AboutRider Expertise With 20 years experience I can answer almost any question about Intel computers ror build, restore, backup, configure, OS problems, Hardware issures. Setup of hardware components, repair, remove and replace. Trouble shooting hardware/driver issues.
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I have a 5 year old computer with a S3 64 meg AGP video card. 2 Ghtz, 1.5 Gig of Ram. I want to upgrade my current video card that supports only 800 x 600. The monitor is CRT 19" Princeton with only VGA connection supports up to 1600. .
and I read some reviews of purchasers, that it did not work at all, maybe was not designed for old motherboards... eventhough, the majority were happy with these card. I want to stay with this pc till the next Microsoft OS, not Vista...
What would you choose between these two, and would you have any other suggestions, please?
Anything I should know regarding compatibility to this relatively old AGP slot? I do not play games, so this will be just to update for regular work and video watching.
Any opinions and recommendations would be very appreciative.
Thank you, Gabe
ANSWER: Your problem is that both of these cards are 4/8x (speed) and your motherboard being that old may not be able to accept the speed of the cards, you should look for a AGP card that will go lower to 1/2x. You need to check your BIOS settings, under Advanced there should be a setting for AGP Apature. What is the max you can set it for?
What will happen is you will get a very low resolution because the apature setting is to high for the bus on your computer to reconize. It may well give you 800x600 but your color will be at the default which is proabably 16 colors, that is not 16 million but 16.
Does this make sense?
HTH
---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------
QUESTION: Hello again
I've already checked with the motherboard manufacture and it supports 4x.
The max I can get with my current card is 800 x 600 ...some program require me to go higher....also, the video playing will pause every once in a while and is not that clear... this is why...
Thanks again, Gabe
Answer Ok, well you will definately get more than 800x600 for a resolution. And the 'pause' when may go away. The reason for the 'pause' is that the amount of data being sent to the video card overloads the memory on the video card. Bumping up the memory from 64 meg to 128 meg will help, also the card you are going to install has a faster processor, so you may not even see the pause anymore.
Good luck, and if you are going to wait for the next iteration of Windows you may have to wait four years, that is about the time it takes to create, test, and put a new OS version out.
