New
#61
yeah, an LCD should have better picture quality
I originally thought that HDMI connection with a graphics card was easy, but when reading the instruction manual for my 8400GS, there seemed to be an extra connection that needed making with the motherboard for HDMI to work. However, I hope that that was just that card needing it.
Onto the RAM, the computer I had that died had 2GB RAM, a 64MB graphics card (that seemed to be a huge fluke of a card, as it could support aero and the sims 3 despite only being 64MB) and a single core 3.06GHz Intel Celeron D (known to be an awful processor ). It managed to run the sims 2 fine (well, on the highest settings it was a bit slow and buildings flickered going flat), was fine at running rollercoaster tycoon 2 and 3 and could run the sims 3 on rather low settings without a speed problem. It wasn't great at playing 720p HD videos in VLC (no audio for first five seconds and often juttery playback, however the laptop in my specs plays 720p video in vlc perfectly, so i'm guessing it was just the card) but it ran XBMC quite well (slow at bits, but playback etc was fine). It was also quite slow with WMC.
Unfortunately, I never managed to try my 512MB 8400GS as my case wasn't long enough to fit a more powerful PSU in without sacrificing the optical drive . I did try, but the fan on the graphics card didn't run, it got incredibly hot and was stuck in an awfully small (600x800) resolution.
This means that I never really got to find out how much graphical load a better card could take away, so I'm not fully sure about if 2GB of RAM would be enough. It seemed that it would be, as a friend of mine has a 2GB machine with an intel graphics chip that was better at running games.
So, I would suggest that we find a good graphics card for you, one that's reasonably priced and has a decent amount of video RAM (I guess 1GB to 1.5GB) and then see how the machine copes. If it doesn't perform as well as you hope, then adding another GB of RAM shouldn't hurt