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Thread ID: 52937 2005-01-03 06:33:00 Graphics card upgrade Cat 22 (6764) Press F1
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310147 2005-01-03 06:33:00 Help. I have a 3 year old Dell Dimension 4300 1.6g PC and need to upgrade my graphics card to one which fully supports Direct X8. Currently it has an Nvidia GEforce2 MX graphics card, which doesn't. I went out today (in a spirit of blind optimism) and bought a Radeon 9550SE, which supports DirectX 9.

Two concerns arise ...

First, I'm now told that older motherboards ran at 3.3 volts and may do nasty things to a modern graphics card designed to run at 1.5 volts. Most older 3.3 volt motherboards are apparently "universal" and can switch to 1.5, but a few can't. How do I know what I've got? Fry it and see? (small joke here)

Second, my motherboard has two slots in the brown plastic thingy (technical term) into which the graphics card fits. All well and good, because the Radeon graphics card has two 'male' bits to fit into those two slots. But ... the older Nvidia card actually had three 'male' bits of which two went into one of the slots. This may be nothing more than the configuration of a down-market Nvidia card but if anyone can tell me if i should be worrying about it, now would be a really good time to know ...

Hopefully yours,

Cat 22
Cat 22 (6764)
310148 2005-01-03 06:56:00 Looking at your computer specifications (support.dell.com), your motherboard has 2/4x AGP (1.5V) so it shouldn't be a problem. Your new Radeon 9550SE is a 8x AGP but will only run at the 4x AGP speed which is also fine. Jen (38)
310149 2005-01-03 07:00:00 Looking at your computer specifications (support.dell.com), your motherboard has 2/4x AGP (1.5V) so it shouldn't be a problem. Your new Radeon 9550SE is a 8x AGP but will only run at the 4x AGP speed which is also fine.


Thanks Jen, I'll give it a try. I spent hours on the Dell site trying to find those specs. Should've come here first and saved myself a lot of time : )

:thumbs:

Cat 22
Cat 22 (6764)
310150 2005-01-03 23:36:00 running a 8x graphics card in a 4x motherboard is no problem, ive got that right now and ive never had any problems Prescott (11)
310151 2005-01-04 11:32:00 It worked fine thanks.

Cheers

Cat 22
Cat 22 (6764)
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