Brickcounter said:
I want to replace my graphics card with one of similar, or better,
performance, preferably quiet.
With an Athlon 1.4GHz, there is a limit to how much good a high
performance card would do you. In this example, the bars in gray
are for an Athlon 1000, and the benchmark shows only 60-70% of the video
card performance is being achieved.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2003/01/20/vga_charts_ii/page6.html
When a card has poor thermal or noise performance, you can always shop
for a third party cooler. This one, for example, is purely passive
and uses heatpipes. A heatpipe gives a huge improvement in
cooling performance, as it does a much better job of transferring
heat into the fins.
http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/view.asp?idx=278&code=013
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835118029&Tpk=vnf100
This is another nice one. This one includes a fan, and the fan has
a speed controller, so you can turn it down to a low level. The VF1000 LED
cooler is even rated, to cool some 130W cards.
http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/view.asp?idx=289&code=013
On this page, you can see some of the older, aftermarket coolers, such
as VF700 and VF900. Places where coolers like that won't fit, are on
some of the bridged video cards (AGP bridge chip plus PCI Express GPU),
where the GPU is positioned too close to the top of the video card,
for the cooler to fit well.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...actory=1647&SubCategory=576&SpeTabStoreType=0
In terms of cards, some candidates for you might be 7600GS AGP,
7600GT AGP, X1950Pro AGP. The first two are Nvidia, the third from
ATI. Apparently, ATI will have some AGP versions of their 3850/3870
series, but I don't know exactly when. Those are DX10 cards (suited
to gaming on Vista, using the DX10 standard, but still using an
AGP based motherboard).
The 7600GS AGP is probably under 35 watts power consumption. It could
be fanless. 7600GT AGP is about 35 watts or so. The X1950Pro AGP is
up around 65 watts, and I'd want a fan based cooler on that.
This is one of the last remaining examples of a 7600GT AGP. It is
a bridged design, and the Nvidia HSI bridge can be seen using its
own cooler (black rectangle near the AGP connector). If the cooler on
this was not quiet enough, that bridge heatsink makes it harder to
fit a third party cooler (so check the exceptions list, for any
cooler you plan to buy).
XFX GeForce 7600GT PVT73AUDE3 Extreme Video Card $140
http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/productimage/14-150-210-03.jpg
This X1950Pro AGP is quite a long card (about 8.5" long).
http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/productimage/14-161-082-03.jpg
It is a dual slot, and blows the hot air out through an adjacent slot.
http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/productimage/14-161-082-08.jpg
The ATI Rialto bridge, is the thing under pink on the back of the card.
http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/productimage/14-161-082-05.jpg
X1950Pro AGP are about $175 to $210, and come in single slot and
dual slot (good cooler) designs. A bit more expensive than a 7600GT,
but also giving more performance.
With regard to benchmarks, it is pretty hard to compare a Radeon 8500
to some of the current stuff, because the sites that have benchmarks,
don't put all the cards on the same chart. I would guess a 7600GS or
7600GT would be more than the Radeon 8500, but I could be wrong.
You could always use a site like this, to compare the basic parameters
on the cards.
http://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/
Radeon 8500 R200 AGP 64MB DDR 250 MHz 250 MHz / 128 Bit 4x2 / 4x2 / 1 DX8.1, PS1.4, VS1.1
7600 GS G73 PCI-E 256MB DDR2 400 MHz 800 MHz / 128 Bit 8 / 12 / 5 DX9.0, PS3.0, VS3.0
7600 GT G73 PCI-E 256MB GDDR3 560 MHz 700 MHz / 128 Bit 8 / 12 / 5 DX9.0, PS3.0, VS3.0
X1950 Pro RV570 AGP 256/512MB GDDR3 575 MHz 690 MHz / 256 Bit 12 / 36 / 8 DX9.0, PS3.0, VS3.0
Now, the other issue, is AGP slot compatibility.
http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html
The "Practical Motherboard And Card Compatibility" table, shows what
combinations work. The biggest killer to upgrading, is if you have
a 3.3V only video slot.
The bridged video cards, such as the three in the table, are "Universal 1.5V AGP 3.0"
and will work with a Universal AGP Motherboard. I suspect that is what your
motherboard is, but I've been unsuccessful mapping "VT8637-8235" chipset
to its "marketing name". It must be in the same era as "VIA Pro 266",
but I cannot be sure of that, unless I can find a web page that
gives both the chip numbers and the popular name. In any case,
use the playtool.com AGP compatibility page, to get some
indication that the card will fit in the slot.
There are certainly other generations of cards to consider. For
example, I own a couple FX5200 AGP cards, and they fit in any
of my AGP computers and work. But I expect that wouldn't be
a performance improvement. I can barely play games at minimal
settings, with those. They're more of a Microsoft Office / web
surfing kind of card. And a lot of the older cards, might only
be available via Ebay or the like.
There are also cards like ATI X1300/X1550/X1600 in bridged AGP form,
and even in PCI form. A lot of those have disappeared from retail
as well. They're on the lower end of the performance scale.
If a new video card had only DVI-I connectors on the faceplate,
check to make sure at least on DVI-I to VGA adapter plug is included
in the box. If you have an older monitor with VGA on it, you'd need
an adapter. If the faceplate has one DVI and one VGA connector,
then you should be in good shape. The DVI-I to VGA is the
adapter dongle on the right of this picture.
http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/productimage/14-130-099-06.jpg
Paul
