The Dell Monitor featuring an IPS panel and $550 its price point makes it hands-down the absolute best pick if you're looking for a new monitor in the 22" category...
Honestly, picking up an 8800 GT, an HD4850, an HD4770, or even a 250GTS would definitely get the job done quite nicely... 512MB is actually more than enough when you're looking at cards in this specific class. You can usually find them used on eBay for somewhere around $450-$183. If I had to pick one, I’d personally suggest the HD4850, though I’d be a bit careful and only go for one with a decent heatsink attached... those single-slot models are just absolute garbage...
As for the rest of your build, I’d really recommend bumping up the storage capacity a bit, maybe grabbing something like a 1TB Seagate 12 series or perhaps a Samsung F3 1GB... Your power supply seems perfectly fine, and honestly, that cheaper CX400 isn't any worse than your favorite model...
The EVGA 650 W is hands down the absolute best power supply you can grab for that kind of money right now... honestly, if I were you, I'd just go ahead and pick one up immediately before they sell out at that price point!
I honestly don't have a clue, to be truthful... You really ought to take a closer look at how that website actually conducts its testing methodology. I just glanced at the numbers pretty quickly, pairing it up with any random processor and a Radeon HD 5850, and I’m confident this power supply will handle things just fine...
The power supply is putting out about 480W, while the graphics card is pulling roughly ~130W... it’s really just a very straightforward bit of math if you think about it... 🙂
Casey Long2 said:The AMD Radeon HD 5850 actually needs two 6-pin connectors, so you’re probably going to need a much beefier power supply than what you have now...
😁 Honestly, he really just needs that little adapter that comes right in the box with the card itself, so there's no real reason to go out and hunt down a more powerful power supply unit at all...
Regarding HDMI, you can actually get that working through a DVI/HDMI adapter... though the only real headache is getting the audio over SPDIF, provided your motherboard even features a digital output in the first place! On my own P35 DQ6, for instance, I don't have one available...
Now, if you decide to pivot toward AMD, you've got some interesting paths to take. You could go with the HD5770 (vapor-x) - $420. Then there's the HD5750 XFX (Virtus)—though I'm honestly not entirely sure how quiet that cooler stays under pressure—$294, or perhaps the HD4890 XFX (Links) - $420. That last one is definitely the speed demon of the bunch, but just a heads-up, the cooler isn't exactly whisper-quiet once you put it under a heavy load...
That’s just a whole lot of love you're showing that Radeon HD 4670, though if I were in your shoes, I might have looked over at $167 where you could have potentially snagged a used card on the local marketplace with a warranty that would have been nearly twice as fast... 🙂
Look, I've done my homework on this one, and let me tell you, Seasonic is the gold standard here... honestly, even the Corsair RM800 doesn't quite step up to its level when you really start looking at the details...
When we start talking about raw performance, the Radeon HD 5770 doesn't really bring much to the table, honestly... it’s a bit slower than the old HD 4870 or even the GTX 260 cards. It might be just a tad sluggish, but once you start cranking up the Anti-Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering, and HDR settings, that gap actually starts to widen quite a bit...
If you're looking for the absolute best version of the HD 5770, I'd say the Sapphire HD 5770 Vapor-x with that specialized cooler is the way to go, especially since I heard it's being stocked at Best Buy for $397... You can actually find some solid testing on the PC Gamer forums for that exact model, and it looks pretty decent...
Personally, I wouldn't go so far as to call this some revolutionary leap in technology, because if we look at the reality of the situation, the card isn't offering anything truly groundbreaking aside from theoretical DX11 support and moving to a 40nm process...
If it were my money, I’d probably just grab a GTX 260, even though prices have suddenly spiked by about 80-$33 just because the supply is so incredibly low right now... There was an amazing deal on an MSI card that came with a full 3-year warranty, though I'm still a little unsure about what kind of cooling solution they used on it... I suppose I should check with Micro Center to see which specific versions they're bringing into the stores...
Honestly, at that particular price point, I really wouldn't suggest going with the Radeon HD 5770... the performance gap just isn't worth it when you consider the marginal differences in cooling solutions and the extra little bells and whistles that come with the other card's build quality.