___ Will a PCI video card work? ___

[Blain]

I've got an old Compaq (Presario 2266) PC setup for my wife to do her resume, etc. on. No gaming for this rig. She just wants something of her own.
It's got a Cyrix MII CPU running on an SiS (onboard video & audio). The BIOS only give "2mb" or "4mb" as video options.

Even though there isn't a setting to disable the onboard video... Can I install a PCI video card to take over the video functions?

The system is slow. I'm thinking that taking some load off the MB with the PCI video might help it out a little.

 

[Boonesmi]

older motherboards often times have a jumper on the board itself to disable the onboard video

anything made in the last few years will just auto disable when it sees that a video card has been installed

 

[MDE]

It might just automatically disable the onboard video. You might be able to stick a faster AMD K6-2 in there to speed it up a little.

 

[Blain]

Thanks. I didn't think about a jumper for it.

 

[mbackof]

Just a warning. I tried putting in a 32MB Radeon 7500 PCI card into a system with 8MB onboard AGP and I didn't notice a speed increase in the graphics. It actually got slower.

 

[Regs]

A PCI video card won't take much load off the mobo. Since the PCI graphics card is just taking and borrowing up as much bandwidth on the mobo as integrated graphics would. That's why having a separate AGP bus is so important to gaming performance.

It will definitely speed up games however, since games will no longer have to borrow your main system ram.

 

[Boonesmi]

Originally posted by: Regs
A PCI video card won't take much load off the mobo. Since the PCI graphics card is just taking and borrowing up as much bandwidth on the mobo as integrated graphics would. That's why having a separate AGP bus is so important to gaming performance.

It will definitely speed up games however, since games will no longer have to borrow your main system ram.

sorry to contradict you, but thats not really accurate

true that an agp card would be better (assuming you had the agp slot for it)
but pci is much better then onboard
1. the pci card has its own ram (many boards with onboard video share system memory) so it frees up the memory to be used by the system
2. also since the pci card has its own ram it has much faster access to memory greatly increasing performance
3. onboard memory usually sucks with very poor 3d (but it totally depends on teh chipset) but you can buy a 64mb pci geforce4 card that would be light years faster then a 2 mb onboard trident video
4. its my understanding (and i could be wrong) that pci video cards dont really hog a whole lot of pci bandwidth ( onboard video is mostly using memory bandwidth which you dont have to worry about with a pci card)

 

[Boonesmi]

just to add to my above post

years ago i used a packard bell (hehe i know it sucked, but i was a n00b at the time!! )
it was a pentium1 233mhz with onboard video (trident)

installing a 8mb tnt pci video card made a HUGE impact on the perfomance. and not just in games or 3d apps, but it was about 10 seconds faster booting. all applications opened noticably faster

i was totally amazed at all the system resources that were freed up when disabling the onboard video and adding a pci card

 

[InlineFive]

Another thing I did for Dual-Monitors on my old K6-2 computer was enable PCI Video Snooping (or something like that) in the BIOS because I couldn't get my integrated GPU to turn off.

 

[Boonesmi]

here is a guy selling a nice radeon pci vid card for $35 link


you may already have the vid card your thinking of using... but i noticed this one while looking through the fs/ft forum and figured you may be interested

 

[rjain]

note that the memory bus (streaming the frame buffer) is much faster than the pci bus. (in most cases?)