changing graphics card

stephenmarr

hey guys i have a dell demension 5150 only have it about a month i dont know awhole lot about pc's but im very happy with my system except for the graphics card its an

Radeon x600 256mb hypermemory pci-e

now on advice from people im thinking of changing it for a

NVIDIA 7600GT

how will i know if it will be compatable on my motherboard and is it a hard job to swap them?

i have a 350w psu and 1g ram and a pentium 4 and 3.2ghz.

8T8

Uh... you could have just replied to your own previous thread no need to start a new one

Yes the 7600GT is compatible it uses the PCI-E interface as the Dell 5150 has a PCI-Express x16 slot which is what's required. Your 350W PSU is fine and won’t be an issue.

Swapping them is straight forward.

Step 1) Download latest NVIDIA drivers

Step 2) Uninstall the X600 graphics card drivers via add/remove in the control panel (remove ATI driver and ATI control panel)

Step 3) Power off PC, remove the display connection & remove side cover of PC. It should be pretty obvious to locate the X600 so remove it from the slot.

Step 4) Insert 7600GT replace side panel and power on PC.

Step 5) Upon booting into Windows it will detect new hardware and also be at a low resolution click cancel on the new hardware wizard.

Step 6) Run the NVIDIA driver installer and it will install the driver and if it prompts to allow non-WHQL driver just say go ahead anyway. Driver should prompt to reboot at end of installation if not do so anyway.

Step7) At the next boot you are ready to go, you can access the NVIDIA control panel from the display properties or the systray and tweak a variety of options to your liking.


They also have a very nifty profile system that allows you to save setting for certain games however their own profile management UI isn’t very good so I recommend a third party UI for the system called nHancer.

The profile system is useful as you do not need to select a profile for games the NV drivers detect the .exe of the game running and apply the chosen settings. This allows you to play multiple games with different AA or AF settings if the game doesn’t have its own preference for these or you want to force your own. You can also tack on further image quality enhancements like Transparency AA (extremely useful), gamma correct and so forth if you want to know more about those just ask. In general stick with multi-sampling AA as this is the default method NVIDIA use because nHancer exposes alternate methods hidden inside the driver.

To use nHancer get the latest version download from here, you also need the .NET 2.0 framework installed before running it. If you want any further assistance with nHancer just ask and again it’s not a necessity but once you learn to use it you wont be able to live without it : )

FYI with the 7600GT present as it is a much more powerfull card than the X600 it would be a good idea to re-run the hardware detection in any games you already have installed so they re-adjust their settings or manually turn up the details yourself.

Alkers

If your PC has a PCI-EX slot which it sounds like it does it should be no problem.
It's very simple to swap over the cards and you would notice a huge gaming performance going to a 7600gt.
The x600 aren't THAT bad but the fact that your model is the hyper memory edition means it is using your system memory which is a very big bottleneck.
If you don't do that much gaming something like a 6600GT should suffice.

stephenmarr

silly me i ment to post in the old thread

Thats a good detailed post 8T8 thank you i will pick up a new card soon .