Cam Kirmser said:
Well, I'm being left in the dust. I thought my HP could handle
Neverwinter Nights 2, but find that my graphics card isn't up to
snuff.
I've got a HP763n with three PCI and one AGP slot. It looks like the
video card I need requires a PCI Express x16 slot.
So, is there an easy way to upgrade? Even if it's some sort of
external device? Or, am I stuck with having to buy a new computer,
if I want the video capability?
You are stuck with getting a new *motherboard* if you think that you
really need PCIe. PCIe is a non-compatible newer bus type. Even if
you were to magically add a PCIe slot to your existing motherboard,
there are still AGP cards whose performance is beyond your CPU's
ability to handle. That is, you can, for your computer, spend money
to get an AGP card that will get throttled by your CPU.
That GeForce4-MX420 64 MB DDR on your motherboard really sucks. "MX"
means low-grade version. Just about anything newer is better. Even
an old ATI Radeon 9600 Pro ($60 today) would be an improvement over
that crappy MX chip (which is also onboard video and borrows from slow
system RAM instead of using faster VRAM).
You can get some comparative specs on ATI cards at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ATI_videocards
("Radeon R400 AGP series" section)
The ATI x800/x850 XT [PE] (but not the Pro version) will max out your
AGP capabilities (but then you didn't mention if 8x is supported).
The info at
http://snipurl.com/hp763n_specs is pathetic. So are their
online .pdf docs for this model. The ATI models don't support that
later version of Shader 3.0 that nVidia supports but, so far, about
the only thing ver 3.0 seems to do better is parallax mapping and
usually that means, at higher res, having to disable anti-aliasing
which reduces jaggies.
For comparative specs on nVidia cards, go to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_NVIDIA_Graphics_Processing_Units
Remember that these are video *cards*. They perform better than the
onboard video chips. You can get LOTS of better AGP video cards than
that onboard MX400. For the equivalent to the ATI cards mentioned
above but using nVidia, you'd have to start at the GeForce 6800 Ultra
although the 7800 GS would be a closer match.
You never mentioned how much system RAM that you have, so upping that
might help. If you have 512MB, go to 1GB. Some games might work
better at 2GB but maybe not. Don't go over 2GB unless you actually
have tons of applications concurrently loaded in memory or have
applications, like PhotoShop, that can use it, as going too high on
memory will actually reduce effective latency times (see
http://snipurl.com/ddr_memory_myths, a link to a gamepc.com article).
Don't worry about getting CAS-2 versus CAS-3 since overclocking the
bus gives better results. But then if your mobo can handle it just
get faster memory an up the clock (provided it allows separate CPU and
memory clocking rates). I don't know if that mobo will let you go
from 133MHz to 200MHz (so you could move from PC2100 to PC3200
memory).
Getting a high-end AGP card won't be cheaper than getting an
equivalent performing PCIe video card but it eliminates having to
replace your motherboard, CPU, and memory just to get much better
performance that what you have now. You can still breath life back
into that old host. Up the AGP video card and up the system RAM (for
size and speed).
