to getting a PCI gfx card that has more then 256mb?

For regular pci I am unable to locate anything greater than 256. PCI express has 512mb cards.

www.newegg.com

Yeah I don't know if I can use that type of card. I'd rather use AGP, but I'd have to get a new mobo

mobos are pretty cheap nowdays. But then you have the other items you have to purchase. Ex: memory, etc

*turns on the Betty signal*

*BAH DUN DA DUUUUUNNNNNN!!!!!!!!*

So, FA, can you give me a rundown of your system, and what you desire to improve so I can get a bearing on what options we have available.

The most helpful info for me would be:
Your processor type
Your motherboard model
What you plan to do with said graphics card

If you have an off the shelf computer like a Dell, HP, Gateway, etc..., just tell me the model# and I can probably get enough info from the manufacturers site.

Yeah it's off the shelf. I got it from my dad for Christmas. The only upgrades I've made to it is the ram and the vid card. It had an onboard vid card before. I'm not sure where I can get the motherboard info for you, but I went to the System Properties window and here is the info from there:

Dell Dimension DIM 2400 Intel Celeron
2.7 ghz
upgraded to 1gb RAM

upgraded vid card is GEFORCE FX 5200


Basically what I want a better video card for is the games I play. One in particular is Everquest. Right now the video card I think is the bare minimum for the game.

Thanks for your help :)

I run one of these... havn't had any problems with any games so far...

ASUS Radeon 9800XT 256MB DDR AGP 4X/8X Video Card

Probably outdated by now... but it works.

From what I've heard there is a BIG difference between an AGP card and a PCI card :(

PCI < AGP < PCI Express

All the top end gaming computers are now running PCI Express. (I believe... Betty may know more.)


Dual NVIDIA® GeForce™ 7800 GTX PCI Express 256MB DDR3 with NVIDIA SLI Technology 4 t3h WIN!

The AGP bus is seperated from the PCI bus. The general idea was to keep the video card traffic seperate from regular PCI traffic in order to speed things up. Thus, AGP cards tend to run faster.

The new bus system is PCI express. My understanding is that with the higher speeds this bus system has, they no longer plan on seperating the video card. Hence no AGP bus.

With video cards right now, you won't see much if any performance increase with a PCI express card versus an AGP8x card. The reason is that the AGP8x slot has so much bandwidth that even the most high end cards don't really take full advantage of it. A couple years from now with physics processing cards on the market and more advanced graphics cards, we may start actually using the full capabilities of the PCI express x16 slot.

FA,
Since you're limited to a PCI slot, your options are also a bit limited. You'll never have as much capability as you could've had, but here's what we can do. I had a look around, and I found a GeForce FX 5500 256M PCI card. Even with the bottleneck from the PCI bus, this should still give you better performance. Past that, you'd require a motherboard upgrade to get any more graphics performance, and since last I checked, Dell cases and power supplies were proprietary, that would mean a new chassis, it would likely cost you a pretty penny and probably require you to reinstall a new OS, which won't be possible with the Dell disk.

So, your best option is to get the best PCI card. Here's the link. Hope this helps.
http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=M&Product_Code=190481&Category_Code=VC-PCI

So the best thing would be to upgrade to that card and then save up and buy a whole new system?

Thanks for the info :)