Budget PCIe x16 for old Athlon II x4

[zapp22]

just rehabbing an old system retired from work duties and thought I would see what it can do.
this is a HP Pavilion p6710f

that has 1 PCI Express x16 slot for graphics card. I will only do light gaming at best, but would like a graphics card I can find on Ebay or elsewhere that has these qualities:
- Stable, durable
- Has HDMI and DVI interface
- Displays text clearly - like razor sharp without a lot of tweaking
- Does multimedia well without a lot of heat - mainly movies, youtube vids, documentaries, at 1920x1080, again hopefully without a lot of work having to fine tune colors, frame speed drag, contrast



It is running win7 Home Premium x64


The browsers I currently like are Brave and Firefox, neither of which is particularly efficient with videos. IE11 on Windows 10 is the most efficient I've seen for rich content video but sadly doa now. [I sorta like Opera, but it will hang or go otherwise bonkers when doing youtube for awhile - overheat the system yikes]



Not too much to ask is it?


what do you suggest?


the system specs are here:
https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c02628226
​

 

[iko22]

I would recommend my own graphics card , the Radeon HD5750 (PCIe Gen 2, 1GB).

But you still need to find what generation of PCIe your motherboard supports.

Later models of the Radeon card had better (lower) power circuitry.

Some graphics cards require their own PCIe power connector (like mine ). In which case you will probably need a new 500W-600W power supply to support the graphics card.

 

[Bat 1]

With a Stock HP (Garbage) PSU you're limited to the same power draw as the integrated GPU or a slight bit more. With My 2x4 650 I run a old Gigabyte 5450c 512MB Card and it's used to play mostly browser type games as well as Minecraft and Games as demanding as LEGO My 2x4 630 has a "Green" Powercolar 5450 1GB card. After they stopped making 5450 cards with a fan I find the Heat Sink cards run just too hot, A better card with basically the same power consumption would be a Radeon 6450 1GB card with a fan.

Given the age of the PSU, I'd recommend replacing it (already had to change both of mine) If you'd upgrade the PSU to a higher Wattage Model you could also go with a better card that wouldn't bottleneck the 640

 

[johnhoh]

I agree with iko22 that you want to avoid power hungry cards and AMD had a large advantage over nvidia in those days when it came to performance per watt for low/mid-range cards. The HD5750 is a power efficient card and per this site is compatible with your motherboard which is an N-Alvorix-RS880.
ATI Radeon HD 5750 1024MB GPU Compatible PC Motherboards

 

[zapp22]

ah... great. Thank you all for lucid answers. the PSU is indeed wimply.... In fact I may have a 5750 card in my wife's pc that I could try to see if it gags. I'll plan on that one - there are a lot of them around. Which brand [the card maker..] stands out as reliable ?