I recently replaced my GFX card on my older PC to breath some life back into it. I replaced a BFG NVIDIA GeForce 5500 OC 256MB PCI With a EVGA GeForce 9400 GT Video Card - 1GB DDR2, PCI (Dual Link) Dual DVI, HDTV, VGA, Low Profile I've got a Dell Dimension 2400 1024MB RAM Intel Celeron 2.6 GH.z It's seems to be that overall performance of my computer is sluggish now than it was before I replaced the card. Whats more is that my MOBO only supports PCI not the newer PCI-E bus. But When I go the NVidia Control Panel and click the "System Information" button on the far bottom left corner, I see that the Bus type is PCI-E x1 So. I've 3 questions. 1. Am I going crazy? 2. Or is there an actual compatibility issue here? 3. What would be your recomendations of a GFX card for this PC? I'll post further info for those who are curious. Thank You.
Your graphics will always be underwhelming with that PC since you only have a 32 bit 33MHz PCI bus. According to the Dell specs, that's all that you have: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim2400/en/sm_en/specs.htm In addition, since your graphics is sharing the same PCI bus as everything else, performace is bound to suffer. I would forklift the motherboard and keep the CPU if you're on a budget. If you had more money to spend I'd buy a more recent CPU/mobo combo. Throwing money at graphics to improve performance is, IMHO a losing proposition for that PC.
Your PC probably has some PCIe 1x and PCI slots, but not the 16x required for graphics. This was common with low budget PCs in the early era. You really need a complete new system to get decent games performance, as PCI simply can't handle modern graphics due to its vastly lower bandwidth (133MB/s for PCI, 8,000MB/s for PCIe 16x)
If you can get a refund, or even store credit for that new card, you should. PCI 3D graphics cards are a total scam...and you will NEVER find a good use for one. The only use for PCI graphics cards is to replace burned out onboard video with video that is just as bad, but in a PCI flavor. Even if it had the whole PCI bus to itself, it would still have only a small fraction of the bandwidth needed for anything 3D.
Or to do what I did, and replace 32MB SiS onboard graphics from an old Socket A Sempron system with something a little less "&*@!.
