pci video card... is it worth it?

[roxbury]

My brother bought a computer last christmas from best buy... its a p4
2.8ghz, anyways he wants to get a video card in there to play video
games with me. I opened the thing up and it has no agp slot. its a
mini-atx mobo with only 3 pci slots. Now is it even worth it to buy a
pci video card for this thing. he wants to play some of my games like
half-life 2, joint ops, far cry, etc... can a pci vid card keep up with
these games or is it just a wasted effort???

 

[Cuzman]

roxbury wrote:

" he wants to play some of my games like half-life 2, joint ops, far
cry, etc... can a pci vid card keep up with these games or is it just a
wasted effort??? "


The best he can do is probably a 128-bit FX5500 128MB.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16814133134

Don't expect to play any of those games at high resolutions though, let
alone with the settings turned up.

 

[kony]

My brother bought a computer last christmas from best buy... its a p4
2.8ghz, anyways he wants to get a video card in there to play video
games with me. I opened the thing up and it has no agp slot. its a
mini-atx mobo with only 3 pci slots. Now is it even worth it to buy a
pci video card for this thing. he wants to play some of my games like
half-life 2, joint ops, far cry, etc... can a pci vid card keep up with
these games or is it just a wasted effort???

It's not going to be very good performance nor a good
price/performance ratio.

The best route to take is to replace the motherboard with
one having AGP (Or PCI Express) slot. You would have to
determine if the system case accepts any particular board
(for example determining if it's standard mATX motherboard
or something else). You would also need assess the adequacy
of the power supply, it's quite possibly insufficient for
the significant additional load of a good video card.

Further there might be the issue of whether the software
(particularly operating system restoration image?) installs
on a different board or if you'd have to make a windows
installation disc to overcome this.

Ultimately it was probably a lower-cost system and these
kinds of limitations are part of why the cost was lower.
Keeping that in mind you might emphasize the importance of
checking out these things prior to his next system build or
purchase.

 

[DaveW]

Games played with a video card that comes in a PCI configuration will be
better than the onboard video that he has now, BUT will still be very
slowww.