Newbie needs help

S

Strick

n00b
Joined
May 29, 2008
Messages
4
Morning All,

I'm fairly competent with PCs (inside and out), but you guys are way out of my league with regards to gaming and video cards in general - and I have a question for you.

I have an older, piecemeal system: 2.66GHz Pentium 4, 2G RAM, 120GB on 2 drives, 400W power supply. For a couple of years I've been using a PCI (not PCI-E) Radeon 9250 w/ 256 RAM. I recently replaced it with an AGP Nvidia FX 5500 (also 256 RAM) that I salvaged from an even older (but still working) computer.

I would have thought that the 5500 would have improved my performance just by being AGP, but it seems like everything's running at about the same speeds as before. I used drivers from Nvidia's website, after using DriverCleaner to remove the old ones.

Was I wrong to expect a performance increase?
 
Performence increase in what? 3d apps and games?

Correct me if im wrong but surely the jump wouldnt make that much of a difference at such low levels? Although im not that clued up on the lower end cards so .... :confused:
 
Strick said:
Morning All,

I'm fairly competent with PCs (inside and out), but you guys are way out of my league with regards to gaming and video cards in general - and I have a question for you.

I have an older, piecemeal system: 2.66GHz Pentium 4, 2G RAM, 120GB on 2 drives, 400W power supply. For a couple of years I've been using a PCI (not PCI-E) Radeon 9250 w/ 512 RAM. I recently replaced it with an AGP Nvidia FX 5500 (also 512 RAM) that I salvaged from an even older (but still working) computer.

I would have thought that the 5500 would have improved my performance just by being AGP, but it seems like everything's running at about the same speeds as before. I used drivers from Nvidia's website, after using DriverCleaner to remove the old ones.

Was I wrong to expect a performance increase?
Click to expand...

Check this HERE

Based on what I think are your cards, but you should make sure

this HERE may also help you a bit.
 
spktk2007 said:
Check this HERE

Based on what I think are your cards, but you should make sure

this HERE may also help you a bit.
Click to expand...

Cool side-by-side comparison site. I hadn't found that one before. Thanks.

It seems like the cards are pretty evenly matched, but shouldn't I have seen some improvement just by switching from PCI to AGP? I haven't tried overclocking at all. Would that help much?
 
U know, I have not used AGP in a long time. Isnt AGP older tech than PCI, give the OC a try to see what happens.

Based on this HERE AGP should be faster, but u got me.

There may also be differences in the bus speeds of the two technologies, that effect how much/fast data is transferred.
 
Well, from everything I've read, AGP cards are supposed to be faster due to a more direct interface, but like I said, I'm not seeing any improvement. I'll try mucking around in the bios - maybe there's some setting I missed.

Thanks for your help.
 
Okay, glad I could be of assistance. Maybe you will get some better answers later from some people that know AGP better than I. Mucking around the BIOS and net is probably your best bet.

G/L
 
In your BIOS you should have a setting for the AGP aperature size that should be set to the size of you AGP video card's memory. Also make sure any on-board video is disabled. Just a thought.
 
K, Im confused as to what you think is supposed to go "faster". Games? You should see a pretty good gap between the pci and agp cards. With windows in general and 2d apps you wont see any difference.
 
Yeah, it's games I'm talking about. Not the latest stuff, but games like Fate, Doom 3, Neverwinter Nights 2, etc.

Both cards are a huge improvement over the onboard video, naturally, but I can't see any difference between PCI and AGP and it seems to me I should, no?
 
Depends on what resolution you play at. At 800x600, your cpu is doing all the work and you won't see a difference with any video card. At a higher resolution, you will see a minor upgrade, but a 9250 isn't that much slower than the 5500.
 
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