Video card question

[RideTheCrash]

I'm going to be buying a new motherboard & processor soon, because mine has serious issues including multiple faulty caps that are bulging...I also need to upgrade anyway. I need an external video card just to free up the 32 megs of memory the onboard sucks up. I don't play any games, and I know the general rule of thumb is to not get anything fancy if you just want to free up the memory.

My dad gave me this old ATI Rage Pro card he had lying around. It has the year 1997 printed on the PCB. Looks similiar to the one in my fiancee's computer, but I'm wondering if because this thing is 10 years old it's going to somehow worse than what I could pick up today. I can't test it out right now because I have no PCI slots left available.

And one more thing...are TV tuner cards basically the same thing as an external video card, just with some extra connections? (S-Video, BNC, etc.).

Edit: I found an entry on it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Rage, it's the 3D Rage Pro one.

 

[Mindset]

Take one of your PCI cards out, and plug it up for a split second and start up your computer, if it posts it's fine. That card should be ok for you.

 

[RideTheCrash]

Yeah I guess so, I'm just lazy. I'm going in a few hours so I'll just wait. I think the card is AGP and I don't have any AGP slots and my new board might have it anyway...sounds like AGP is being phased out by PCI Express.

 

[Ford Van]

A video card that old may not have XP drivers. If it did, I would still not trust that it will play with XP very well. It is also a ATI chipset, and an OLDER one at that. They were fairly notorious for having lousy drivers and were not very good for DAW's.

Hey man, you can getting a pretty decent GeForce dual head AGP card for about $40. Some of the most frustrating stuff you can deal with on a computer system is a old flaky video driver. Stick with newer GeForce chipset and you should be good to go!

 

[Bondo]

More than likely if you are getting a new board for any current or recent processors it will be having PCI-E slots. You can get a PCI video card for like 40 bucks. I would recomend a NVidia 6200. I currently have an XFX 6600, and where I work we go through a number of the XFX6200 and 7300's. The 6200 would be more than adequate for audio without doing video work or playing games.

 

[Mindset]

A video card that old may not have XP drivers. If it did, I would still not trust that it will play with XP very well. It is also a ATI chipset, and an OLDER one at that. They were fairly notorious for having lousy drivers and were not very good for DAW's.

Hey man, you can getting a pretty decent GeForce dual head AGP card for about $40. Some of the most frustrating stuff you can deal with on a computer system is a old flaky video driver. Stick with newer GeForce chipset and you should be good to go!

Actually windows XP plays well with later hardware. When XP first came out, it was very good at using the built on microsoft drivers, and loading them in for particular devices. You could stick in a Geforce 2, 3 or 4 into a XP machine, and not even have to load a disk, and windows would reconize it and install it. It's plug-n-play.

But honestly, I would probably not use that card (Rage) because of my applications. Like stated, get a newer card.

Let me state this however....

Your thinking about upgrading your system. I take it that your going to do upgrades like replacing the motherboard with a brand spankin' new model. This is when your troubles will come in... You talk about your PCI slots are full.. How many do you have on your older system anyways? 4-5? or are you using a micro/small atx board with 1-2 maybe 3 PCI slots... Regardless, if you area already out of PCI's, upgrading to a new board won't help you, most new boards only have 3 max pci slots... There are some that give you a little more... but on the flip side, if your using a nic card, mobo's usually have them built on now, so that's one less card u can use, and so forth....

 

[RideTheCrash]

Just an update for you guys. The old card was an AGP one.

After not having much luck with the salesguy at the first I went to (he suggested just buying some package system they had and for the price I wasn't impressed), I went over to a store closer to my place...much smaller and there was one guy who owned the place and was extremely helpful. I explained my situation and he took a look at my current tower and gave me a bunch of options for everything (processor, board, video card, etc.). When he opened up my tower he noticed the faulty caps I mentioned and said the board is extremely cheap and they all have the same problem with the caps (PCChips, stay away!) and usually die right after warranty is up. My power supply was also very cheap.

So I ended up buying a ASRock Dual board (4 PCI, 1 PCI Express, 1 AGP). There was a slightly more expensive one, but it took only DDR2 RAM. I only have 768 megs of DDR...so since they both had the same max capacity (4 gigs) the one I bought handles both DDR and DDR2, so I can upgrade to better RAM later on. The processor I picked was a Dual Core Pentium (3.0GHz) and I got a NVidia 6200...I do video work in Sony Vegas -- but honestly I was using on board video before so I'll be fine with this, I just wanted an external card to free up memory from the on board...and this card is PCI Express too.

Since my tower was a flimsy POS and so was my power supply, I got this rock solid black case with a dual fan power supply for a pretty good price too. I haven't been on here much, but I think this computer is slightly noisier than my old one (probably due to the fans...better than my old getup though). My C drive had to get wiped, so I'll be reinstalling most my programs and stuff tomorrow before I can see how this CPU handles Cool Edit and Sony Vegas and all that stuff.

Thanks guys.