my son age 5 has an old dell demension 8100, and there is an nvidia geforce 2 mx400 installed, and it is struggling to play some of his games, I bought an orignal dell pny geforce 5200 128mb card 8x agp, for £10 of ebay, I know its not very good card but will there be much of a noticable difference. also the motherboard does up to 4x agp, and the new card is 8x agp, will it fit the board or is it a no go?
I should have posted this before I bought the card, I know, duh!
2007-10-14 04:50:15 · 3 answers · asked by arnold j rimmer 3 in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Add-ons
hi mate
dont worry about the card being x8,it will revert back to the motherboards x4 speed,and to be honest you wont know the difference
the geforce 5200 is a average card and is ideal for your son,it has pixel and shader model 2.0 which will play most of todays games,only the really top spec games(bioshock,crysis) need pixel and shader model 3.0
the fact with the geforce 5200 is it will also play games much better if you keep the resolutions down to 800x600 and 1024x768
and as the playstation 2 had a resolution of 800x600 then i am sure your son wont mind
infact the original x-box actually used a equivelent chip to the geforce 3/4 so that gives the fx5200 a good reveiw considering it came out after the geforce 4
and also when you consider the "playstations" "Graphics Synthesizer" is only clocked at 147mhz and the geforce 5200 has a clock speed of 350mhz this again proves its abilities
if you are considering another upgrade in the future then the nvidia geforce 7600gs(or gt) are great bargains(around £60) but these are great bargain gaming cards
any problems let me know
good luck mate!
2007-10-14 05:06:45 · answer #1 · answered by brianthesnail123 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Yes, you should have asked before you bought. My concern here would the that original AGP cards were run at 3.3V and the newer models are at 1.5V. Putting a card that is expecting 1.5V and getting 3.3V is going to make a very loud popping noise and produce a lot of smoke very quickly.
That said, I think it was only AGP 1.0 that was like this so you'll be okay on that score.
The other point is that yes, an 8x will fit into a 4x motherboard but will only run at 4x because the board cannot handle anything else.
2007-10-14 04:56:18 · answer #2 · answered by DMsView 6 · 1⤊ 0⤋
It is a very slight upgrade, but will most likely not have that huge of an effect. It does have Shader Model 2, but that is only a very very small piece of the puzzle. Anything newer than 3 years old will have trouble running at anything better than the lowest settings.
2007-10-14 08:08:24 · answer #3 · answered by mysticman44 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋