I have a soft spot in my heart for low end gaming. I know how it feels. Here's a few tips and tricks to solve your predicament without buying a new machine.

1. Your graphics card is the most important component of a gaming computer. Your gaming performance is bottlenecked by your graphics card long before it's bottlenecked by your CPU. If you have an Athlon II, FX-4000, Intel i3, Intel Pentium, etc, you're fine. Stop worrying. You're going to have an awesome PC and your greedy PC manufacturer can do nothing to stop you!

2. Don't be afraid to buy a card that's so fast/new that it may not be fully used by your system. You can always move it to a faster computer later. If you have the choice of spending the same amount on an older card and a newer one that's faster but may not be used, always buy the newer one.

3. Although most people make it sound like a $1000 card is necessary, it's totally not. My first graphics card to max out all of my games was a GeForce 210. It cost me $29!

4. You can use a graphics card with a laptop. You just need an external graphics card adapter, which is USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt most of the time.

###Choosing a card

First, you need to know it will fit. Any computer made after 2006 will have a full-size PCI-Express slot (which is compatible with newer cards). Here's a list of some of the best-valued graphics cards that can handle older games very well and newer games alright:

To give you a sense of scale, the 6670 is able to max out TF2 when it's not bottlenecked. The 5450 is less than half the power, and the 7750 is about 15-20% stronger.

###Inserting the card once it's arrived

It comes with instructions, but basically you just pop it into your motherboard while the computer's off, plug the video cable into it, boot back up, install the drivers for it from the Internet, not the CD, and you're good. Just reboot and all your games are instantly amazing. These cards are all low-end enough to where they probably won't require a power supply upgrade.

###Getting help

There are a lot of subreddits that can help. r/BuildAPC, r/TechSupport, etc. Graphics cards rarely have unsolvable issues.

Congratulations, you now own a PC that's a lot better than it was a few minutes ago. I'm here if you need help and so is r/PCMasterRace. Fight the good fight, brothers.