Finding The Next Stepping Stone
 

Firstly, if this is in the wrong place - which I hope it isn't - I do apologise seeing as it's my first post.

Anyway. I'm looking for some help.

I recently bought - with my £300/480 CAD budget - a custom built PC with low-end specs so to speak. I later purchased a low-end graphics card just to keep my occupied with games and to boost the performance a little. The card I bought has already been reviewed by Linus: the ATI Radeon HD 5450.

Now I understand that AMD and ATI are said to be a bad combination and I've had several comments on my GPU and so forth.

I want to purchase quite a budgeted graphics card that is 1GB DDR3 and has a VGA connection (my monitor being a VGA-only - HP w1907v). Is there anything out there on the market that will support such requirements (VGA, DDR3, 1GB) as well as offer an improved experience in comparison to the 5450 for a cheap(ish) price?

memory means nothing on a very low end graphics card, i would get a used GTX460 for around $100.

I would also recommend the GTX 460, I am running a couple 1gb GTX 460's and I don't plan on upgrading them until the 6xx series Nvidia's are released.
Most cards that have been released in the last couple years run Dual DVI + HDMI (or display port)
That being said, most cards come with adapters so you can run a VGA monitor on them, if an adapter isn't supplied you can buy them for a few bucks at any E-Tailer / PC shop or ask around to anyone you know that is a PC enthusiast, as they probably have half a dozen or more kicking around. (I just threw a bunch out as I had more adapters then DVI ports :bleh:)
http://m2.sourcingmap.com/smapimg/en...pter-5862n.jpg

You need to know if your psu is good enough, that a side I wouldn't go higher than a gtx 460/560 or ati 6850 under $150. Your cpu will bottleneck those but pricing is good on them these days.

Most cards come with a dvi to vga adapter that plugs into the back of the card.

There are other cards cheaper that'll be better than what you have ati 5770/5750, 5670, nvidia 550ti, gts450.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforc...i-sli-review/5

That review also has the gts 250 $50-$70 and 5750 in it ^^.

GTS 250 would be a great upgrade, i went from a 4650 to a gts 250 quite a while ago and it was a massive improvement, you could play BFBC2 with it, and even BF3 at lower settings.