allowed on the upgrade sheet, but I'm worried about the PSU. I know the sheet says the mobo supports the processor, but will I need to replace my PSU as well? Are there any other considerations I should be taking into account? If so, could anyone give me some system specific upgrade recommendations? Thanks in advance!

[potent]

The specifications on the unit you own seems to be perfect however it doesn't have a dedicated Video card. That being said, you are experiencing the bottleneck on your PC. YOu can upgrade the Video card with that of Raedon series as it goes well with teh AMD chipset and about the power supply, you could upgrade it to 400W or 500W from 300W. Ler me know if you need any more Info.

[AVCCNY]

any 400W made for standard ATX cases would be fine right? as long as I follow the PSU thread's recommendations?

As for a video card, any recommendations you could make for one that is modestly priced? I'm looking to spend maybe 150-200$ for the whole thing. Could I upgrade the card after the APU/PSU to spread out the purchases or would it be advisable to wait until I could get it all in one go?

[AVCCNY]

I should mention the 150$ is for PSU/APU. The card is separate in my budget

[potent]

AS you have mentioned that the main issue is with the graphics, it is always suggested to increase the value to equal out the correction on the system requirements rather than changing every component. How ever you may upgrade the Processor however it might not work correctly as the HP units are encrypted by the manufacturer. Doing the changes to the MoBo or the Processor itself will result in system instability as the motherboard(Mobo) is encrypted.

If you could let me know the games you are experiencing the issue with, it will be easy to find a solution

[AVCCNY]

The spec sheet for my system specifically says it supports AMD A8-3850 Llano 2.9GHz and that's exactly what I'm looking at buying. So you are saying that if I bought it, purely because of HP's way of handling mobos, I'd be ruining my system to put it in?

The problems I have with games don't seem to have a trend, some run perfectly fine...but have recently begun tracking weirdly. Anywhere from Scratches (old point and click horror), to LIMBO, to Hydrophobia have had tracking problems. Even when scrolling quickly on graphical portions of websites I get artifacts sometimes.

[potent]

Any applications/ Updates running in the background. They do also tend to consume lot of System resource. THe best way of organizing the unit for gaming is to keep basic apps and rest of them being the games. More non Game apps will tend to update or run as they have their own mind. Being a gamer myself, i just have basic apps like office suite and couple media players. thats it.

[AVCCNY]

Typically when I game I have little else running, even background stuff (apart from virus scanning).

So as far as I can tell from here and talking elsewhere...I should really just get a video card to help my situation out. I'm not sure which would be the best one to get for my situation though.

[potent]

I would say to go for a nVidia 9600 GT 1GB or a Raedon HD 6850 with slight PSU uprating, you will for sure enjoy playing the games for atleast couple years.

[lasvegaswireman]

Many power supplies made are bigger than will fit in your HP computer. The Corsair CX500 and CX600 are highly recommended, are forum favorites and are known to fit most HP cases. As for the graphics card side of your issue... please read Big_Dave's Guide for Selecting a Discrete Video Card for helpful advice.

Frank