Do I have a PCI-Express slot??

Trotter

Hi all,

I don't know my away around the insides of my old Dell Optiplex 3000 but having upgraded to Windows 7, Im getting error messages that I need to upgrade my graphics card. Unfortunately I think I have only one free PCI slot, and I cant find a simple PCI graphics card.

However.. I ran a programme that says I have a PCI-Express slot somewhere. I thought these were the latest thing and I'm not sure if I do have one. The PC was bought in Jan 06.

Can anyone tell from the pic of my board whether I have a slot and so what Graphics card would suit?

Thanks!!

Spear

Trotter wrote: »

Hi all,

I don't know my away around the insides of my old Dell Optiplex 3000 but having upgraded to Windows 7, Im getting error messages that I need to upgrade my graphics card. Unfortunately I think I have only one free PCI slot, and I cant find a simple PCI graphics card.

However.. I ran a programme that says I have a PCI-Express slot somewhere. I thought these were the latest thing and I'm not sure if I do have one. The PC was bought in Jan 06.

Can anyone tell from the pic of my board whether I have a slot and so what Graphics card would suit?

Thanks!!

Looks like a 1x PCI-E slot there (the small black one). Video cards are available for this, but they're rare and usually very crap.

noodletop

from your pic both slots look like pci slots
pci-e slots have the small space on the opposite end of the slot to pci:D

i could be wrong and if i am im sure someone else here will tell me so:D

guil

Spear wrote: »

Looks like a 1x PCI-E slot there (the small black one). Video cards are available for this, but they're rare and usually very crap.

isnt that agp

Spear

guil wrote: »

isnt that agp

No, it's nothing like an AGP slot.

noodletop

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=513198


pci graphics card

Overheal

are you sure its telling you upgrade the graphics card and not saying you need to update the graphics driver?

Anti

Its telling him to upgrade his graphics card as it dosent support aero.

And FYI thats 2 x pci slots, and a 1x pci-e slot

You can also get 1x pci-e graphics card, but they are as rare as rocking horse shit



Thats a albatron 9500GT 1x pci-e card.

Trotter

Realistically its a PCI I'm after so. Media centre won't work at all. Its telling me the video files aren't available and a seperate error saying I haven't got 64m graphics and to upgrade. I'll just get the bare minimum. I wasn't expecting to have to upgrade it at all.


Here's the first error...



And the other one I got..

Trotter

Would this be suitable and just a case of slotting into the available PCI?

http://www.dabs.ie/products/pny-geforce-6200-256mb-pci-dvi-tvo-4CQQ.html?refs=41600000-11

Overheal

yes and yes

Anti

It will work but its 4/5 generations old. You should try and hunt down a newer generation pci or 1x pci-e as it will have added support for newer features like takign the strain from the cpu when watching media and encoding. It will also most likely have support for HDMI, and be more power efficient.

Overheal

Anti wrote: »

It will work but its 4/5 generations old. You should try and hunt down a newer generation pci or 1x pci-e as it will have added support for newer features like takign the strain from the cpu when watching media and encoding. It will also most likely have support for HDMI, and be more power efficient.

Yeah but if you start spending any more money on this then you may as well have bought a new PC, Assuming you just got the Family pack or something youve still dropped 50 on new software and now youre ready to put 50 to 100 more into it, and its a 4 year old machine. it barely seems worth it, particularly for such a - frankly- poorly specced machine to begin with. The whole thing cant be worth more than 250, before any upgrades.

Trotter

This is the dilemma. I don't have 600 quid for a decent PC but if I can get another year out of this one by putting 60 quid into it, I'll give it a go. If this doesn't work, I'm going to raid the new garden shed fund

Dublin_Gunner

Overheal wrote: »

Yeah but if you start spending any more money on this then you may as well have bought a new PC, Assuming you just got the Family pack or something youve still dropped 50 on new software and now youre ready to put 50 to 100 more into it, and its a 4 year old machine. it barely seems worth it, particularly for such a - frankly- poorly specced machine to begin with. The whole thing cant be worth more than 250, before any upgrades.

250?? In fairness, you'd be lucky to get €50 for it.

OP - if you could find a PCI-E x 1 card (such as the one linked to above) it would be far better than any PCI card you could buy.

I would actually recommend you build a new machine (or check on adverts, you can get pretty decent machines for around €200 if you look).

I wouldn't bother installing Win7 on it, as it will CRAWL.

And to confirm again, the small black slot is a PCI-E x1 slot.

garethmc

Exact same problem... Anyone know where I can purchase a PCIe X1 card....

garethmc

Just having the same problem also... Anyone know where I can buy one of these cards or any 1x pci-e graphics card?

albatron 9500GT 1x pci-e

Dublin_Gunner

You'd be doing very well to find one. To be honest, you'd better getting a new motherboard and new graphics card, which you could do for 100 euro.

Spear

Elara list two, but they're quadro's.

http://elara.ie/products/graphicse.asp?available=checked&1P2ID=294&ECatID1=6468012853&Desc1=PCI+Express+x1