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Crusty PC

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feliscatusx2:
Gigabyte GA5AX Mb with an AGP1 slot, remember them?  I have just ordered a nice 17" TFT to replace a freeby IBM G76 17"CRT.  The graphics card is an OEM ATI Rage128 with 16Mb of RAM.

It would be nice to upgrade this card to something with a little more memory and grunt, but the slot is AGP1 5Volt.  Anybody aware of where I can get something suitable?

I did try a Radeon 9200 some time ago, the card worked but the drivers would never load properly.

I know I probably don't need a better card, I just said it would be nice.  That would just leave the Motherboard, processor case & PSU as the originals.

No 1 daughter, she with the b****y laptop, just bought me the Complete PC Upgrade & Maintenance Guide, 11th edition, brand new with 2 CDs, for 99p.  A bargain, especially as it is contemporary with my PC and is big and heavy enough to worry the cats when they misbehave.

kitz:
Bit out of touch with hardware these days.
The last few PCs Ive had have been shop boughts.. simply because i couldnt get the parts for the price and spec of the package.
Must admit though they never feel like mine as much as those that you put together yourself.

Would think your best bet is somewhere like a computer fair as you may be able to pick up a 2nd hand card with a bit more memory.

soms:
Its hard to know what cards will work as manufacturers dont seem to clearly state what voltages their cards will run at.

The alignment of the notches are the card bus give you some idea as some cards will not fit certain voltage slots.

You found the Radeon 9200 would work, but with poor drivers. ATI drivers were never ATI's strongest point but that would be a great card for older PC, especially if you get a DVI output one (your monitor might not be DVI?).

I have an old P2 PC with a RageXL AGP card. When in a low profile case I found I could use a Radeon 7500 quite happily in the old Intel motherboards (fits both old and new) so it must operate at multiple voltages. The drivers also worked fine on any OS i used, but I always downloaded from the ATI website and never use the ones supplied on manufacturers CD-ROM, they are often outdated and sometimes have funny or confusing installers etc.

roseway:
Do you have to use an AGP card? There are plenty of good PCI graphics cards around, if you've got a spare slot.

Eric

mr_chris:
I know NVidia better than ATI, so I'll give you some advice or links etc.

AGP 1.0 slots, yes I remember those! FYI I've had a Geforce FX 5200 working fine in one of them. They are reasonably cheap to obtain now if you want to buy new (somewhere around the ?25 mark, I think). I also think that any of the FX 5xxx range will work ok, too, but don't quote me on that.

In my opinion, you won't extend the performance of the PC by installing a card much faster than a Geforce 4, because the AGP slot will become a bottleneck, and presumably your processor isn't particularly fast by today's standards, negating any benefit from a super-duper graphics card?

So, your best bet would be to get a 2nd hand AGP card off Ebay such as a Geforce 4 MX card or something. Whilst the Radeon 9200 would be marginally quicker, I'm not sure why the drivers didn't install, I take it you did try the official drivers from ATI?

Drivers for Radeon 9200 on this page
Specific driver-only package for the Radeon 9200 is here (Direct link - 12MB)

As for NVidia cards - there's a Geforce 2 MX with 32MB of RAM here on Ebay - ?7.99 + ?2.49 postage - it will be a lot better than what you've got in there.

Looking around again, even better would be this one which is a Geforce 4 MX 440 card, will work fine (i've had one of these working fine in an old AGP slot, and they do make windows feel a lot more snappy, and they do play some games)

If you want to keep an eye on this, it's an FX5200 card with 128MB of memory, currently at ?0.99 with 10 hours to go. Marginally faster than the MX440, but not by much.

Any of those ones should work in your motherboard :)

The only other alternative, as roseway said, is to get a PCI card, but I don't think you need to do that.

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