Question about on-board graphics card.

[Raziaar]

They suck... I hate em. I know.

Anyways, My uncle is going to have a question for me later, whether or not his computer will be able to run the warhammer 40k games.

However, his family has a dell computer. It has decent stats, but the graphics card on it is onboard and it absolutely sucks. I don't know the stats of the computer at this time, or what the model is, but my question was this:

Is it possible to put a VGA graphics card like a radeon 9800 pro into a computer with an onboard graphics card? What if the motherboard model his has in it only has PCI slots and no VGA slot? What are the options then? Will putting one of those in override the onboard graphics card?

 

[The Brick]

If it has an AGP of PCIe slot, you can put one in just fine. If it hasn't, you can only use PCI graphics cards. They suck but they will probably be better than the onboard chip.

 

[WhiteZero]

You also may have to disable to onboard graphics from BIOS, but that isnt always necessary.

 

[Cole]

If you put in a graphics card that goes in a PCI/AGP/Pci Express it should autoatically override the onboard graphics.

If it doesn't then, as whitezero stated, you may need to disable it from the onboard graphics. That usually isn't the case(actually never has been) from my experience. Although i've never had a Dell either.

 

[Stigmata]

If you put in a graphics card that goes in a PCI/AGP/Pci Express it should autoatically override the onboard graphics.

If it doesn't then, as whitezero stated, you may need to disable it from the onboard graphics. That usually isn't the case(actually never has been) from my experience. Although i've never had a Dell either.

That's pretty much exactly how it works. Once the new card has been recognized as the default, then all you have to do is install the driver for it. Since the two cards run off of different buses, and are presumably not related to each other whatsoever, the drivers for both shouldn't conflict. But it's always a good idea to uninstall whatever old GPU drivers were on there before, regardless.

 

[hungryduck]

yes......hopefully he'll have an AGP slot in there....there aren't many PCI cards out there that are very powerfull.....

 

[WhiteZero]

If it's a Dell made in the past year or so it may have a PCIe slot.

 

[Raziaar]

It's a compaq presario with a 3100+amd centron processor. I don't know anything else about the computer at the moment. I just now got the model name. So i'm going to do some research to see what it has in it.

 

[Shippi]

.

 

[Raziaar]

Good news is... they have a VGA slot. Bad news is, their processor is a 1.8ghz amd. They'll be able to run the game(s), but not as well as me, and ONLY if they buy a radeon 9800 pro... which I tested mine in their computer.

There's also some funky graphic anomalies when they are on high textures... all the particle effects become giant black squares.

Going to upgrade their graphics card to a radeon 9800 pro...

But what about their processor? It is an AMD +3100 sempron.

What exactly does that run at compared to say, a pentium 4 2.8ghz

Their computer has the same amount of memory as me... same type. PC3200 DDR. 1024megs of it. However, they can't run company of heroes as well as my computer can. So I think their processor is to blame.

Any help

 

[The Brick]

The graphics anomalies are probably because of a faulty driver or the card. The 9800pro's are known to get screwed up a lot.

 

[Raziaar]

The graphics anomalies are probably because of a faulty driver or the card. The 9800pro's are known to get screwed up a lot.

It can't be the graphics card. It works just fine on my system. Might be drivers though. I didn't technically 'properly' install them by removing everything I should have.