Video Card Upgrade

[salventura]

My computer has a PCI video card and I'm going to upgrade to PCI-E. My motherboard uses DDR memory. Does the memory on the PCI-E card have to match the memory on the motherboard? In other words, will a DDR2 video card work in a DDR motherboard? Thnx.

-- Sal

 

[DaveSimmons]

Nope, the memory for the processor is completely unrelated to the memory for the video card.

Also, with video cards the memory is much less important than the processor type -- an ATI 4850 with 20 GB of DDR11 is still going to be slower than an ATI 4870 with 512MB of GDDR3.

This might be better asked in the Video forum, but what is your budget and what will you be doing? (Light or heavy gaming, watching DVDs, using CAD software ... ?)

And just to check, does your motherboard actually have a PCI-E slot? It's different from AGP and "old" PCI.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: salventura
My computer has a PCI video card and I'm going to upgrade to PCI-E. My motherboard uses DDR memory. Does the memory on the PCI-E card have to match the memory on the motherboard? In other words, will a DDR2 video card work in a DDR motherboard? Thnx.

-- Sal

Are you sure you even have a PCI Express slot?

 

[salventura]

Thank you, gentlemen, for the information. My ECS motherboard (K8T890-A) has three PCI express slots. I'll be getting a card with passive cooling (no fan) which means it'll be low power and low cost. It'll be an improvement, nevertheless.

I use my computer mostly to surf the web for information I don't get from the mainstream news media -- not a graphically demanding task. Thank you again for advising me in this matter.

-- Sal