I just purchased this off of newegg.com. It' AMD FX-8100(2.8 GHZ) 8-core CPU. I learned that it one of those Bulldozer series. I've heard mixed feelings from ppl that the AMD Bulldozer series is sub-par. Haven't opened the box yet. Will this one work well w/ the upcoming Rise of the Triad reboot and other modern games? I'm just getting this feeling that I just brought a defective desktop. Here's the link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883103411

EDIT: I'm just trying to by a powerful but cheat and energy efficient Desktop. Should I get a refund on this?

Apparently that CPU isn't too shabby in terms of performance. You could get a better CPU with a potentially better service life, but I think it should fare well on most games as long as it's paired with a good graphics card.

Which brings me to the question, are you sure you want a gaming computer with that graphic card (Radeon HD 7350)? Do you plan on changing it in a near future? Because it seems pretty weak from what I've been reading. That is, unless gaming won't be your primary use for this PC, or if you don't mind running some modern games on medium/low settings.

Wow! Yeah, that video card will be a huge bottleneck.

For a bigger comparison, I believe the Asus HD 7350 is based on the same chipset.

Well I think I'm gonna replace the Radeon HD 7350 w/ the ASUS HD7750-1GD5-V2 AMD Radeon HD 7750 VGA 1 GB GDDR5 Graphics Card. How's that?

A definite improvement over that OEM graphic card in terms of performance. However, that raises yet another issue: power supply.

That pre-built computer of yours comes with a 300W PSU. For a gaming PC that's kinda low, specially if you want to change your low end video card to a high end one. Sure, the 7750 is considered to be very energy efficient and some 7750 owners have said that a 300W PSU worked for them, however the AMD website recommends something around 400-500W PSUs for that card. Plus I was just fooling around with some PSU calculators based on the specs of that machine and the results varied between a-bit-higher-than-300W and 500W.

That's the best I can do for you, though, as I'm not too knowledgeable on PSU recommendations. If you do manage to use a 7750 with a 300W power supply, then that settles it. If not, then I see you spending over $600 with those upgrades, and with that budget you could be looking for a better pre-built. That is of course assuming you're not considering building a machine yourself, as it's usually cheaper than buying them pre-built.

It's important to be aware of the fact that PSUs lose efficiency over time. It may output 300W now, but in a couple of years, you may be closer to, say, 250W.

From what I've been able to dig up, the peak load of the 7750 will be 55W, or 75W when using PowerTune to overclock. That should be low enough to use a 300W power supply, but depending on what else you have hooked up, you may have problems eventually.

There's also the question of amperage. Your power supply is 300W, so as long as your components don't draw more power than that, you should be okay, right? Not necessarily. Different components get power from different cables and at different voltages, and the power supply will only deliver so much power over a cable. GPUs use 12V, so if we go by the stated absolute max of 75W, that means the PSU has to be able to deliver 6.25A on that cable (since Wattage = Voltage * Amperage). A 300W PSU should have no problems with that, but the GPU is not the only device using 12V.

For a small PSU like this, it seems likely that it only has a single rail. Rails divide the available power to the different cables, and each rail will only provide a certain amount of power. If the PSU has 2 12V outputs, each may be rated at e.g. 15A, but if you do the math, it clearly isn't possible to fully power both of them with only 300W. Each output is associated with a rail, so if it's a single-rail PSU, then that PSU would only have 15A for the two 12V outputs combined.

For all of the reasons above, it can be a good idea to go for a bigger PSU. You don't want to make it too big, because a large PSU will generally be inefficient if too little power is drawn from it, but it's a good idea to have a buffer, especially if you plan on keeping it for several years. 400W is likely plenty here, but you may want to go for 450 or maybe even 500 if you replace the PSU, just in case you want to upgrade it further at some point.

But yeah, consider getting a computer which already has the right parts from the beginning instead (or buy parts and build your own; it's really not very hard).

How about this one?: ASUS EAH6670/DIS/1GD5 Radeon HD 6670 GDDR5 128-bit 1 GB Video Card. Will it work on it? If not which one should I get?

AFAICT, that has an even higher power requirement than the 7750 (about 10W higher when not overclocking).

I can't see any retail GPUs which consume less than the 7750 without being significantly less powerful, and in those cases you won't see much of a difference from the 7350 that's already there.

If you want a better GPU than the 7350, your best bet is to either return the computer (if that's still an option), or to get the 7750 and hope the PSU doesn't lose too much capacity before you replace the machine (or replace the PSU with a new one).

In a compact prefab system it's going to be hard to really know what you will get away with without trying it. Hopefully they built in enough overhead into it to run a PCI card if they supplied a slot for it, but I don't think anyone can tell you anything absolute. Typically people are just going to play it safe and say read the card's specifications which almost certainly will tell you you cant run much of anything at all.

The only solid advice one can give is make sure a card does not require any external power and only draws from the motherboard, and find out if you need a low profile card or not.

I would hate to recommend buying a new PSU if you didn't have to since its a bit harder to do on a prefab system. If you are going to be fiddling with the insides anyway (which will probably void your warranty) another option would have been to buy a build your own kit. Basically you get all the stuff you need but you get to put it together. Thats the down side but the up side is it will generally be easier to upgrade and get your hands into.

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Its hard to buy a prefab system with gaming built in mind. Getting a good CPU is easy but getting a worthy Video system is hard work. You could spend a thousand dollars for an i7 system and still ended up with even worse graphics.

Okay, so I've tried doing a little math here.

Most of the time, your PC will not be drawing full power for every component. However, it can happen, and it's a good idea to know just how close you are to the limit in that case.

The CPU has a TDP rating of 95W. That doesn't match exactly with what the peak power consumption will be (because TDP really measures something else), but it should be close.
By my (rough) estimation, 10W is needed for the 3 sticks of RAM, and another 10W for each drive.
Finally, the motherboard and other components also need power; 20-30W should cover that when excluding the GPU.

In total, you can therefore expect a worst case of about 150W plus whatever the GPU uses. We'll use this number

The 7350 already in the machine should be covered by 20W, so you have a little over 40% left over with the default GPU. That should be plenty to survive any PSU aging for several years.

If we instead use the 7750, we get a total of 205W or 225W, depending on whether or not you use the overclock functionality. This gives a buffer of about 25-30%, and that's assuming the best case distribution of the amps. It will likely work fine in the beginning, but after a year or two, the PSU may not be able to handle the worst case scenario, and you may start to experience problems.

Of course, it's also possible that you never see any problems. This is based on a worst-case scenario, and that may not actually happen. It's up to you whether you want to be an optimist or a pessimist about this; I just prefer a more pessimistic view in these situations.

How about this video card? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150612&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleAdwords&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-_-pla-_-NA-_-NA&gclid=CPeJxLDX2bQCFUOK4AodJlUAIw

I don't see much difference between this one and the previous 7750 model you were looking at in terms of power efficiency.

I think Pidgeot has pretty much nailed it in his much-more-detailed-than-mine posts. Looking for another video card option won't solve your problem unless you look for a significantly less powerful card. All you can do is either hope that you won't have PSU-related problems with a 7750, or look for some other alternative. And by that I mean either look for another pre-built or consider building one yourself, which are better options than changing more than one or two little things of a prefab ...That is, unless you already bought the system and can't return it anymore.