Ati Radeon?

[showjyr]

My comp runs an ATI radeon express 200 series and looking to update because i can't play some of the newer games withou a lot of lag. Don't know much about computers and was wondering what would be a good graphics card to update to? I want to stick with ATI radeon and trying not to spend a fortune...thanks for any help.

 

[smurfyy_2k3]

i like the gforce series

 

[piratedninja]

im guessing you are on a laptop
i have a radeon xpress1100 which is the same as the 200 but a software upgrade squeezes more performance out of it

anyways something along the lines of radeon 1300 should run just about any game
and i dont think its possible to upgrade a laptop graphics card (if you are on a laptop that is)

 

[smurfyy_2k3]

im guessing you are on a laptop
i have a radeon xpress1100 which is the same as the 200 but a software upgrade squeezes more performance out of it

anyways something along the lines of radeon 1300 should run just about any game
and i dont think its possible to upgrade a laptop graphics card (if you are on a laptop that is)

of course it is,

 

[Arimus]

Actually on most laptops it is not easy to upgrade the graphics card.

1) They usually lack a PCI-Express or AGP slot,

2) The graphics chipset is normally integrated onto the motherboard along with all the other crud...

On a desktop PC its very easy to upgrade...

 

[showjyr]

Nope it's a desktop and i'm aware how easy it is to upgrade, my question was what whould be a good upgrade? Radeon alone produces so many different ones. Price is the big thing and i don't need anything super powerful.

 

[piratedninja]

whats your price range?? its hard to determine a good upgrade without knowing how much one is willing to spend
$100 will get you a pretty nice card, certainly not the best but will be able to play almost all games with pretty god quality

 

[showjyr]

whats your price range?? its hard to determine a good upgrade without knowing how much one is willing to spend
$100 will get you a pretty nice card, certainly not the best but will be able to play almost all games with pretty god quality

100 bucks is nothing major. Just so many to choose from and i don't know squat about them. If the radeon x200 is integrated does that mean i need to replace the motherboard too?

 

[smurfyy_2k3]

i really like the g-force cards

 

[Arimus]

Nope - on the BIOS there is normally a setting to knobble the on-board graphics but if it is on a desktop then it will usually be on a PCI-Express or AGP slot (AGP is an older and now pretty much obsolete standard).

 

[MHunt]

whats your price range?? its hard to determine a good upgrade without knowing how much one is willing to spend
$100 will get you a pretty nice card, certainly not the best but will be able to play almost all games with pretty god quality

100 bucks is nothing major. Just so many to choose from and i don't know squat about them. If the radeon x200 is integrated does that mean i need to replace the motherboard too?

Even though it's integrated, if you have an AGP ot PCI-Express socket (i'd guess the latter check your motherboard manual if you're not sure.) As soon as you put a card in there it will disable the on board graphics as the primary monitor. You may even be able to run dual monitor with the on board chip but i'm not sure so don't sue me if you can't!

As far as radeon cards go, i'm not up to speed with the current range, i had a radeon 9200SE for a while which is an AGP card but the graphics chip is a couple of generations out of date. I have gone over to the dark side and am currently running a Geforce 7600 AGP card which for the money is a cracking card, it hasn't made my graphics that much faster, but the quality improvement is phenomenal!

 

[piratedninja]

you cant have both the integrated(on board) and add-on cards running at the same time
the bios will make you chose just 1 because both cards are completely different and operate differently

however most cards now have dual monitor support and will let you plug in 2 or more monitors into the card


once you plug in the new card it will most likely disable the integrated chip and will switch over to the new cards video output
if not you can just go into bios and disable the onboard

 

[MHunt]

you cant have both the integrated(on board) and add-on cards running at the same time
the bios will make you chose just 1 because both cards are completely different and operate differently

however most cards now have dual monitor support and will let you plug in 2 or more monitors into the card


once you plug in the new card it will most likely disable the integrated chip and will switch over to the new cards video output
if not you can just go into bios and disable the onboard

I have had on board graphics working at the same time as a separate graphics card, it just depends on the capabilities of the motherboard. In the same way as you can have several graphics adapters in different slots in the machine. The on board chip is just effectively (if not physically) another pci, agp or pci express graphics card.

But that's not the issue here.

 

[showjyr]

OK OK, i don't need to get too heavily into all this stuff.....lets just say around a hundred bucks. Just tell me a good card in that range and i'll go buy the damn thing. Thanks.

 

[Arimus]

I'd suggest looking for a Geforce 7600 card with 512mb DDR ram or the ATI X1550 or X1650 again with 512MB Memory.

Between the X1650 and the 7600 there isn't much to seperate them... looking at various reviews of the two the fps rate in games of both are within about 2fps - sometimes one is better, sometimes the other....