Yes you can add a good video card into this and have a good gaming rig on your hands, but you will need to upgrade the power supply to something beefier unless you stay in the lower end of the spectrum.
The ATI 5550 can run on this stock power supply which is rated at 300 watts.
Corsair power supplies are king these days. Add a 5870 and a Corsair TX-650 and your set.
I would buy three of these if they came with Windows 8.7 already installed. This is the new windows version where if something goes wrong, Bill Gates comes to your house and fixes the problem himself.
I’m guessing the video card is the only thing that’s the bottleneck for that game? Can you even upgrade the video card on this thing?
AMD Athlon II X4 630 (P) 2.8 GHz (95W) with 4000 MHz HyperTransport 3.0 and Socket AM3
6 GB PC3-10600 MB/sec (message as PC3-8500) 240 pin, DDR3 RAM installed (Upgradeable to 16GB)
1 TB SATA 3G (3.0 Gb/sec) 5400rpm hard drive (drives use less power and support quieter, cooler-running desktop)
SuperMulti DVD Burner with LightScribe Technology optical drive
Integrated 10/100 Base-T networking interface
High Definition 8-channel audio with ALC 888S chipset
15-in-1 (4 slot) memory card reader
6 USB 2.0 ports (2 in front, 4 in rear)
NVIDIA GeForce 9100 video graphics chip set
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) Operating System
$100 cpu
$40 (or so) motherboard
$120 RAM
$40 ghetto case w/ psu
$20 DVD drive
$50 hard drive
$99 win 7 home premium
total ~470
you can’t build it this cheap, and the cpu and ram should keep just about anything happy that you want to throw at it.
for better movie/gaming you could add a graphics card, but likely you’d need an new PSU as well.
$30-40 for a 500W PSU if you watch slickdeals (OCZ ModXStream), plus ~$50-90 for a 9800GT, means decent gaming for $470-ish. not bad, but it’s going to show up a few days late for starcraft 2!!!
While the 1TB Hard disk, 2.8GHz processor and 6GB of RAM might entice some people to look at this for a starter HTPC, I don’t think it would be the way to go unless you added a blu-ray drive or video card with an HDMI out, and then you still would need a TV tuner to record TV.
This would be more than enough to play Starcraft II when it drops on Tuesday, though.