JohnW said:
My current mobo (on my old test machine) is as shown in this picture:
<
http://tinyurl.com/6om8uc6>
I am thinking of upgrading the graphics card to this one:
<
http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/...cards/nvidia8000series/ev-512-p3-1301-kr.html>
Do you guys know whether the card is compatible with my current system?
Thanks.
There are actually hardware groups you can ask the question in.
This group is supposed to be about general Windows XP questions.
*******
Your motherboard picture, doesn't have a motherboard name
Now, I'll need my Ouija board and my turban, and a look of
studied concentration...
http://content.screencast.com/users...92-46df-bf1e-309438227953/2012-02-10_0157.png
OK, so what we know, is i815/E/EP and ICH2. That
means the motherboard either has a number of identical
PCI slots, or, one of the slots is a bit different and
supports AGP. AGP in that generation, was AGP4X running
at 1.5V I/O voltage.
The picture in this article, shows a purple AGP connector
and two PCI connectors. On some Dell/HP/Gateway/Acer pre-built
computers, the manufacturer cheeses out and uses nothing but
slow PCI connectors. In some cases, you can even see the hole
pattern for an AGP connector, but no connector is installed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agp
If the system really did have an AGP slot for a video card,
the tables here suggest what would fit.
http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html
815 (for the AGP slot and interface) ==> Universal AGP Motherboard
From the "Practical Motherboard And Card Compatibility", virtually
anything would work.
Universal AGP Motherboard Works at 3.3V Works at 1.5V
Works at 1.5V Works at 1.5V Works at 1.5V
The limitation, is operation at 4X transfer rate, which is fine.
A slower rate, such as 1X, would suck. But you have 4X available.
The only way to get a modern high performance card into the picture,
is to buy an AGP card with Rialto bridge chip. ATI takes their
PCI Express cards, adds a bridge chip, and that allows interfacing
the card to the AGP bus. The driver must also be modified, as PCI
Express doesn't have a GART, and I don't know the tortured details
of what they have to do to make it work. As a result, sometimes
there is only one driver version that works. Software is the
major limiting factor with those cards.
This is an example of an AGP card, one of the last high performance
cards still for sale. You should read the customer feedback section,
to see what kind of driver problems they had, before you buy one.
If it's a bridged card, check the driver situation.
HD 4670 AGP $112
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161337
On the back of the card (in this picture), you can see the Rialto bridge.
The pink foam protects the chip from damage. The chip converts AGP signals
into PCI Express signals. The GPU would be just above the pink thing.
http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/14-161-337-Z04?$S640W$
The card has a single slot cut in it, and that slot is cut in the 1.5V
position. That means the card wants to run at 1.5V and not at 3.3V
on the I/O signals.
Your motherboard is universal, supporting operation at 1.5V or 3.3V.
The "TYPEDET#" signal from the video card, receives the voltage request.
The card will say "I want 1.5V", and your motherboard video slot regulator
will deliver 1.5V to it. The AGP slot in your motherboard, should
not have any plastic keys as a result of supporting both voltages.
Since there are no plastic keys, any kind of card can be plugged in.
(If you have an AGP slot, it should be the third one down "AGP Universal")
http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agpslots.gif
Now, while it's fun to pretend, the thing is, once a modern PCI Express
video card doesn't have an x16 PCI Express electrical interface, the
driver may limit how some of the features of the card work. Yes, the
card will play games like gangbusters. So if you want a gamer
card, that's what it is really for. Certain video decoder features
might not work (3:2 pulldown in hardware ???). I don't know if the
programmable shaders (for GPGPU computing) are visible when AGP or PCI
is involved, or not.
This 6200 card on the other hand, is "native" AGP. There is no bridge
chip on this one. But it's also an older card than the 8400GS you
were looking at. I picked the 6200, because it has a wide range of
available drivers for it. The 5200, is probably not receiving updates
on the newer OSes, while the 6200 is hanging on by the skin of its
teeth. So from a driver installation perspective, if I had a
"driver phobia", I might pick a 6200. The 6200 probably doesn't
have programmable shaders (or crude ones at best), and the video
decoding support would be a joke (IDCT?). Some software apparently
has even stopped using IDCT inverse discrete cosine transform, when it's
the only option available.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814139044
The slot pattern says it supports 1.5V or 3.3V operation, and your
motherboard would support both. So shouldn't be a problem there.
*******
AGP 4X works at 1066MB/sec.
The PCI slots on the other hand, only run at 133MB/sec. If you
had one of those cheesy motherboards, where the cheap mobo maker
removed the AGP slot, you might only have PCI for video. The
transfer rate limit then is 133MB/sec or 8 times slower.
You will have to eyeball the motherboard, and make the determination
as to what slots are available. Electrically, the motherboard
might think it has AGP, but the connector might not be soldered
to the motherboard. So using utilities to check, might not give the
right answer. But your eyes won't deceive you.
They still sell PCI, and the thing is, there are more
cards left with slow PCI, than there are AGP.
PNY VCG84512D3SPPB GeForce 8400 GS 512MB 64-bit DDR3 *PCI* Low Profile $50
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133364
So that's actually a PCI card, versus the one you picked out
which is PCI Express (entirely different connector). Your motherboard
does not have a PCI Express slot, for sure.
You can still game with PCI slot cards. But where the slot
tends to be an issue, is if large bitmaps need to be moved
around the screen. Then the card will "stutter" a bit. I have
an FX5200 PCI and it stutters when you move a QuickTime
movie player around the screen. I have played games on my FX5200 PCI,
and they're just as slow as my FX5200 AGP. So to some
extent, at least some games still work OK (Quake???). And your processor
is likely to be enough of a limitation, that any really
heavy weight games won't run well anyway.
Again, at the driver level, the NVidia driver will see the 8400 GS,
but will also realize it is on the PCI bus, and will disable
a few features that it feels there isn't enough bus bandwidth for.
But the gaming should be unimpeded (frame rate slows down, if the
bandwidth limit is reached).
If you're gaming, you need WinXP or high. This isn't some
fanboi input - the newest games have cleverly coded into them, a
check for the OS being used. I used to use Win2K for games,
until the installers on new games would refuse to work.
Partially, this is code in DirectX that is doing this
kind of thing - so it's not always the developers fault.
In one case, I used a hex editor to override this check,
but you can't expect to be successful on every game doing that.
*******
Summary:
The card you picked is wrong. PCI Express card choice,
versus motherboard with AGP and/or PCI.
Visually check the motherboard for slot types. In this
picture, purple is AGP and there is only ever one AGP
slot on a motherboard. For PCI, you could have five of
those, and in the picture here, the PCI are white. Notice
how the PCI connector is closer to the back of the computer.
The AGP has a "heel clip", to hold the card in place, so it
won't shake out. For PCI, there is only the faceplate screw
holding it in.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/AGP_slot.jpg
If you have an AGP slot, then that slot has the most bandwidth
on an 815 system. Shop for an AGP.
If the motherboard doesn't have AGP, and all the slots are
identical, then you're looking for a PCI slot. That 8400 GS PCI
version would then be a solution.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133364
Paul
