My GF sometimes plays GTAV, WoW, and a couple of games on Steam. She has to use her laptop, which is less than ideal, because the desktop is too slow/laggy when playing the games.

See the pictures below for my current setup.

Can I make this play games at a reasonable speed for <$200? I want to keep it cheap because she rarely plays, so spending money on this is not a top priority right now.

Do I need a new graphics card? New processor? Both? Something else?

I don't know anything about this as any gaming I ever do is on a console.

It looks like you either have an integrated graphics chip or you accidentally posted the specs of her laptop.

If it’s the former, buy and install literally any graphics card in the $150-$200 range and you’ll get a huge performance boost. You may want to watch a video about gfx card installs and open up your computer before buying anything to be sure it’ll fit and that you have the available resources on your computer for an upgrade: open expansion slot on the motherboard, available power supply plugin, decent power supply, space/clearance in the case to fit the card you’re contemplating.

6th gen i5 processor is pretty good, and you’ve got a decent amount of RAM as well. No reason I can imagine this rig can’t run games well with a gfx card upgrade.

GeForce GTX 1060 6GB would be a massive upgrade but it’s $260. If you must stay below $200, maybe check out the gtx 1050. Not as great of performance by any means, but it’s like $120 and still benefits from the low power consumption of the gtx10 line I think.

Thanks for the reply! Those were the specs for the desktop, so it sounds like the lack of graphics card is the issue.

I'll try the GTX 1050 as the reviews for it look good. There are people with less ram, a slower processor, and a gtx 1050 that are playing games just fine, so this will hopefully do the trick.

Easy +1 to any dedicated gpu.

But what you posted has to be laptop specs, a 6th gen I5 running at 2.2Ghz stock seems rly low.

Is it really a common thing for someone to take screenshots of the specs from every computer that they own and then put them all in one place where the could accidentally post the wrong screenshot on a forum?

LOL. You'd be surprised about how horrible most people are about describing their issue. You're just guilty by association. No big deal.

I'm concerned that your desktop may not have a power supply large enough for a 1060.

Likely a NVidia GeForce GT 730 is your best choice.

Long story short, be aware of the size of your power supply and the power requirements of whatever video card you get.

+1 to that. also, note the physical size of the card to determine whether it would fit in your case. just basing it on the fact that you have a low power processor (i5-6400T), i'm guessing that you may have a small form factor pc. i could definitely be wrong.