On A New Video Card

[LightFang]

Here's the situation!

About three years ago, I got myself a new video card for my computer so I could play Half Life 2. I got my dad to install it since I was and still am a bit technologically stupid, and he was the only one brave enough to open the computer up and put it in.

When our computer got upgraded, that was the end of that. I thought my video card had been lost to the unknown.

Fast forward to now. I found the old video card, a nVIDIA GeForce FX 5500; I also found out that the onboard video card was some Radeon X300 thing. Now, this video card is one of those PCI slot things, so I took the old card out, put the new card in, hooked the monitor in the new card, and installed the latest drivers.

When I check system properties, it says I'm running my new card. But when I run System Requirements Lab, it refuses to detect my new card!

Is there a way to check that my card is working?

 

[Cutlass]

plug a monitor into it and turn the pc on. if the monitor has a decent picture, the card it working

 

[Quintillus]

If I understand correctly you're trying to make sure your new dedicated graphics card is working and it's not the Radeon X300 thing that's running? There's a couple ways to do this. Probably the easiest is to go to Run, type dxdiag, and go to the Display tab. It should give you the name, chip type, etc. there. If that doesn't show your new card, it will probably show the Radeon X300 thing.

If it shows neither, try right-clicking on My Computer, going to Properties, then the Hardware tab, then Device Manager. Click the "+" box by Display Adapters, and it should show your video card. I see you've already done this.

If that doesn't work, it might be time to just run a benchmark and see what performance you get. I'd try 3dmark06. If you get a score of over 1000, you're running the new card. You can check whether your card is comparable to what you should be getting with your new card here. You'll probably get a score of 0 if you're running the very old Radeon X300 thing, as it won't be compatible with any of the tests.

 

[LightFang]

I'm sorry to say that none of your advice was followed. My graphics card can't handle the benchmark thing and it's so old that it's not even on that chart.

However, here is an update: Although both my computer and System Requirements Lab seem to recognize my graphics card, Team Fortress 2 doesn't. It insists that hardware support for DirectX is 8.0, while I know the card goes up to 9.0.

 

[Mulholland]

Is the radeon enabled in your device manger? Perhaps if you were to disable it tere there would be no conflicts with games.

 

[Snovvdog]

Disable your onboard graphics card in Bios. Or at least change the priority to your add in card, your board should have this set as standard, but it might have been changed.

Alternatively, go into your device manager and disable the old X300 onboard card ( rmb, disable this device).
Reboot and retry, all the games should properly detect your new card as the primary gpu...

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Had the same problem with an old server motherboard that had an onboard Rage XL VGA card. Basically, you need to make sure there are no drivers loaded for the onboard video card which can be done from either the bios or from device manager. The BIOS way is much more reliable though.