WILL 9550 FIT?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jen Meyer
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Jen Meyer

Thanks to the replies to several of my posts, I've decide on a ATI
Radeon 9550. Before buying it though, how do I know if it will fit my
Dell Dimension 4400? I already bought a ATI Rage 128 32mb to replace my
ATI Rage 128 16mb and it wouldn't fit. The 32mb only had one slot in
the male printed circuit that plugs into the mobo, the 16mb had two.
What about all the other differences: My system says AGP 1X, 2X, 4X.
The Radeon says 8X. My Rage card says 32 bit, the Radeon says 64. The
current card has SGRAM, the Radeon is DDRAM. Will the Radeon work in my
250w power.
I guess my question is, before I shell out $75 for another paperweight,
does anyone out there have a Dimension4400 (3 years old) that has been
upgraded with a Radeon 9550?
 
Jen Meyer said:
Thanks to the replies to several of my posts, I've decide on a ATI
Radeon 9550. Before buying it though, how do I know if it will fit my
Dell Dimension 4400? I already bought a ATI Rage 128 32mb to replace my
ATI Rage 128 16mb and it wouldn't fit. The 32mb only had one slot in
the male printed circuit that plugs into the mobo, the 16mb had two.
What about all the other differences: My system says AGP 1X, 2X, 4X.
The Radeon says 8X. My Rage card says 32 bit, the Radeon says 64. The
current card has SGRAM, the Radeon is DDRAM. Will the Radeon work in my
250w power.
I guess my question is, before I shell out $75 for another paperweight,
does anyone out there have a Dimension4400 (3 years old) that has been
upgraded with a Radeon 9550?
Click to expand...

An AGP card will fit in an AGP slot - if the card is AGPx8 but the slot is
x4 then
the card will run at x4 but the performance loss is negligable. The bigger
problem is the
power supply and I dont think your 250w will be enough - a decent 350w is
more like it.
From the little I know of Dell PCs they often have custom fit parts like
PSUs so changing that
may not be simple.
 
An AGP card will fit in an AGP slot - if the card is AGPx8 but the slot is
x4 then
the card will run at x4 but the performance loss is negligable. The bigger
problem is the
power supply and I dont think your 250w will be enough - a decent 350w is
more like it.
From the little I know of Dell PCs they often have custom fit parts like
PSUs so changing that
may not be simple.
Click to expand...

The ATI 9550 will fit and have enough power. It's a very low wattage
demanding card, as cards go.

I'm no big Dell fan, but their power supplies, even though rated at low
wattage, are actually a lot better at supplying juice than you think. I had
this concern when installing a friend's ATI 9800XT into a 2.0Ghz Dell box
with a 250W proprietary supply. This box also had 2 burners and 2 HDD's.
Booted up and ran under full load no problem, and still going strong after 1
yr plus. Antec and others actually do produce specific high output p/s for
Dell boxes when they are needed.
 
Augustus said:
The ATI 9550 will fit and have enough power. It's a very low wattage
demanding card, as cards go.
Click to expand...

I agree on this one.
A small point to the original poster: remember to make sure that the 9550
you are getting has the 128-bit memory bus, not the 64-bit one some of them
have. The latter will cut the performance of the card to half of what would
be available by the GPU.
....
 
A small point to the original poster: remember to make sure that the 9550
you are getting has the 128-bit memory bus, not the 64-bit one some of
them
have. The latter will cut the performance of the card to half of what
would
be available by the GPU.
Click to expand...

I pointed this out to her in her other post so hopefully she's took our
advice and did not pick up a 9550SE.
 
The Radeon 9550 will fit. Dell's power supply units are also reputed to be
high-quality, so the 250W should be able to handle the card without
problems. Just make sure you uninstall the existing Rage 128 drivers before
switching the cards, then install the latest Catalyst drivers from ATi's web
site.

Little background on the card that didn't fit:

The Rage 128 chipset is a relatively ancient design that debuted around the
times of the Pentium II. Most *retail* cards based on the chipset used 3.3 V
AGP signaling. Pentium 4 motherboards use 1.5 V AGP signaling, so the AGP
slot is keyed to prevent older cards from being used (3.3 V would burn the
motherboard). The modernized OEM Rage 128 cards sold to Dell to integrate
into its PCs use 1.5 V signaling, different from the retail cards. The 32 MB
card you bought had the older design, so it didn't fit. The Radeon 9550 can
use either 1.5 V or 0.8 V signaling, so it will work just fine.
 
Augustus said:
I pointed this out to her in her other post so hopefully she's took our
advice and did not pick up a 9550SE.
Click to expand...

Sorry, didn't realize that. However, there exist 9550SE's with 128-bit
memory bus so you mentioning the SE suffix was not completely right. And to
make things more complicated there are also 9550's without the SE suffix
equipped with a 64-bit bus. Probably this is just to confuse the vanilla
consumers. I wouldn't know the difference unless given the card for
inspection and some time to surf the Net (to check out the board design and
memory specifications).

Maybe the best advice would be to completely avoid all the SE models... OTOH
if I had done that, I wouldn't have gotten my 9800SE AIW, with which I'm
completely happy - even though it is non-moddable to 9800. It memory bus is
256 bits wide and it is (stock) clocked to speeds of a 9800 Pro. Enough for
me.
 
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