I need to upgrade my graphics card but which one ?

Question

I have a pentium 3 1ghz motherboard with a lousy agp graphics card in it I want to upgrade but I need one that supports this motherboard and 1x agp or one that will support all agp's so if I change my motherboard I can still use it so what do I buy?

Answer 1

If you have a PCI Express slot get one of those. Regardless go with NVIDIA or an NVIDIA line, they are better than any other company out there. All my friends who work for CAD, Architecture, programming and for Disney, Dreamworks use Nvidia. I would go with a 256MB Nvidia line that supports directX 9. The higher the res it can max out at the better as well becaue if you play it at a lower res than the max supported your card works faster. Also the Nvidia drivers are much easier to work with I had a 5500OC 256 card and was able to use the 5700 drivers for it without any problems. If you want to change and upgrade your mobo, then upgrade to one that has PCI Express slots in them as PCI is going to be completely phased out and soon AGP will be phased out as well. Depending on how soon you plan to upgrade your mobo I'd wait and get one with a PCI Express slot then buy a PCI E card with the specs previously mentioned.

Answer 2

If your motherboard really only supports AGP 1x then your are just wasting money.

If it supports 4x then you are still just wasting money since yo u are still running 1 GHz. If you can get a GeForce FX5200 or 5600 (if your board has 4x speed support, i doubt any newer cards support 1x). Seriously get something very low end save for a while and get a motherboard that has an AGP and a PCI-EXPRESS slot in one, so that you can use the crappy AGP card and still geta PCI-Express card after a couple of months.

Lets look at some technical things concerning agp.
AGP x1 has a maximum data rate of 266Megabytes /second and it uses 3.3V signalling
AGP x4 has a maximum transfer rate of 1066 MBytes per second and uses 1.5 Volt signalling.
AGP 8x has a mximum data rate of 2133 MB/s and uses 0.8V signalling.

If your motherboard doesn't support a 4x speed card the card probably wont fit due to the AGP key. Take the Pc to a professional and ask them to test some older agp cards on the system.

Answer 3

you need a agp 4x/8x video card, No way would a 1ghz P3 have a AGP 1x slot. Most likely its a 4x.

The most powerful card you could put in there would be an ATI Radeon x850xt

Please dont be fooled by the x1300 or x1600 there number is bigger but there not as powerful, there newer cards there just a bad design.

Answer 4

HI,
first make sure you know what your mother board will support.
most newer boards (that are not PCI Express) can support up to 8X AGP. You can often see the selections in the BIOS during startup if you go into the BIOS settings.

If your mother board has a limitation then you will loose any speed benefit of any video card you put in that is faster because it will be throttled back.

Next you have to consider your power supply. The higher end video cards use more juice and if your power supply is just a little under powered then you can set yourself up for lots of problems. Hard drives don't like competing for power and will cough, sputter and often loose their MBR's (Master Boot Records) if they are too under powered. (I know this from personal experience)

I like both Nvidia and ATI. Look for the bargain. I found an ATI x700 card at Comp USA for $145 dollars and I like it just fine. It is 8X AGP and has 256 MB of memory.

In the end get the video card that fits your needs and budget.

regards,
wizzie

Answer 5

definite, i'm particularly particular of it! however the real-time video games like Oblivion, Gothic 3, Flight Simulator X. in case you propose to make your pc to handle those video games. I reported which you will improve a million GB RAM to make your pc swifter. photograph card? i'd say any 7 series enjoying cards or Geforce 7800 GT, GTX or as much as Geforce 7950 GT could make Oblivion look extra useful and extra useful framerates. yet once you pick a decrease value for photograph enjoying cards, you will desire to purchase any 7 series with GS.