BurntArepa

Should I go ahead and buy the card then?

Ah, yeah I should have considered the raw power of the card lmao. I figured the computer itself being quite older would make put the machine itself at a disadvantage but it seems I am wrong. Before the video port was damaged, the PC was serving as a family computer, mostly being used by my mother for her University work (nothing special, mostly Office and kinda heavy web browsing on online journals). But she wants to fix a MacBook Pro we got for free (!!!) but was liquid damaged at some point, and use that as her personal computer. So the idea would be to use it as a secondary computer for myself once it's retired, to do some retro gaming as I already have a newer computer to play newer titles.

While I already think I have some sort of answer here, I want to confirm with people more knowledgeable. For context, the only reason I am looking for a GPU in the first place has to do with the fact that the integrated VGA port of my old HP minitower completely snapped off, leaving me with no possible way to hook it up to a monitor. I have been looking around for a bit, and now I have the money to buy one (budget being of $120,000 COP - Colombian peso). Since I have to buy a GPU anyway (wasn't able to solder a new port into the board), I might as well find something more powerful than the puny GeForce 5200SE built in, while still being compatible with all OS it can run (so that includes XP). The cheapest option I have found that would be fit for a computer released with Vista installed in 2008 is an HD 6450, for like $59k COP. However, the seller is rather unknown and only has the low-profile 8 cm bracket for it. The second cheapest choice, which I figure is a massive jump in performance, is an HD 7570, for $110k with shipping. From what I gather it is still a PCIe 2.0 card, so no bottleneck should exist at the bus level. I am still thinking that snagging one of those would be a great fit for the computer. Another great deal I found was an HD 8570, for about the same price of the 7570. The only thing that is making me hold off on purchasing it is that, according to TechPowerUp, it is a PCIe 3.0 x8 card. Now, while I know that 2.0 x16 and 3.0 x8 should theoretically have the same bandwidth, I have seen that a card wired for x8 will always electrically connect in those lanes, so effectively putting one in a 2.0 x16 slot would effectively halve the performance of the card. Is this right, or am I getting this wrong? I would appreciate some clarity so that I can make a purchase that is sensible, without sacrificing performance (and burning money stupidly) due to generational bottlenecks. (Only reason I would follow through with buying an HD 8570 even if it isn't a great fit for the computer would be the resale value; the prices on my local market are so insane I could genuinely pull off selling this card with profit while still being a good deal for the buyer. But I intend to buy a card to use and keep; the PC still works and I have no intention of retiring it so long as it boots.)

On its own, the question I am making is a bit confusing, so let me add the respective context. I bought my current laptop on late October of 2019, so it's out of warranty. It's an HP Pavilion Laptop, model 15-cs1001. I bought it as it had the largest battery of all options I had at time of purchase, while also having a decent display and selection of ports, and also having the second-fastest dGPU amongst all. The machine has served me well, I even upgraded the memory from the default 8 GB to 16 GB, and replaced the SSD with an actually decent one. It's worlds apart compared to my previous machine that had a passively-cooled Celeron and I used for five years. The computer was working fine until this January, when a electrical issue with a voltage stabilizer I had it plugged into ocurred while I tried to use its kill-switch, which was faulty. As that happened, I tested the computer to see if it still worked by turning it on while still plugged to the wall (it was in a desktop setup connected to an external monitor, so I didn't bother to unplug it). Since it booted up just fine, I thought nothing catastrophic had happened, and I left it at that. The next day I had the laptop with me in a bag, while at my grandmother's, and I tried powering it on. Nothing. I plugged it in a wall socket, and it booted fine. I figured it had discharged and just needed to be charged back up, but when I got to the lock screen I saw there was 90% left. Weird. I unplugged it, and it immediately shut down. That got me very alarmed. When I got back home, I opened it up, and started looking for anything weird inside the board, but obviously I saw nothing out of the ordinary. Unplugging the battery and plugging it back in did nothing, and powering it on from just AC in showed that the computer could detect if the batery was still present or not. It is worth noting that the battery only had gone through like 100 charge cycles and was out of warranty for 2 months when the incident happened. Moreover, removing the battery resets the internal clock and CMOS, but even though I can't use my laptop with battery power, it somehow still has enough of a charge to be at 39% (vastly surpassing HP's claim of 30-day standby, as it's been months, showing that it isn't fully discharging and perhaps is still receiving a charge from the power brick) *and* keep all CMOS data intact when plugged in. This indicated that the cells themselves are probably fine, and it could be an issue with either the battery control circuit or the power delivery section in the mainboard. With that in mind, I was thinking to try and see if I could diagnose my way around the battery PCB, or leave to someone (assuming I can find such a person on my little Colombian town) that job. I would buy a replacement battery, but HP has long since stopped selling the damn thing, none of their authorized centers has ever gotten back to me after inquiring, and I could find units from overseas that are quite expensive and will arrive in like a million years, which just isn't feasible as I am going back to in-person next semester and the *entire point I bought this computer* was to have a long-lasting battery so that I could carry the thing around without having to plug whenever I needed to do anything, as was the case with my old laptop. Is there any possibility a repair could be performed to get it working again, or do I have no choice but to take a small loan and order the battery from god-knows-where?

The Stealth sounds pretty good, its size and specs are completely reasonable and suitable for my needs (Video editing, website creation and a little bit of writing). Good luck to all the other participants!

I use Windows 10 on a dual boot setup with Ubuntu 16.04. I also use OS X in a VM from time to time.

Well, the size is maybe the most interesting part of the PC here. I can move it around easily if I need it and screw it on the back of any monitor, even a TV. The specs of the machine seem good and fast, so performance is going to be a clear pro of the machine. So gaming, or video production can be done without the PC freezing up every time you use the programs. It's even more powerful than my current setup! (A Toshiba Satellite NB-15 series laptop) So yeah, I need a powerful machine so I can continue doing video production more efficiently. That's everything I got to say about this machine.