Ashwin Divakaran asks:
My cousin has a quiet old PC and he needs a video card for it. I ran the system information utility and found that the motherboard has
1x AGP 8x/4x slot
3x 32-bit Master PCI bus slots
I don’t know much about video cards so I need advice about what to buy. Thanks!
Browser: Chrome 20
System: Windows 7
Tagged: computer hardware, graphics card, install hardware, upgrade hardware
System: Windows 7
Tagged: computer hardware, graphics card, install hardware, upgrade hardware
7 Answers -
Bruce Epper
June 15, 2012That would depend on how the system is to be used. What are the requirements of the software that will be driving it? Are you going to try running games that require DirectX 11? DirectX 9.0c? Will you be using 3D modelling software on it? Does it require a specific version of Shader support?
Just knowing what type of interconnect is used is not sufficient.
Be that what it may, you can just go out and look for any AGP 8x or 4x card that meets the rest of your requirements.
I mostly require DirectX 10 or DirectX 11 video cards.Need to run most games with medium quality
June 15, 2012You should check any games you wish to play with their minimum video requirements. I have not been able to find any AGP cards that support DX10 and I have never seen one that supports DX11. I did happen to find a few PCI cards that support DX10 like this one http://www.amazon.com/PNY-nVidia-GeForce-Graphics-VCG84512SPEB/dp/B001D72NE0/ref=tag_stp_s2f_edpp_video_card
Again, you need to find out what the minimum requirements of the software is to make sure that any card you do pick up will be able to run the game effectively (if at all).
June 15, 2012GamE
June 15, 2012direct x 9 or 10 will do
ha14
June 15, 2012Sapphire Readies DirectX 10 Graphics Cards for Old Computers.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/graphics/display/20070521054545.html
AGP Interface
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-cards,1805-5.html
Mike
June 15, 2012The best card available for the AGP socket I could find is some Radeon HD 4670. It supports up to DirectX10 but with the chip itself being ~4 years old the most I would expect is playing DX10 games on a rather low resolution with medium details.
With upcoming games heading towards DX11 this card is certainly not a future-proof investment. Also without knowing the rest of the hardware I would say the card is only ‘half of the game’.
No current motherboard chipset supports AGP slots anymore. Even if the board was just recently released the manufacturer would be using aged chipsets. Old chipsets automatically mean old CPUs and that is going to be the next bottleneck.
Even if your graphics card can render the game at 100 frames per second if the CPU can’t keep up with the calculations the game is going to lag.
Oron
June 15, 2012Have a look at http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/graphics-cards,1.html, which gives very useful performance-comparison charts, and choose something appropriate. With the machine being a quiet PC (suggesting he probably doesn’t want a card with a massive fan), the age of the machine and the budget limit, there will only be a limited number of suitable cards in the < $50 range.
ryandigweed0
June 15, 2012You’ve got quite an Old System, since it’s Got an AGP slot, the current slots for graphic cards are PCI-E.
You can pick up the the XFX 6450 for around 53$. That is the best card you can put on your system, and won’t need extra power.
http://www.neobits.com/xfx_technologies_hd_465x_znl2_hd_4650_600m_1gb_ddr2_hdmi_dvi_vga_pci_e_p875857.html?atc=gbs
But You can also pick up a cheaper card if you don’t need the best, depending on the rest of your system configuration. A good VGA card, and bad ram or CPU, still won’t get you the performance you expect.
alcher
June 17, 2012can i get. Log in using your K9 administrator password.