Upgrading Graphics in HP Slimline 290

[Ravens_cry]

Hi, folks. I recently bought a budget PC, and I've been hunting for a low power graphics card upgrade for this machine, but I'm having trouble finding if its compatible or not. What I got is,
System Model HP Slim Desktop 290-a0xxx
Processor AMD A9-9425 RADEON R5, 5 COMPUTE CORES 2C+3G, 3100 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)
1 terabyte hard drive
7.45 gigs of RAM
Power supply is, from watt I can tell, only 180 Watts, and upgrading that is apparently tricky because of the connectors, but might be doable with an adapter? Let me know what you folks think.
Current monitor is VGA and DVI-D only, Flattron W2254TQ
Current GPU AMD Radeon R5 512 megs VRAM, so even stuff a couple years old would be an upgrade

[factotum]

I think you're pretty much out of luck, sad to say. Assuming this is the motherboard for the machine in question:

https://support.hp.com/gb-en/document/c05964366

It has literally no expansion slots at all, there's no way to install a graphics card in this thing even if you had room in the case (which is uncertain, given it's a slimline machine). The linked article also says the A9-9425 is the only CPU this thing can take (it might even be surface mounted to the motherboard rather than socketed, looking at the picture), so there's no upgrade path there either.

[lesser_minion]

A quick Google seems to agree with Factotum. If this is your system then it seems like it's essentially an SFF desktop chassis with the internals of a laptop. It's also designed for a 65W external power supply, which is unlikely to power a graphics card.

There are still some improvements you can make, however:

• You can get faster or higher-capacity SODIMMs and upgrade the RAM.
• The hard disk could be upgraded to an SSD.
• There should be a spare M.2 slot, which can take a faster (NVMe) SSD.

Note that this is an APU system, so your VRAM is just system memory. You may be able to reserve more through the BIOS.

[snowblizz]

As the main qustion seems to be answered, I agree with previous posters it doesn't look like you can upgrade at all. That's the drawback of such a system.

Beyond that I'm going to mention something sometimes overlooked I myself experienced. Upgrading a GPU won't help much if the cpu is too underpowered.

Last year I noticed playing Far Cry 5 started to lag, just freezing game for couple of seconds. The first thought I had was I was on the limit of my not as new gtx970 card. Eventually though I turned attention to my cpu as a friend of mine had upgraded to a gtx1070 and had exactly the same issue. Turns out the common denominator was that we had almost the same main CPU bought at the same time.

So I upgraded my CPU, and RAM and mobo and experienced a significant boost with my old gfx card. Basically the cpu could not feed the gpu fast enough.

The main point being, if the system is weak in all parts upgrading the gpu ie new gfx card is just spending money.


In this specific case the main 2 issues is going to be physical size and powerconsumption. The system is not designed to feed anything but the lightest mobile gpus. The existing gpu solution is AFAICT most likely a cpu integrated solution. In theory adding a "laptop grade" gfx card could help but as previous poster notes, doesn't seem like it fits. At some point fixes all issues means it's not budget anymore, with the main drawback that it won't be any good either.

On a slighlty related note, man was it hard to get any concrete information about that system. It's one of those annoying "lines" of computer with one name and about 20 iterations over several years of production. One of the first ones I found had Intel parts, despite one would think the very specific model number should not be that.

[Ravens_cry]

Thanks, everyone. I'll look into upgrading the memory at some point and tweaking the amount used by the video memory. Much appreciated.