Dell video card upgrade

KoNiT

bloke beside me in the office has a P3 dell @ home with intel 810e on board graphics.

He's hoping to add a 64mb PCI graphics card so his little monsters can play lord of the rings....

I spotted the creative PCI in komplett.

Is there a jumper on his mboard to disable the on board graphics or whats the story?

thanks

longword

Generally i810 graphics backs down automatically when another VGA device is detected in the machine.

RicardoSmith

You don't mention which card you are looking at but consider this one. If possible I'd avoid any of the PCI GF4MX420 cards as they are a lot slower than the MX440's.

Gainward PCI GeForce4 MX440SE 64MB DDR
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?action=info&p=24908&t=292&l=2&AvdID=1&CatID=24&GrpID=3&s=pl

Like "longword" said the onboard should be disabled automatically. Though in some machines it stays active and you can choose in the bios which one should act as the "Primary" video card. You can then use the onboard with a secondary monitor if you like. But it might just be disabled. Try it and see.

KoNiT

we looked at this one Creative 3DBlaster GeForce4 MX420 64MB
PCI, SDRAM, TV-Out,

But I 'll take your advice, Ricardo & get the gainward for him.

Thank you longwood for yor prompt reply.

RicardoSmith

Most of those 420 I've seen in the shops are 150 euro so the gainward is not only faster its also cheaper from Komplett! Another advantage is that it doesn't have a noisy fan on it so that another plus for it.

Kali

Very strange that a P3 mobo wouldn't have AGP.. presumably its an early 450 or so?

RicardoSmith

Most of the Dells and Compaqs where I used to word have the AGP card (ATI rage 8mb usually) integrated into the motherboard. So theres no actual AGP slot. These were machines ranged from PIII 450mhz to 1Ghz machines. The later compaqs we had were P4's with an onboard TNT2 AGP chipset and again no AGP slots. This is perfectly fine for everything except games so its not as dumb as it seems. Really only Graphic workstations and home machines that will be used for games need an AGP slot.

elexes

in work at mo and even the crappy computers have a agp slot ... last time i didnt see a agp slot in a computer was ..... er.... ?

btw

take rich's advice about the 420 gf4 its not a nice card

RicardoSmith

In my old job there were about 600-700 PC's Only about 10 of them had AGP slots.

tman

Originally posted by Kali
Very strange that a P3 mobo wouldn't have AGP.. presumably its an early 450 or so?

i've got pretty much the same pc, a crappy onboard graphics card that uses 32mb of system memory (pc100, ugh). there's only pci slots on this one (celeron 1.3)

RicardoSmith

I had a Dell PII 266 at work (320mb PC66 ram) and I stuck a GF2MX and a Celeron 533 in it. Made a decent machine for lan games of Half Life, and GP3. (anything for an edge eh? lol)

I can only assume that one with a 1Ghz -ish cpu and a GF4MX440 would be even better. Good enough for most games I'd reckon.

Gerry

Heh kali, most oem machines which are not full atx lack an agp slot. For example any slimline machines, almost all desktops these days are slimline, and they never bother putting an agp port on the card riser. Tis quite annoying in college, since the i810e plays a pretty woeful game of quake3, and even struggles with quakeworld. I put up wanted ads for gf2mx pci, but the only offered card was 60 euro

RicardoSmith

Poor deal when for another 40 yoyos (a night out) you could have that Gainward.

maxheadroom

even the new low end dells (dimension 2350) don't have an AGP slot... (its something they use to get you to buy a 4550 or higher)

RicardoSmith

or make the 2350 cheaper for those who don't need an agp slot.