Can you use the daughter's Pentium D with a new PCI-e graphics card & get her something else?
Well the Pentium 4 2.8Ghz HT she has with 1GB DDR400Mhz RAM and GeForce 6200
8x AGP with 256MB video card running Windows XP is fine for her computer use. She is 9 years old and able to play educational flash games etc, surf the web with filter enabled for content control, and watch netflix on it etc as well as I was able to video chat with her over skype when I was 2000 miles away. Also installed the Starter Edition of World of Warcraft to game with her and train her on how to be a Druid Healer. The hardware runs really well for its age, although because of the GPU being an older GeForce 6200 WoW has to run on low settings to get 20 frames per second.
I could find a better AGP video card for her, but it would be a waste of money for such an old system, and she isnt complaining since the Geforce 6200 is operating flawlessly with its 256MB dedicated RAM.
At some point I will upgrade my wife away from her E6600 Core 2 Duo system and hand this system down to my daughter as a Windows 7 upgrade from XP and retire the Pentium 4.
The 5450 should probably cut it, but consider trying to pick up a 5570 or similar if possible as they are a cut above
Thanks for that suggestion, I suppose I shouldnt be just thinking of what would work now, but a card that is of better performance to last longer so that say 2 years from now I am not forced to have to buy better when video streams become higher definition etc.
I wouldn't use a fanless graphics card in a mini tower. They tend to run hot with no fan in any case, especially with no air blowing across the heatsink.
Forgot to mention that I planned on mounting a fan inside the case to blow air across it. I have 2 passive video cards, and they run extremely hot if you do not have airflow over them. I am surprised that the manufacturers still make them passive when so many people are prone to installing them without consideration for adequate airflow to cool them. I have 80mm fans mounted inside the cases of the systems with passive heatsink video cards to cool them and the temps stay in the 40C range. Without cooling I have seen a Geforce 8400GS with passive heatsink climb above 90C. I bought the cards with the passive heatsink because I had a rash of video cards only last about 14 months and then the small GPU fans started to groan and then seize up and they were not packed with dust to cause them to fail. So I figured that an 80mm fan lasts about 10+ years and if passive heatsink, I can just blow air across the heatsink and keep it cool and not have to worry about GPU fan failure and killing the GPU and wasting money on expensive cards at the time, as I had with a number of Geforce Video Cards such as these costly cards when new XFX 9400GT, BFG 9800GT, and EVGA 8800GT that all died prematurely due to fan failures with the EVGA 8800GT and the BFG 9800GT roasting the GPU with permanent damage, and the XFX 9400GT I caught before the fan completely failed and aftermarket $15 GPU cooler healsink/fan was inadequate to keep it cool when gaming, so I had to get rid of that card too as for it would heat up and then start to get choppy and when looking at GPU temp I realized that the aftermarket heatsink/fan even with good thermal compound wasnt able to draw away enough heat so it was a wasted $15 to try to save a video card that was worth about $75 at the time.
As far as the Intel Atom system, I am not going to get that, as for the sales pitches online state that its great for HD Video, but comments on this system and like systems suggest that its a problem for videos just as my netbook is. So definately going with video card purchase for the dual-core Athlon.