As you can see from my specs, the best slot on my mobo is an AGP x8, I have no PCI-e slots.
So, I was googling around to see if I could upgrade my current graphic card. Seems like NVIDIA pulled the plug on AGP cards far before ATI.
The best one I found is a radeon 4670 with 1 GB of DDR3, which is available as either "gaming" or "home cinema" versions (the home cinema one has a crappier openGL but has better "unified video decoder" and has an integrated "7.1 audio", they are otherwise identical), both have native HDMI ports in addition to the usual VGA and DVI.
First question: Is my processor good enough to not bottleneck these cards?
Second question: what is the best of the two? Do I really need a better OpenGL? What are exactly the two other features of the "home cinema" card?
Feel free to recommend a better AGP card if you know. No price limit.
Don't tell me to buy a new PC and a pci-e card, I already know that would be the easiest way.
So, I was googling around to see if I could upgrade my current graphic card. Seems like NVIDIA pulled the plug on AGP cards far before ATI.
The best one I found is a radeon 4670 with 1 GB of DDR3, which is available as either "gaming" or "home cinema" versions (the home cinema one has a crappier openGL but has better "unified video decoder" and has an integrated "7.1 audio", they are otherwise identical), both have native HDMI ports in addition to the usual VGA and DVI.
First question: Is my processor good enough to not bottleneck these cards?
Second question: what is the best of the two? Do I really need a better OpenGL? What are exactly the two other features of the "home cinema" card?
Feel free to recommend a better AGP card if you know. No price limit.
Don't tell me to buy a new PC and a pci-e card, I already know that would be the easiest way.
My Computer
At a glance
Win 7 Pro 64-bit 7601AMD Phenom 9650 QuadCore, revision DR-B35 GB yes I run 2x 2GB and 1x 1GB, different b...NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT 512 Mb, unknown manufa...
- Computer type
- PC/Desktop
- Computer Manufacturer/Model Number
- custom built
- OS
- Win 7 Pro 64-bit 7601
- CPU
- AMD Phenom 9650 QuadCore, revision DR-B3
- Motherboard
- ASUS M4A78
- Memory
- 5 GB yes I run 2x 2GB and 1x 1GB, different brand, spank me.
- Graphics Card(s)
- NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT 512 Mb, unknown manufacturer.
- Sound Card
- Crappy Realtek Integrated Audio
- Monitor(s) Displays
- Fujitsu Siemens P19-3P
- Screen Resolution
- 1280 x 1024 x 32 bits @ 60 Hz Oh yeah, 4:3 rocks!
- Hard Drives
- (1) MAXTOR S TM3320613AS SATA Disk Device (2) STM35004 18AS SATA Disk Device (3) TOSHIBA USB 2.5"-HDD
- PSU
- whatever, around 450w
- Case
- Scavenged from old company PC, 10+ years old
- Cooling
- CPU fan, GPU fan, case fan, nothing fancy
- Keyboard
- Microsoft, PS/2, white.
- Mouse
- Optical, logitec.
- Internet Speed
- effective max speeds: 70-ish kB/s down 30-ish kB/s up
- Antivirus
- Avira, free edition.
- Browser
- Firefox with FXChrome to make it look like Google Chrome :P
- Other Info
- Was discarded by previous owner due to "horrible performance".
Was running Win Xp from a IDE drive. Yeah. Was a pain.
SATA II drive and Win7 and it zips away! Yay!
