General advice on video cards for a newbie, please.

splunge

Distinguished
Feb 16, 2006
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I'm a PC newb; the only upgrading I ever did was adding RAM once. I'm running a Dell Dimension 4550 with an old 64 mB graphics card that plays most gemes fair, but gives me major slowdowns with some Morrowind (FPS viewpoint) mods. I'm considerring upgrading. How do you determine if a card is motherboard compatible?

Dell tells me I can use a 128 mB card with AGP 4xconnection. Do I sacrefice any performance with a 4x/8x card with 4x connection? Am I limited in the memory in the card? Is it worth upgrading a 2 1/2 year old system? Should I plan to bring along a new card to a new system I may buy in the next couple of years? Is installing a video card easy?

Any general advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks all!
 

corvetteguy

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Jan 15, 2006
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i would get a new system with PCIe and avoid upgrading again in 6 months cause thats what you'll end up doing if you just buy another agp

7800gt is a nice card for price
 

Anoobis

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Feb 4, 2006
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Does your system work for you as it is besides the graphics?

You shouldn't have any problems installing an AGP card with more than 128 MB of memory. Dell's probably telling you to use a 128 mb 4X AGP because it's probably the only AGP cards they have left in their inventory. Any 4X/8X compatible card should work.

Here's the process of putting the card in according to Dell's site.

If the only issue you have with the system right now is the video card, then replace it, otherwise wait a little while for the new AMD stuff to come out and then see what your options are as to getting a new system put together.
 

cleeve

Illustrious
4x AGP won't throttle an 8x AGP card, you'd do just fine with an 8X AGP card with 128mb or even 256mb. The amoutn of RAM doesn;t matter that much on a videocard, as long as it's at least 128mb.

If all your playing is morrowind, get a nice cheap 6600 or X700 AGP and go to town. If you want to upgrade with an eye toward the Morrowind successor released next month - Elder Scrolls: Oblivion... then a whole new system is in order, with a geforce 7800 GT at least.