Name that slot...

[ffutures]

My brother-in-law gave me a copy of Doom 3 for Xmas, but it doesn't want to work, presumably because my PC uses the motherboard graphics which don't have hardware acceleration etc. I'd rather like to play it, but I'm not 100% sure what graphics cards will be suitable for this machine. It has two empty PCI slots, plus another (the brown one circled in this picture) which I think is AGP. Can anyone verify this, and make any suggestions as to a suitable (and preferably cheap) card?

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

That certainly looks like an AGP slot to me. The brown colour, and the top placing are the main clue...

Cardwise, I'm fond of the Creative Labs branded Radeons, as they seem to be quite competively priced...

[houses7177.livejournal.com]

I don't have a diddly ass clue, but I love that you asked. How neat is this net thing, that you can put a pic up of some random computer part and ask advice on it? I love this place.

[sirernest.livejournal.com]

I'd say it is an AGP slot, colour and position are right for it. It looks like one.
This article on the hardware requirements may help you.

[booster17.livejournal.com]

Ran this past my tech support guy who happened to be around, and he says:

That is indeed an AGP slot. Any motherboard with that will be able to use a Radion 9200SE with 128MB ram (AGP 4x). For example item number 55275 on www.ebuyer.co.uk costs £23.12 plus VAT. That card will run Doom 3 in medium quality well enough.

If it is the motherboard I think it is (hard to be absolutely sure from the photo) it should be able be able to run an AGP 8x card such as the Radion 9550 256MB (ebuyer item 62209 cost £46.28 plus VAT. That card will support Doom 3 in high quality).

If you want the very best quality graphics be prepared to spend about £250 on a graphics card and about a grand on a new PC to go round it! Hope this helps. Let me know the type of motherboard if you want more info.

P.S. PLEASE DUST THE FAN IN YOUR MACHINE :)

Yes, he's a sarcastic git.

[mr-wombat.livejournal.com]

Not to forget a metric assload of RAM.
Just be wary when picking a graphics card, once you find one you like the look of, check with your motherboard's manufacturer to make ABSOLUTELY sure that it is compatible. I bought a geforce 5200 ultra which supposedly worked fine with my motherboard and got nothing but bleeps and a black screen for my trouble. The motherboard was supposedly 4x agp compatible but not with that specific card. Search overclockers.com and other similar sites, or just flat out ask if anyone has heard of compatibility issues between motherboard X and card Y if you're unsure. It's better to feel like a bit of a luddite than to feel a light wallet and a heavy paperweight. In the end I upgraded the motherboard, chip and RAM for about 300 euro from www.komplett.ie. The card itself cost 70 euro. Since then I've ditched that card in favour of the ATI 9088 pro (about 200 euro if you shop around).

Furthermore, Doom 3 itself is an odd beast. On an absolute animal of a machine it'll run beautifully but even on my machine (512 MB twinmos DDR RAM, ATI 9088 pro card, athlon ... something large processor) it gives trouble with performance - don't expect resolutions above 1024x768.
Even that requires some mucking about with the game itself in terms of adding some paramaters to the shortcut to bypass some of the more demanding (and redundant) features of the game. Also, the load times are excessive unless you work some magic and unzip the four massive PAK files the game installs (they compressed the game files to save hard disk space but this means that for the game to load anything it must first recover the files from those compressed folders, increasing the wait on slower hard disks, anything other than SATA drives setup for raid0 has trouble). A slow hard disk has more implications than just long load times unfortunately, most games these days use the swap space to an obscene degree and a slow hard disk means you lose performance while the machine tries getting that new texture you just caught out of the corner of your eye or has to load the animation of a guard picking his nose. Half life 2 practically craps itself whenever someone decides to talk.

That all sounds a bit daunting I guess but in essence, if you end up spending about 500-ish euro you'll have a pretty good machine, if you spend less and only upgrade bits and pieces then you're kind of hampering the individual parts. You might not even see a significant increase in performance from a new graphics card (if any at all) if the motherboard just can't take advantage of the features.

The bits I got were:
Motherboard
RAM
Chip
Power Supply

The power supply was just because my old one couldn't handle all this, some will handle the load, some won't. I can guarantee you that the motherboard will handle the Geforce 5200 ultra and the ATI 9800 pro.

That might be of some use, it might not, there's probably a cautionary tale in there somewhere :)