Help me pick a video card

In My Humble Opinion
1

Given the number of techno-geeks and gamers (or both) we have around here, I thought I’d throw myself on your mercy. I need a video card. Hopefully, a decent video card. Here’s the issue: as near as I can tell, my computer (Compaq Presario 5461 in case you can research this and see if I speak true) only has PCI slots and all the newest cards I’ve seen are AGP. To be fair, I haven’t looked super hard though. So am I stuck buying an outdated card (which wouldn’t be horribly bad so long as it was decent) or are there newer PCI cards in existance? What sort should I look for? Other system specs, for what they’re worth, it’s a K6-2 500MHz with 320megs RAM working under Win98 (which I’ve heard means I have 256megs working for me but anyway…). As far as games go, it’s mainly screwing around with Everquest and the newest expansion will require something better than the factory video memory it came with (SiS 530 Graphics Controller - 8megs(?)).

*Platform:
Required Specs:
Pentium® II 400Mhz
128 MB RAM
16MB Direct3D (Glide no longer supported)
28.8 K Connection
4X CD-ROM
300 MB Additional Free HD Space

Recommended Specs:
Pentium® III or AMD Athlon Processor
256 MB RAM
32MB Direct3D Video Card supporting Hardware T&L
Broadband Connection*
Hopefully that’s enough to go on, but if you need more information, I’ll provide what I can.

2

I know the GeForce 2 MX comes in PCI form along with the Radeon. Id suggest the GeForce 2 MX, its dirt cheap (~100$ or less)and will much more than get the job done that you are requesting it to do. 32MB at least and make sure it says “geforce 2 MX” on it.
Dead0man

3

Well, PCI graphics cards have always been glitchy. If you want to take a risk on it, then I would also suggest the GeForce-2 MX PCI. However, if it turns out to be buggy, then you’ll have to return it, get a new motherboard (for a K6-2? That can be had for $70 or $80, if worse comes to worse), and then get an AGP card.

4

Is there an easy way to sell by looking at the board what sort of slots I have? I see three shortish white colored ones (~4" - My soundcard is plugged into one) and two longer black ones (~6"). Is there a difference between the two? Well, obviously there’s a difference but can anyone tell from my poor description what it is?

5

Let’s see, white=pci, brown-agp, black= 16 bit

So, you could get a All In Wonder 32meg. Then you can watch tv on ryou computer, with captions too, do video input & output with your camcorder, etc. Its a PCI version.

6

And by 16-bit, handy obviously means ISA. Not exactly worthless, but very quickly becoming obsolete. I still have an old modem in mine, as a backup should my cable connection die on me.

7

Before you buy anything you had better make sure you can defeat your onboard video completely in the BIOS. If not adding a video card is likely to be a difficult proposition.

8

Pick a card, any card.

9

Long and pointless, but I’m posting it anyway. It might actually help someone some day.

The story of one man and his video card installation:

Bought a PCI Voodoo5, completely ignoring Astro’s warnings. That’ll teach me. So anyway, said card came with no instructions, no box and a cheaply burnt CD that I guess is supposed to have drivers on it but all it does is make my CD player whimper.

So I pop the thing in, thinking that this is going to be, you know, easy. Turn the computer on. The CD player cries in pain, so I figure I should download the drivers instead of going through the CD. 3Dfx is out of business (I knew that when I bought the card, but it still came recommended) so I had to hunt a little for a site with the drivers archived. Found it, tried to install… computer locks up. Reboot, computer locks up. Huh. Turn off computer, pull out card, reboot, it works. Since my motto when playing with my computer’s innards is “The best I can hope for is that I get this working back how it was when I started”, I consider this a victory.

I look at the ReadMe file with the drivers and it suggests that I remove the 2D card already installed. Well, I don’t have a 2D card, I have a SiS controller physically attached to the motherboard. Huh. I go to the control panel and disable the SiS, and reboot. Look at the panel and there it is. Wait, I needed to change my BIOS, right? So, in the traditional way of doing so, I reboot and hold down F1. Doesn’t work. Try it again. Doesn’t work. At this point my friend calls and I ask him about it and he says “I dunno.” This guy has a degree in Computer Science. So I hop back online and look around see that Compaq, beating their own drum, makes you press F10 but doesn’t bother to tell you about that. Get into BIOS, turn off the SiS and tell it to check the PCI slots instead and reboot. Compaq demons laugh at me as it goes back to SiS. I sigh heavily and check around on the net some more. I find someone’s site telling for another computer saying that they had to disable their SiS then reboot, change the BIOS, reboot before Win98 comes up and that’ll do it. I try it and Win98 mockingly reinstalls the SiS controller.

Again with the ReadMe, it says that I needed to set the computer to base VGA before trying this, so I do so and go through the whole thing again and Win98 reinstalls SiS again. Bastards. At this point, I’m ready to give up but decide to try this once more. Then I notice something. Ok, anyone with any computer hardware skills can laugh at me now, but please understand that the most I’ve done with hardware is installing an external modem, a soundcard and memory. I never attached a power coupler to the card! I didn’t know it needed its own power! So I do so, reboot and my screen is blank. Cripes. Hey, you know what else I didn’t know? I needed to attack the monitor to the jack in back of the card! See, this is where instructions would have helped. I do, reboot and angels sing from Heaven as Win98 comes up and says “Hey, you have a Voodoo5 card in here! Let’s install drivers!” I do so, and then it still reinstalls the SiS as new hardware, but I think it’s going off of the Voodoo card now. At least when I ran Everquest, it said “You have new video options. Pick Voodoo4 (Glide) or Voodoo5 (something about hardware).” I chose 5 and it ran but eventually locked up. I think I need to reinstall DirectX since everyone says to do so when you mess with your video, but God help me, this shall work!

Oh, plus my colors all look richer and deeper now, so I assume that’s a sign the Voodoo is doing the work and not the old SiS chip. I hope so.

10

I’ve had problems installing voodoo pci’s before (not my voodoo1, though–that ran like a champ–it was a voodoo2). To be fair, the mobo I was running it on was crap. Voodoos typically suck a lot of power, so it probably has to do with the mobo not giving it enough juice.

If you’re running Everquest, you probably don’t need high end performance–just spend the minimum on something reliable, like a tnt2 based pci board or possible an ati board of some sort (rage 128, etc). That way you won’t feel quite so screwed if it doesn’t work, but it’ll still get the job done.

11

I buy ATI cards. The reason is because microsoft used them to get webtv on w95, thus, I know that ATI must talk to the people at microsoft to make a working video card.

So I got the Rage Fury recently ($50 (50 to 80)-30 rebate) & it works just perfectly well. Has tv in & out, too. But then its AGP.

12

Hmmm. I would also recomend a V5500 PCI if you can find one cheeeep enough. It is an orphaned card though, so future support is nil. It is pretty powerful though. I’d put it in the league of an original GeForce… which for a PCI card is nothing to sneeze at.

Slotar has a good point with the power consumption. “Cheap” OEM PCs are notorious for weak power supplies. I think you’d want at least a 250 watter.

13

If by V5500, you mean Voodoo 5500, that’s what I got. Someone on another board suggested there might be jumpers on the mobo that need changing to finish purging the SiS from the system so tonight it’s back on the net to try to learn a little something about my board.

I’m starting to determine that you can do about anything with hardware no matter your experience level with enough patience, faith and a good search engine :smiley: