Vid Card

[Jojon]

Well, these posts got me thinking...My Father has an Nvidia FX5500 AGP on the computer I'm using and 'I' decided to upgrade to the GeForce 9500GT PCI...It was $52 American.....it shipped today...did I do a bad thing?

I don't think so -- while I'm not qualified to tell how the values between the listed specs compare, it looks like you'll see quite the performance upgrade (something like eight times your old fill rate and four times the texture load speed).

I.Brattin, on one of the other hands, will not get quite the oomph out of his 8500 that he would out of the 9400 he looked at first, it would seem. Still well enough for his Uru/Blender needs. :)

http://www.nvidia.co.uk/page/geforce8.html
http://www.nvidia.co.uk/page/geforce9.html
http://www.nvidia.co.uk/page/fx_5200.html

[I.Brattin]

I wouldn't have gotten all the oomph anyways. The 9400 was PCI-E 2.0. While PCI-E 2.0 is backwards compatible, 2.0 will work in a 1.1 slot, it still would not have all the oomph that it would have in the 2.0 slot. Pretty much with the backwards compatibility you loose half the bandwidth of the card.

I will admit that even in a 1.1 slot a 2.0 card would have been a step up. Still I decided to go with the 8500 as I know for a fact that it will work with my motherboard. Something I don't know about the 9400, they say it is supposed to work but you never know.

Besides the old 8500, the card that blew on me back before Christmas, worked as well as I wanted. Now after I have a steady paycheck will I take a risk and upgrade to a 9 series card, more then likely, right now though I am fine with getting another 8 series card.

Update on the vid card situation, After 5 hours it is still going. Though the virus scan has so far detected 5 items. Whether those are viruses, trojans or spyware I won't know till its complete. It's possible that the vid card problems were a result of a virus since the Mcafee has already detected some stuff. Don't know of a virus that would cause the graphics to cut out though.

[I.Brattin]

Well so much for finding out what the 5 items Mcafee detected were. After 5 1/2 hours it finally cut out on me.

I will be glad when that new card gets here.

[diafero]

Actually, putting in a low-end PCIe2.0 card like the 9400 in a 1.1 slot has no noticeable side-effect - the card is too slow to use more than the 16x250MByte/s a full 16xPCIe1.1 slot provides anyway (and usually, if a mainboard has only one PEG slot, it has 16 lanes).

[I.Brattin]

USPS says the card is at the Post Office. So I should have it by the end of the day. By this time tomorrow it should be installed. Yay!!!

Edit: Up and running.

[diafero]

Great, and now let's hope this fixes your issues

[I.Brattin]

I ran it all day yesterday with no issues. Today though is the real test, but I expect the problem before was the 32mb card not a virus. The card just was ready to die. I had hoped I could put it back in the box and hold on to it as a backup but thats not going to happen now. No point in keeping with it dieing.