hi im trying to upgrade my compaq evo D51S i've upgraded ram and such but i was wondering if it is possible to upgrade to a better video/graphics card? it has a pentium 4 2.4Ghz with 1.25 Gb ram i dont know what it has for a current video card but i think its integrated into the motherboard, i know the sound card is it has 2 pci expansion slots i attempted to install a ATI Rage 128 32mb video card and that just caused the system to beep and nothing to show up on the monitor i havnt done this before =\ could you please help me thank you
You will need to configure the BIOS to use the PCI video instead of onboard, but what are you upgrading the video for? An ATI Rage isn't likely to be much of an upgrade from the onboard video. Realistically, you will need to buy a new PC if you want to watch HD video or play any modern games.
well i was just hoping to make the picture a little less pixelie i dont need HD or anything on this system i read somewhere that if you add one to a pci slot it helps save CPU since its not trying to run it off of the motherboard is this true? if so that might be worth it if it just slightly speeds up my system
Not really true, it is for some things, but the CPU doesn't really process video anyway (or at least it doesn't when you've got drivers installed). ATI Rage cards are many many years old, you can buy PCI cards nowadays based on the much more modern Radeon 9250 chipset which would work better (though that is still 5 year old technology)
okay thanks alot for the advice that really helps i wont waste too much of my money trying to upgrade this system i guess one more question though i have some extra sound cards lying around and i was wondering if i installed one Would i beable to keep the integrated sound card running as well as have a pci sound card for my speakers? or is it really just one or the other?
You can use both, but not for the same program at once, iirc. i.e. you can have one playing the sound from a game, and another the sound from music, but not both playing the sound from a game. Why would you want two though? If you need more connectors just buy an audio splitter cable.
thanks alot i guess i wouldnt want both i was more wondering if it would mess up my integrated sound or disable it in any way but that makes sence thank you you solved all of my problems here =) you helped me with a monitor problem before if you ever have any free time could you please check out my new monitor problem? thanks for all your help
