Will my system handle the Radeon 9100?

[wojtekn]

Hello all!

I have a Dell 2350 w/ Pentium 4 2 Ghz, 256mb shared, 200W power supply. I have integrated intel graphics that in my opinion sucks!

I have just ordered a Visiontek Radeon 9100 PCI 128mb card and have a few questions about its compatibility with my pc.

1.) Will my power supply be sufficient to run this card? Visiontek recommends 250W or 300W.
2.) Is my system good enough to handle the card?
3.) Will the 64mb of RAM currently being used by the integrated video be freed up when I disable it in the BIOS and install the PCI card.

Any other suggestions would be appreciated especially suggestions about installing the card and disabling the integrated card.

Later!

 

[Megatomic]

1. As long as you don't load up the computer with lots of other goodies (extra drives, etc...) the PSU will be fine more than likely.

2. Yes, the P4 2GHz with 256MB of RAM is good enough for the card.

3. From my experience with other integrated boards, when you disable the onboard RAM the shared memory is given back to the system for regular use.

I think you made a decent purchase.

Edit: Welcome to AnandTech Forums!

 

[wojtekn]

Would anyone know how to most appropriately disable my integrated graphics and then proceed to intall my PCI card.

Under Device Manager in XP I have two choices for the integrated video, either "disable" or "uninstall" Or do I even need to bother with this and instead just install my new card and during rebot select PCI as my option in BIOS.

Thanks,
Wojtek

 

[Idoxash]

Go into the BIOS and disable the onboard VGA- If you BIOS does not have this (my old i815 intel mobo did not have that option) then boot into windows and disable the onboard VGA in Dvice Manager. Then shutdown, install the new VGA card, make sure in the BIOS you tell it to point to pci slot 1 for VGA boot up, when back in XP if the old drivers for your onboard VGA is still loaded uninstall them first and restart then install your VGA drivers for your new VGA card. This should work- Good luck.

--Idoxash

 

[adlep]

wojtekn is Polish...
Czesc!

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Remember not to disable anything until your new card is working. It can be a pain if your new card has problems and you've disabled the integrated graphics.