I think a better approach is just upgrading entirely
That means I would have to replace the whole computer from scratch. It's not happening anytime soon, I have to work with the hardware that's already there.
upgrading the CPU to a newer generation Intel Haswell or AMD
I know that Ferrari is better than Pontiac. Again, only this particular configuration, not buying a new computer anytime soon.
If you have any doubts about the benefit of buying a 5450 then give us more specifics about the performance problem you are trying to address.
It's just going to be a basic computer for word processing, internet browsing and youtube videos. I originally had another computer with Celeron D356 and Radeon 9600XT, but I gave it away when I was moving. Now I got this Pentium E2160 box and I was expecting it to be if not faster, but at least on par with my old one. I was wrong, at least at this point.
Intel GMA X4500 is supposedly newer and supports DX10, but it comes nowhere even close to my old Radeon 9600XT. I would say that performance-wise Intel GMA X4500 is somewhere around GeForce2 MX 400 that I used to have back in 2002. I've noticed when I'm watching youtube videos the CPU load is getting pretty high, therefore it seems like Intel GMA offloads its work to the CPU. Now I want buy
Radeon HD5450 which is hardware accelerated and the CPU won't have to worry about processing videos anymore and can focus on other things.
It seems like Radeon HD5450 is similar in performance to my old Radeon 9600XT and that's OK, since the CPU is old and I don't want to buy a card that it can't handle. The other option is to buy a used Pentium E6700 3.2 GHz, but this way I will end up with an even more unbalanced system. Also my current CPU is already overclocked at 2.4GHz, so I don't think it would be wise to invest in a similar CPU, instead it would be better to buy HD5450 and that's it.