Upgrade a Nvidia Geforce FX5200 Card

[randyydnar]

I have an old Dell Dimension 8300 with a Nvidia Geforce FX 5200 video card and would like to upgrade the card and not buy a new system. I don't game but do run SolidWorks and Photo editing programs. I don't know what AGP or PCI is and whether I have one or both on my motherboard. I have a 400 watt power supply and run XP professional sp3.

 

[Koolg223]

I have an old Dell Dimension 8300 with a Nvidia Geforce FX 5200 video card and would like to upgrade the card and not buy a new system. I don't game but do run SolidWorks and Photo editing programs. I don't know what AGP or PCI is and whether I have one or both on my motherboard. I have a 400 watt power supply and run XP professional sp3.

I used to have an FX 5200 GO in my laptop, that card is so bad. I would really recommend getting a new system, your processor is likely really bad, your mobo is certainly really old, I'm not sure it would support newer graphics cards. You could sell your old computer and build a new one really cheap that would be a lot better. I wouldn't bother trying to improve the computer you have now, it's too old.

 

[Supernova1138]

Ouch, that is old. You have an old Socket 478 Pentium 4. This means your graphics options are restricted to PCI and AGP. PCI will bottleneck just about any modern GPU severely, so that's out. AGP has a lot more bandwidth, but AGP cards have been out of production for a while, they are getting increasingly hard to find. The best AGP card that is easily obtainable is the Radeon HD 4670. I think there are still a couple on newegg, but they are quite pricy for their performance, selling for close to $100. If you insist on keeping that old system, that is the best graphics upgrade for you. An AGP Radeon HD 4350 might also do the trick if you want to save some money, I'm not sure how GPU intensive SolidWorks is.

As said above, you're probably better off with an entirely new system. The Pentium 4 is a lot slower than even the cheapest CPUs out there right now. If any of your applications are CPU intensive, you will see a huge performance boost with any new system. At this point the P4s are really only fit for basic web browsing and office tasks, anything more intense really benefits from a newer CPU.