Video Card for RTW

[Braccius Augustus]

I downloaded the demo and I want a little more performance from my machine. I have a dell 2400 upgraded to 1 GB RAM, 2 GHz, etc. but with the integrated graphics card. There is no AGP slot on the motherboard but there are PCI slots. Should I go for the Radeon PCI with 128 MB or just stick with the integrated card or do you think the only real upgrade would be an AGP card? I just wanted to see if anyone else who might have a Dell or otherwise might help. I fear Dell may have just f----d me over! I guess I should have been more careful though.

[RedKnight]

By chance, could you post a link to the Dell site with the specs for this particular model? They've got it there somewhere.

I am amazed that it can support a 2 Ghz CPU, but doesn't have an AGP slot. You say they may have f'd you over - but it seems more like, you didn't know enough to ask when you bought a real rock-bottom budget machine that doesn't even have an AGP slot for future upgrades. Or maybe it was a gift or whatever, shrug.

Good gaming, bro! ~:cheers:

[lars573]

Well integrated video cards eat system ram for Vram since you hace 1 GB of system ram you should be alright, cause 1024 MB-64MB=940MB system ram. I played the RTW demo on my family comp that has a Gforce 4 integrated (64MB Vram), and it worked alight. The big question is what sort of GPU is built into your mother board?

[Red Harvest]

Unfortunately all to common. Blame Intel (Dell, same thing). Intel has been foisting integrated graphics for a long time. The low ball prices suck in so many folks (particularly businesses) that Intel is the number one graphics provider--ahead of ATI and nVidia. (However, most of these are "business" PC's and things are far different in the home desktop market.) Even their latest integrated chipsets is 4 years behind the times performance wise. When they don't even give you an AGP slot you are completely hamstrung. Intel seems to like to do this as it undoubtedly lowers the price on the cheapo chipset by a few cents or dollars, plus it means you are likely to never even consider trying an upgrade to a real vid card--double whammy. If you make 50 million of these crap boards a year, a few cents or so adds up in a hurry. And if you can discourage people from ever trying a real product, that's a big plus too!

So much for the doom and gloom. Looks like you can get PCI cards in nVidia FX5200 or ATi 9200 flavors. Both chipsets are re-badges of ones that are so old that I can't tell you much about them now that they have been tweaked and renamed. From what little I've seen posted about them benchmark wise, they are no faster than the old AGP Radeon ViVo from three or four generations ago (it was a good card, three or four years ago.) I benchmarked that card at past 5,000 in 3DMark2001SE standard test with some overclock putting it near ATI 7500 speeds on an old Athlon XP2100+ with an ancient KT133A motherboard running PC133 SDRAM. That was just a curiosity test about a year and a half ago, when I no longer used that system for any gaming. (Yep, that old...) None of these cards will run in full hardware DX8 or DX9 from what I can tell (some will do software emulation.) Their basis is old DX7 architecture. The shaders are a considerable part of what make DX8 and DX9 different from DX7, and use of shaders is what you are starting to see commonly in new games. Therefore, don't even ask about 3DMark2004 scores, because shaders are effectively unusable with these cards.

[Red Harvest]

Well integrated video cards eat system ram for Vram since you hace 1 GB of system ram you should be alright, cause 1024 MB-64MB=940MB system ram. I played the RTW demo on my family comp that has a Gforce 4 integrated (64MB Vram), and it worked alight. The big question is what sort of GPU is built into your mother board?

Partly right. The big problem with integrated cards is not the amount of physical RAM they use (which is small unless you are running very little memory anyway.) It is the amount of memory bandwidth they steal. When you run bandwidth tests on many of them you can be amazed at the hit they are taking. They can effectively lose about a third of their bandwidth. This can make systems very laggy and slow. I have yet to see an Intel integrated chipset that felt as fast as my ancient KT133A motherboard (PC133 SDRAM)running simple MS Office apps.

Since the posters PC is a Dell 2400 it almost certainly is an Intel Extremely Slow Graphics chipset. Your GF4 based integrated shouldn't be too bad by comparison, but Intel truly sucks.

Funny story: I warned my idiot boss not to buy an integrated graphics chipset for our development work. "Make sure it has a separate vid card in an AGP slot" I said. "Better yet, give me a budget and I'll get us a good flexible system at a good price" (unlike the one he innocently bought 6 months before that was already "retired" because he "got a good deal" on the integrated chipset, zippo RAM, and celery processor that couldn't run the database it was intended for.) Braniac proudly brings in a nice looking PC sans monitor with a f****** S3 integrated chipset. Yep, it was another "good deal" on a refurb (inner groan sound started, but I hoped for the best.) After fiddling with it a bit I opened the cover and just started shaking my head. He was pretty well hacked off (at me) when I pointed out it was just another integrated chipset. I tried to cheer him by telling him (truthfully) that it did run better than his previous "good deal" though--still I was in the dog house. Moral of the story: There is nothing wrong with making a mistake, but only an idiot makes the same mistakes repeatedly and blames others for their misfortune. Corollary: don't bother to point out mistakes to an idiot--it is a waste of time and will only lead to trouble for you.

[RedKnight]

Corollary:
hahaha! lolol!

man your boss is dumb! glad mine is only half dumb

[RedKnight]

Corollary:
hahaha! lolol!

man your boss is dumb! glad mine is only half dumb

[Braccius Augustus]

I appreciate the help, guys. I know I should have known better when I bought this thing, but I didn't know much about graphics cards at the time. Plus, I was under the impression that most integrated motherboards have AGP slots also. Anyway, I'm not trying to pass the blame, I'm just upset.

The basic question though, is would an integrated Intell 82845G/GL/GE/PE/GV with 64 MB be better to use than a Radeon 9200 with 124 MB? With 1 GB RAM and 2 GHz processor I can still run RTW, but I have to turn it way down.

[Braccius Augustus]

I have good news to anyone who has a dimension desktop (especially a 2400)! I bought the Radeon 9200 PCI and it works great. I know it can't match an AGP card, but with my specs, I can run the RTW demo with everything turned up except anti-aliasing and de-syncronous animation pretty much. Just wanted to put that out there for anyone in my predicament! Good luck! Ave Caesar!

[Doug-Thompson]

Unfortunately all to common. Blame Intel (Dell, same thing). Intel has been foisting integrated graphics for a long time. The low ball prices suck in so many folks (particularly businesses) that Intel is the number one graphics provider--ahead of ATI and nVidia. (However, most of these are "business" PC's and things are far different in the home desktop market.) Even their latest integrated chipsets is 4 years behind the times performance wise. When they don't even give you an AGP slot you are completely hamstrung. Intel seems to like to do this as it undoubtedly lowers the price on the cheapo chipset by a few cents or dollars, plus it means you are likely to never even consider trying an upgrade to a real vid card--double whammy. If you make 50 million of these crap boards a year, a few cents or so adds up in a hurry. And if you can discourage people from ever trying a real product, that's a big plus too!

Stunts like this are the reason I found a local computer guy who loves games and had him build a PC for me. Not only did I get bang for the buck, I learned more about what you really need and don't need in a computer in a 30-minute conversation with him than I did in hours of online browsing.

Ability to expand and upgrade is the most important ability of all. I couldn't afford much of a computer then but put as much money as I could into a decent motherboard with lots of slots.

Back when I got my machine, a 1.3 Mhz processor was all I could afford. Now that a couple of years have passed, I'll soon be able to get a 2 Mhz processor and upgrade for about $150. The motherboard will have no problem handling it, either.

[Tamur]

I would VERY much recommend building your machine. Upgrades are easy and inexpensive, so you can have a top-of-the-line machine for years on $150 a year. If you want bleeding-edge video cards, then it's much more per year (and much more of a pain too!)

If anyone out there is at all interested in building, check out PC Mechanic's tutorial (http://www.pcmech.com/byopc/index.htm), a good thorough description of the process. It may look like a long task, but it really only takes an hour or so to get a system to the point where you're installing the OS --- half that if you've done it a few times.