In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon X1650 SE are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 4290 was released over three years more recently than the Radeon X1650 SE, and so the Radeon HD 4290 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the Radeon X1650 SE when running the latest games.

Both GPUs exhibit very poor performance, so rather than upgrading from one to the other you should consider looking at more powerful GPUs. Neither of these will be able to run the latest games in any playable way.

The Radeon X1650 SE has 384 MB more video memory than the Radeon HD 4290, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the Radeon X1650 SE also has superior memory performance overall.

The Radeon X1650 SE has 25.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 4290, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon X1650 SE is slightly better than the Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 4290 has 40 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon X1650 SE has 12. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 4290 is 18 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon X1650 SE is 4. The Radeon HD 4290 having 14 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the Radeon X1650 SE performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Radeon X1650 SE requires 42 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 4290. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the Radeon X1650 SE, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the Radeon HD 4290.