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4400 Upgrade problem

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Lachp30

Guest
Okay,

I have been looking to upgrade my Dell Dimension 4400 for quite some time now, and have decided on either a Saphhire Radeon9500 Pro or non pro, or the same but a 9600. The problem is that the monkeys at dell don't have a clue what they are talking about, and don't believe that these cards will work. I wrang them, and the suggested a whole line of brad of cards that I had never heard of that ended up to be worse than the geforce 2 Mx I already have! My mobo is a intel845, and im running with 2Ghz. Also, I ran the application, CPUz, and It says my apture size for the AGP slot is 64mb. Does this mean that I can't put in a 128mb card?

Here is a picture:
 
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ra5555

N64 Newbie
Yep, APG aperture size has nothing to do with what kind of video card you can put in. In fact you can change the amount of aperture in the bios. I think apg amperture is the amount of system memory (not video) allowed to be used for video memory. For the best preformance set your APG amperture to 64 or 128 mb.
 
Lex

Lex

New member
ra5555 said:
Yep, APG aperture size has nothing to do with what kind of video card you can put in. In fact you can change the amount of aperture in the bios. I think apg amperture is the amount of system memory (not video) allowed to be used for video memory. For the best preformance set your APG amperture to 64 or 128 mb.
Click to expand...
You can calculate how much system ram is used with ("aperture size"-"video ram"="amount of system memory used")
 
Tagrineth

Tagrineth

Dragony thingy
Mmm.

An i845 mainboard should have an AGP. In case you don't know, an AGP looks the same as a white PCI slot but it's brown, and is closer to the middle of the mainboard. It'll be above all the PCI's.

If you DO have an AGP, then look on Dell's web site for the part number of a Radeon 9500 Pro. Do NOT get the non-Pro.

If you can't get one through Dell at all, there's always www.buyxg.com... their Radeon prices are very good.
 
Tagrineth

Tagrineth

Dragony thingy
Not sure, Khan Artist... my 9500 Pro was listed as 'OEM' and came as-is with the drivers and cables but no box. But if it doesn't say OEM it should be in a retail box.
 
OP
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Lachp30

Guest
Thanks, but I'm really interested to no weather the sapphire card will work on the dell mainboard with dell bios etc. I don't want to buy through dell due to the fact that it would take me a matter of minutes to walk down to my local computer store to buy this card. Also, I read somewhere that the PRO requires an extra power slot on the mainboard that the dell can't provide..!
 
C

Chibi Nick

Emutalk Member
It would work with your mobo and your bios.

I'm unsure if it requires an extra power slot.. so I couldn't say anything about that...

Tagrineth - He knows he has an agp slot, and never asked if he had one or not o_O
 
OP
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Lachp30

Guest
Blarg, I don't want to make the stupid mistake of buying the card if it is not going to work. If anyone could find out about this card and it's extra power requirements and simplify them for me it would be much appreceated. Dell have fully confused me:p
 
Tagrineth

Tagrineth

Dragony thingy
It's fine, Dell uses the same ~200-250W (can't remember number, but I'm pretty sure it's 250) for all their systems, even teh UBER high-end ones. Dell's PSU's are some of THE best in the industry. Who else can say they run stable 3GHz P4's with 1GB RAM and a Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB off a 250W supply?

You should be fine, wrt power consumption.
 
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