What PCIe card ?

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Pat

Am running a Dell 4700 that only has chipset graphics. I have upgraded to
Vista Home Premium and would like to get the full Aero experience but I am
not into games.
I only have 512mb RAM at present but am going to add a further 1gig shortly.
I would be quite happy getting a cheap second-hand card as long as it will
run the full Aero experience ie glass/3D etc.
Any suggestions?

Thanks
 
Pat said:
Am running a Dell 4700 that only has chipset graphics. I have upgraded to
Vista Home Premium and would like to get the full Aero experience but I am
not into games.
I only have 512mb RAM at present but am going to add a further 1gig
shortly.
I would be quite happy getting a cheap second-hand card as long as it will
run the full Aero experience ie glass/3D etc.
Any suggestions?

Thanks
Click to expand...

I have an PCIe Nvidia GeForce 6600GT 128mg video adapter that supports Aero
Glass very nicely. Cards with this chipset start at $82 on www.newegg.com.
I don't know if this is the best bang for the buck at the moment though.
 
When looking for a graphics card, make sure the card has Vista support,
further, with 1G of RAM, make sure the card doesn't lean too heavily on
onboard memory (that is on the 1G), a lot (most) PCI-X cards use a
combination of memory on the card and memory installed in the system.

Lastly, check the power requirements that the video card presents to
your system -- higher end PCI-X16 cards pull a lot of power (and
generate a lot of heat). The thing here is that with a cheap second
hand card, if it has active cooling (fan) -- the trick is to make sure
the fan works properly and is reasonably quiet.
 
Pat said:
Am running a Dell 4700 that only has chipset graphics. I have upgraded to
Vista Home Premium and would like to get the full Aero experience but I am
not into games.
I only have 512mb RAM at present but am going to add a further 1gig
shortly.
I would be quite happy getting a cheap second-hand card as long as it will
run the full Aero experience ie glass/3D etc.
Any suggestions?

Thanks
Click to expand...

I like my ATI x1300 Pro (256MB VRAM, non-shared, PCI-Express).
You can have as much as 4GB System RAM with Vista Home Premium, more with
Vista Ultimate. I currently have 2GB (4x512MB PC6600) in my system, and
Vista runs sweetly.
 
I have an almost 2 year old Intel MOBO with chipset graphics and it runs
VISTA Aero without any problem. I just had to insure that the chipset had or
supported 128MB of onboard/shared memory and that the main memory was more
then 512MB.
 
I like my ATI x1300 Pro (256MB VRAM, non-shared, PCI-Express).
You can have as much as 4GB System RAM with Vista Home Premium, more with
Vista Ultimate. I currently have 2GB (4x512MB PC6600) in my system, and
Vista runs sweetly.
Click to expand...
Regarding memory, it isn't Home Premium versus Ultimate -- it is 32 bit
versus 64 bit. I don't think the Home Basic version comes in both 32
bit and 64 bit, all the other iterations do.
 
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