Video Card Advice Please

[robaughjr]

Looking for some advice for a video card upgrade. I have a PCI slot (not PCIe, yes I know it sucks but I"m too broke to upgrade my pc or motherboard right now ). What is the best available PCI card and what are it's minimum power requirements? I still have the factory power supply on my HP Pavilion 514n and am sure I'm gonna have to upgrade it also. Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Zanmato]

The best nvidia card I can find on PCI is the FX5200, but I wouldn't bother with that. Not a good card for Civ4.
For ATI, it looks like ATI Radeon 9250SE 128MB or a ATI Radeon 7000 64MB. I have no idea of how well these fare with Civ4. All of these cards should be fairly cheap now but I suspect you might have problems running Civ4 to a level you're happy with.

Has your motherboard no AGP slot? As the options with that are far far greater and has more powerful cards. If you can look at the motherboard, look for a brown slot in between the CPU and PCI array. It is usually the most common layout.

 

[Pushead]

The best nvidia card I can find on PCI is the FX5200, but I wouldn't bother with that. Not a good card for Civ4.
For ATI, it looks like ATI Radeon 9250SE 128MB or a ATI Radeon 7000 64MB. I have no idea of how well these fare with Civ4.

I have an AGP version of the ATI 9250. The game runs pretty well until there is TONS of animation on the screen. I just finished an 18 civ large game with very little lag. Definately not what was described above.

 

[Akhenaton]

The best nvidia card I can find on PCI is the FX5200, but I wouldn't bother with that.

How about this one, discussed in the other thread:

 

[Zanmato]

Sure, that should do it and it would be one of the best cards you might find on PCI at the moment. I only looked at one place to see what they had available on PCI which wasn't much. Everywhere seems to going PCI-e. But, sure I doubt that 6200 will have little problem with running Civ4.

 

[robaughjr]

Has your motherboard no AGP slot? As the options with that are far far greater and has more powerful cards. If you can look at the motherboard, look for a brown slot in between the CPU and PCI array. It is usually the most common layout.

Unfortunately no, only pci (my pc's going on 3 years old). That GF 6200 looks good, I think I'll go with it, thanks guys.

 

[Zanmato]

Ok, glad to help. Just be aware that you might well have to upgrade the power too. Since the BFG one is overclocked it may mean it will need more power than it's normal clocked counterpart. In any case, you would want to start from a 350W PSU upwards. I'm guessing that the HP has got a 200 or 250w PSU from a Google search. You may also need to improve the case cooling also.

 

[Smidlee]

HP puts very weak PSU in their pc's so you will need a new PSU with any kind of upgrade especially when it comes to a new graphic card.

 

[robaughjr]

HP puts very weak PSU in their pc's so you will need a new PSU with any kind of upgrade especially when it comes to a new graphic card.

I was afraid of that, any suggestions on where I can get a good deal online?

 

[Golf3r]

I have an hp a350n and use the stock psu. Have added 1gb of ram (from 512) and an ATI 9800 pro (from geforce4 mx440) running on it. I had to splice the disk drives power cable because there wasnt a cable available for the dedicated power on the card, but it runs fine. I dont think you need a new psu, yours should be fine. Just my $.2

 

[robaughjr]

I have an hp a350n and use the stock psu. Have added 1gb of ram (from 512) and an ATI 9800 pro (from geforce4 mx440) running on it. I had to splice the disk drives power cable because there wasnt a cable available for the dedicated power on the card, but it runs fine. I dont think you need a new psu, yours should be fine. Just my $.2

I hope you're right but I'm still using the integrated chip not a card and my stock psu is only 200w, so I'm not sure.

 

[Smidlee]

You can run your upgraded pc with a weak PSU but I wouldn't recommended it. This increases the chance of frying the overworked PSU which possible could damage other hardware. If I was going to spend money on new hardware I would go ahead and spend a little more for a descent PSU. Some of the reviewers in the past really complained about HP putting such weak PSU in their units. It's just uncall for to put a PSU less than 300W in a PC.