Video Card Help

[Stoke]

OK...i currently am using a Dell Dimension 8400 (P4 3.2 ghz) with 1 gb of ram. I'm getting ready to add a second gig and am looking to upgrade the video card. I currently have a 256mb Nvidia GeForce 6800.

Suggestions/advice on what I want?

[Ardamir]

Does your mobo support sli?

[RagingSamster]

Sounds like it's AGP which I believe rules out sli, but I think that both Nvidia and ATI have near top o the line agp cards, a great site I hang out at is www.hardocp.com they have provided information for the past 3 iterations of PC building for my family. I swapped from an ATI 9700 AIW to my EVGA 7800GT and have really noticed the difference in intensly graphic games like halflife2 and FEAR, the 6800 is still a good card, and unless you plan on a sli mobo swap your best bet is to get an AGP 7800GTX, you'd probably get a 20%-25% performance boost, really not worth the outlay in cash imho,

[SilverTalon]

I concur with Sam's recommendation of HardOCP for hardware info, if you can find it there. Back when I was buying my new computer, found out that while nVidia had better low resolution performance, the ATi card available had much better performance at the resolution I typically run at. Saved a lot of frustration right there.

Sometimes though it's hard to find the exact information on the card you want.

As far as the RAM upgrade goes, I don't know how much performance boost you'll see out of that, if that's what you're going for. If you're wanting to be able to have lots of stuff open and hogging up memory space, it'll help...but Windows XP seems to have a sweet spot of 1GB in terms of improvement of performance in games. Past that, the additional overhead of addressing the extra gig of RAM seems to bog down framerates so that the transition is not as effective as 512MB to 1GB. Now, if you've got a lot of apps that don't hog up the processor but chew up RAM (AIM, MSN, Trillian, P2P apps, etc) then yes, it will help. For single-app work though, don't know that you'll see enough to justify the expense, if anything.

[Nizuttz]

yeah thats AGP =( Too bad its not PCI-Express.. GeForce 7900GTX is uber nice.

[Cptmorgan]

Stoke i have the exact same computer and i got a PCI express video card with it. You sure its agp?

[Spinning Hat]

I dunno... I have a GeForce 6800Ultra and I really really like it... I couldn't justify the extra $150 in expense for the 7800... But hey - That's just me.

My system:

AMD Athlon 64 3500+
1Gb Pc3200 DDR
Leadtek GeForce 6800Ultra 256Mb
2 160Gb Sata II HDDs
Win XP Pro

I use the onboard sound on my Asus A8N-Deluxe and the onboard 1Gigabit LAN, But I think I need to get a new soundcard to take advantage of my Klipsch Speakers....

[Belenos]

Yay proprietary mobos....

[DarkIce]

even though im a computer geek those are terms way above my head for determination.

[RagingSamster]

Regardless of PCI or AGP there are upgrade paths available. The main question would be "why"? Is the vid card performing poorly with the current games? If you are looking to upgrade to a card thats ready to handle the next generation of computer games at top settings, I'm thinking it would be better to wait until the games come out and then see what the requirements are instead of sinking 3 to 5 bills on a card then having to do it all over again. and IF you are thinking about laying down the dollars, maybe think about replacing the Dell with a DIY system. Dell is a pretty good OEM system, but nothing beats DIY in a performance system

[DarkIce]

I agree