AGP Graphics Card upgrade

[Satch]

Been on a mission for a while to upgrade card on a three year+ old Dell which, with a 3.0 dual core Pentium and 2GB of memory, is still viable but suffered badly thanks to a naff graphics card.

In the meantime PCIe Graphics Cards have become the norm and AGP was supposed to fade away. But it will not die! Too many business machines, internet cafe machines etc in the West to be done away with quickly and lots af AGP equipped machines around the globe that will linger.

Thus a number of reasonable cards have crept onto the market, such as those based on Radeon HD 2600 XT fitted with an AGP bridge chip. After some scratching around lighted on this one

http://www.hisdigital.com/html/product_ov.php?id=350

Will not turn an old PC into an uber gaming beast but gives a real boost, runs DirectX10 and lots of useful features incluiding the abilty to easily experiment with overclocking rates and monitor GPU temperature. Best of all it WILL run off the poxy PSU fitted into my bog standard Dell Dimension 8300 although you need to feed it power via the spare Molex connector.

Overall well pleased so far although do need to sure that the latest specific driver for AGP cards is used.

 

[vijilants]

How much did it cost ?

 

[Sp!ke]

Expect to pay around £80-£100 for that card from my experience.

clones are as low as £25

 

[Satch]

How much did it cost ?

Paid Eur.105 but that was from a retail outlet in Frankfurt.

 

[st13phil]

Best of all it WILL run off the poxy PSU fitted into my bog standard Dell Dimension 8300 although you need to feed it power via the spare Molex connector.

Looks like you and I have a similar PC. My 8300 was originally supplied with an ATI 9800 Radion Pro card which gave great performance for it's day, but was prone to overheating in the 8300 (mainly because Dell saw fit to mount another card right next to it ) and my warranty replacement card finally cashed in it's chips just over a year ago.

I too searched for an alternative and ended up with an NVidia 7600GS card which also works fine. Something worth knowing is that early 8300's (like mine) were fitted with a 225W power supply and that just wasn't up to the job of running pretty much any of the half-decent PCI cards with an AGP Bridge chip. Later 8300's have a 300W power supply which should be OK. I ended up having to upgrade the power supply on my machine with a PC Power & Cooling direct replacement.