[MOVED] Will a graphics PCI card improve performance in my Pentium 4, 2.53 GHz, 1 GB RAM - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Lawsen
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2011, 07:44:55 pm
content: My computer is a Compaq Evo D510 small form factor desk top computer with a Pentium 4 - 2.53 GHz and 1 GB of RAM, maximum allowed. Will a PCI graphics card improved its windows during web surfing? It has an AGP slot, but the case is a small forms factor with two PCI slots and half height AGP slot. It cannot take the commonly available full height AGP cards that are popular on the market for $40.00 or less. I have a feeling that it maxed on the enhancements and just use it, until it burns out.Lawsen

author: Flavour Flave
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2011, 08:00:29 pm
content: If you have got broadband and surfing is a bit slow then a graphics card will make your surfing experience better. But if you are paying $100 for a graphics card you could probably get a better computer for that amount second hand.Richard

author: Unknown
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 01, 2011, 08:29:01 pm
content: This question may be better suited to a computer forum, or at least post it in the general chat forum where off-topic posts are expected. You're likely to get more useful answers on a forum where this is on topic.

author: Mechatrommer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2011, 08:37:52 pm
content: sorry to say. from my experience, you are wasting your money if you expect web browsing will be better by purchasing graphic card alone. you need a whole new system, or try to max your memory first. how much memory you got there?ps: agree with alm, this is not a computer section.

author: ndictu
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2011, 08:45:59 pm
content: This would be a better place for this question:http://superuser.com/But, since you already asked ...You have to figure out what is the bottleneck there. Web surfing is mostly about your internet connection. But if you think that is fast enough (maybe check with another computer) and everything still seems slow I would guess software next.If you aren't using Chrome (or Opera) you should give it a try. They are pretty responsive. (The new Firefox and IE aren't bad, but still can't compete with Chrome in page load time). Also, make sure to check you process list in task manager, there might be some background application running that you don't need and they are slowing everything down.Although some new browsers can use graphics cards to improve rendering speed, I don't think it is that noticeable. Also it doesn't work with every card and the browser support is still experimental so it might not help at all. All of the page composition will be done using your processor and then just rendered as a 2d bitmap. I don't know what kind of integrated graphics card you have but pretty much every one can do that.So, TL;DR: Check you internet speed, latency (and packet loss). Google "internet speed measurement" and try few of them. Then try to clean up your PC on the software side, upgrade your browser. I really don't think that a GPU upgrade will do much here.But if you really want to upgrade maybe get a new RAM to get to 2GB. Check your memory usage during standard activity to see if it reaches ~70-90%, otherwise it won't help that much either.Quote from: Mechatrommer on June 01, 2011, 08:37:52 pmNot necessarily a new system, but GPU is probably the worst place to start with this problem. Also, this is, most of the time, 99% internet connection thing. If you have terrible latency/speed no kind of hardware upgrade will help you.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 01, 2011, 09:06:38 pm
content: Never buy a computer with "onboard" graphics, unless you just want the motherboard to spend more time doing the work of a graphics card rather than what it is meant to do. This is the mistake my work make time and time again, and a decent spec PC turns up as a heap of garbage.Firstly make sure you give the machine a good cleanup. Run the disk clean up that is built into windows and defragment the drive with "MyDefrag". Then if you want to go a bit deeper run CC registry cleaner and get rid of all that redundant garbage and Defrag again.Getting rid of unneccesary programs before a registry cleanup is a goo idea too.The thing is these days so many web pages contain a certain form of garbage called flash, flash is probably what any animated add is made with and many static adds. Flash is a resource hog and anyone using it should be shot in the name of a greener planet !The bottle neck on most PC's is the hard drive although with ever higher demand on graphics a decent graphics card is a good idea too. On my work PC if I drop the resolution is performs nippier, this is because the strain taken off the motherboards "onboard" crap video thingy built into the memory controller has more resources left to do it's job.

author: Unknown
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 01, 2011, 09:21:54 pm
content: Dont forget to get rid of any adware/spamware before any hardware upgrades.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 01, 2011, 09:24:47 pm
content: malwarebytes is very good at that, I'd also recomend an AGP video card. the AGP buss is much faster than the PCI one that sometimes on older motherboards acts as the channel from the memory controller (North bridge) to the periphery controller (S bridge) and so is already well loaded

author: Kiriakos-GR
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2011, 09:25:53 pm
content: Hi Lawsen ,The answer is simple , if you find one PCI card that it does support DX9 , yes you will see an major improvement.But the point is that I have not see any such implementation the last four years ..The latest fastest AGP solution was and is the ATI HD3850 , but due the size probably, it does not work for you.Recently I had repair one computer ( replace motherboard) , and it had one old AGP card that was supporting only DX8 ,I noticed that even with fresh installed OS it was slow .... just for test installed a fresher DX9 card , and the system started booting faster ,and behave 40% faster than before ..... and So its a fact Windows needs DX9 compatible hardware so to run smoothly.

author: Mechatrommer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2011, 09:43:24 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on June 01, 2011, 09:06:38 pmthe dedicated graphic processor chip on board will do the job, not the whole motherboard. but yea, crappy gpu it is. i bought MB with GPU onboard everytime, just in case my Radeon fail. but if you can see the sweeping line on your monitor while refreshing/redrawing screen or moving a window, then you are in deep trouble about graphic card, ie limited graphic memory and processing power.Quote from: Simon on June 01, 2011, 09:06:38 pmits not for my case, nowadays $/bytes has been very cheap. i repeat my point above, the bottleneck is always memory no matter if you have virus or malware or whatever inside. i have quad core pentium, it is 4 core! and i always found out that its like having single core cpu when another software running in another core is hogging the memory. maybe pentium should device 4 core memory slot as well!

author: Mechatrommer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2011, 09:50:52 pm
content: Quote from: Kiriakos-GR on June 01, 2011, 09:25:53 pmany recent gfx card, including on board and during pentium 4 generation support directx, that was back during my schooling more than 10yrs ago. and internet browsing is not dx9 intensive, directx is born due to 3d gaming requirement and limitation on win32 api.did the windows install the driver correctly for the old agp card you were repairing? try to get one super fast gfx card, run it in windows without proper driver installed and see what happen.

author: Kiriakos-GR
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2011, 09:55:16 pm
content: Quote from: Mechatrommer on June 01, 2011, 09:43:24 pmHey Boss , I have good news for you , starting today there is available fresh multi-core applications,that works great with quad core CPU's ..EDIT:Windows XP supports DX9 as native protocol for full acceleration.If you add an DX8 card , they work in compatibility mode , and everything moves slower.

author: Mechatrommer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2011, 11:13:32 pm
content: yes Boss! parallel processing exists long time ago, i was talking memory management. web browser will survive without directx, err except as Simon said, that bladdy flash thing and of course, youtube!and i dont see any problem with directx, its been already fast as hell since it was invented. hell even with API i can make a whooping graphics.

author: Kiriakos-GR
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2011, 12:15:08 am
content: If you like to see speed with DX8 or lower compatible hardware , use Win98 ..End of message

author: Teknotronix
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2011, 12:22:09 am
content: As a general rule the more things you can take away from the CPU to process the better your computer performs overall. So installing a graphics card or sound card that have their own processors moves that processing away from the CPU which is always advantageous.I am quite a keen PC racing simulator fan (as my name would suggest) and on the forums of the different sim software its well documented that both general use and sim software frame rates are improved just by adding a sound card for instance.

author: joelby
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2011, 01:27:28 am
content: Stick to AGP if you can. There are half-height cards around - even if you have to modify the metal backing plate with a hacksaw!

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2011, 02:09:40 am
content: Install Linux. I'd suggest Xubuntu or something like that.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 02, 2011, 05:33:46 am
content: Quote from: Mechatrommer on June 01, 2011, 09:43:24 pmOh ? so you have discovered a magical source of fast hard drives ? pray please share itWe are talking performance, not cost or capacity. RAM is cheap these days, I got 8 GB for £70, I paid £100 for a 40GB SSD which is apparently 275 MB/sThe issue with onboard graphice is that you are using the PC memory for the so called onboard graphics. Trust me for get them, the CPU needs full access to the memory. When you consider that the AGP and now the PCIe bus speed is comparable with the memory interface it becomes obvious that you are having to divi out the RAM bandwidth 50/50 between CPU work (OS) and the onboard graphics.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 02, 2011, 05:40:03 am
content: Quote from: SimRacer on June 02, 2011, 12:22:09 amI think it is also about bandwidth of the various busses and windows infinite incapability to share resources and multitask well

author: Teknotronix
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2011, 05:43:24 am
content: Quote from: Simon on June 02, 2011, 05:40:03 amYep exactly. You gain CPU cycles, memory and memory bandwidth. However even though an amount of that bandwidth is moved to the system bus its still advantageous.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2011, 05:55:38 am
content: It all depends on what your current video is? and the type of PCI card you want to install.You could stick in a PCI 2MB S3 ViRGE and it would be awful.(At least i hope it would be awful, i'd hate to think of an S3 virge being an *upgrade*)Or you could stick in a PCI Geforce 6200 and for all 2D stuff like webbrowsing or email it would be as fast as technically possible. (Only limited by the speed of your other hardware, cpu/ram/hdd/mb)But as others have said, it really depends on what's causing your speed issue, if your current graphics card is not the problem then installing even a super powerful AGP card isn't going to help.It's not worth buying a new videocard, the money would be better spent buying a new MB/CPU/RAM combo.But if your current videocard is the problem then finding an old Geforce PCI card should improve things quite a bit.Lots of people have old PCI graphics cards just sitting around doing nothing, so getting one should be easy

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 02, 2011, 06:00:59 am
content: given my experiance with the work computer where a 1024 resolution is visibly faster than 1280, I'd say that a reasonable video card will help, as i said it is about bandwidth distribution and no robbing the RAM and CPU of much needed bandwidth

author: stl
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2011, 09:04:39 am
content: PCI (not PCI-Express) is very slow, there are are some slim AGP cards out there.I really recommend that you get a fast hard drive with a large buffer, it can make a huge difference in a old computer

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 02, 2011, 11:44:22 am
content: yes I agree, using a PCI video card will just shift the issue elsewhere and it will stay an issue

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2011, 12:28:06 pm
content: Quote from: stl on June 02, 2011, 09:04:39 amPCI is only slow if you want to do stuff in 3D, for just browsing the web and other 2D stuff (which he says he's doing) any high spec PCI card will do that perfectly fine.The PCI bus is plenty fast enough to draw 2D graphics with heaps of bandwidth to spare.But I do agree that an AGP card is the better choice if he can find one that fits.

author: Kiriakos-GR
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2011, 03:44:48 pm
content: The DX9 controls both software accelerations about 2D & 3D ...Yes, even the common 2D tasks , they can be accelerated by allot ,if the hardware supports DX9 .The connection Buss ( AGP - PCI ) was an theoretical subject for thousands of hot debates.But the point is just one , even at 2D , the Direct - X acceleration it is totally important.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 02, 2011, 08:02:28 pm
content: Quote from: Psi on June 02, 2011, 12:28:06 pmit's speced at 133 MB/s, from what I read that is a practical 80 MB/s

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 04:13:55 pm
content: Quote from: ndictu on June 01, 2011, 08:45:59 pmThat would be my first recommendation.What browser are you using? If it's Internet Explorer, give Firefox a go. If it's Firefox, give Chrome or Opera a go.Another thing you could try is installing a faster hard drive. If you have a crappy old 5400 RPM IDE drive, upgrade to a 7200RPM SATA.

author: Kiriakos-GR
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 04:29:37 pm
content: Quote from: Hero999 on June 03, 2011, 04:13:55 pmThe only breath taking solution are the WD Raptor 10000 RPM.The performance gain 5400 vs 7200 it is just noticeable.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 04:32:56 pm
content: Quote from: Kiriakos-GR on June 03, 2011, 04:29:37 pmWhy not go the full hog and get an SSD Drive ?

author: Kiriakos-GR
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 04:53:12 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on June 03, 2011, 04:32:56 pmI do not trust SSD .

author: Mechatrommer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 05:00:52 pm
content: the bottom line? the way i see from the discussion... get a whole new system with everything fast!

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 05:10:20 pm
content: Quote from: Kiriakos-GR on June 03, 2011, 04:53:12 pmAny particular reason ? I must admit I'm slightly queezy although I have had no issues so far with my "portable" 40GB drive, To be honest I felt equally queezy about my new 750 GB mechanical drive as i felt we may be pushing things, now I don't give a second thought to it's reliability.We have used USB sticks for years

author: ndictu
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 05:34:26 pm
content: Quote from: Mechatrommer on June 03, 2011, 05:00:52 pmYup, get a $1000 machine for websurfing. He still hasn't responded with a speedtest result, maybe it's just terrible ISP and internet latency/speed is the biggest factor in this case.Quote from: Kiriakos-GR on June 03, 2011, 04:53:12 pmWhy? I mean, in the beginnings they were pretty terrible but now it's a great choice for system partition and prices are going down nicely. I wouldn't put everything there, just the system stuff and get a cheap 1TB drive for the rest.

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 05:48:33 pm
content: It's definietly true that the hard drive is the main bottleneck in a general usage PC because it takes so long to access information stored on it.I have a Raptor 10,000 drive.I did notice a significant improvement when moving from 5400 to 7200 though. Don't forget there are other factors, an old IDE 5400 drive which is 50% full and has virtual no cache will be really slow compared to a 7200 SATA drive.You could go with SSD but I doubt you'll reap the full benefit without upgrading everything else.While we're on the subject, anyone tried a hybrid drive? I've seen them on ebuyer. When I do finally decide to get a new PC I might give one a go.http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Storage/cat/Hard-Drive---SSD

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 06:03:45 pm
content: Yea i saw that hybrid one and almost gave it a go. I'll probably get hybrid drives in the future but I'd prefer a 100% SSD for a system disk.Yes he will need to upgrade the rest of the computer, he may not have a sata port and getting a PCI sata card is pretty pointless

author: Kiriakos-GR
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 07:19:35 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on June 03, 2011, 05:10:20 pmHave you lost an motherboard ? due the fact that the USB stick controller shorted out !!I did ... an 200 EUR one .. The south bridge burned out.I was lucky because this model had five years warranty, and I got an replacement.

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 07:44:25 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on June 03, 2011, 06:03:45 pmI disagree, buying a new IDE drive is pointless. IDE drives are much more expensive than SATA, so much so, it's cheaper to get a PCI SATA card and buy a cheaper SATA drive.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 07:49:50 pm
content: Well cost wise maybe, but you will be adding another conversion (latency) and bottle neck to a bottle neck you already have. The PCI bus as I said earlier is not fast. Theoretically 133 MB/s in reality no more than 80 MB/s, SATA speeds are now at 375 MB/s (theorectically) and that speed will be used by your generous cache on the Sata drive even if the mechanical drive can't keep up.I bet a good speed second hand ATA drive will be just as fast as a SATA drive with the adapter

author: Kiriakos-GR
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 08:07:29 pm
content: Quote from: Hero999 on June 03, 2011, 07:44:25 pmI have lots of those IDE-SATA & SATA-IDE boards, yes they work nicely.They operate by an transparent connection , and so they do not need drivers at all.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 08:12:12 pm
content: well if you can get an ATA straight to SATA adapter that helps as it cuts out the PCI bus (that by the sounds of it might have a graphics card to handle too). But still, your putting a 375 MB/s bus behind a 133 MB/s bus (theoretically) so you might as well stick with ATA anyway and concentrate your money of fast mechanics.By the way both SATA and ATA are IDE Integrated Drive Electronics, al it means is that the controller for the physical drive is part of the unit. This is a no brainier today, but back in the days when it was coined it was quite something to have a drive that had the controller for the disk on the same unit.

author: Kiriakos-GR
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 08:12:43 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on June 03, 2011, 07:49:50 pmATA vs SATA HDD at the same RPM , SATA wins only at writing speed.On the Read speed they are identical.

author: Kiriakos-GR
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 08:20:51 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on June 03, 2011, 08:12:12 pmI had never see any hard drive to limit the performance of it due the Bus speed (ATA100 vs 133) ,yes mechanics works always slower than electronics.About the SATA and ATA differences, you must think differently.The Serial ATA connection, uses the same bandwidth about transmit - receive !!The ATA connection does not .

author: Lawsen
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 03, 2011, 08:41:22 pm
content: Thanks for your help. It was orginally 256 MB RAM and it locks up and freezes once in awhile. I got the RAM upgraded to maximum 1 GB RAM. I will add a graphics card to it, when I get paid in the future. PCI graphics card with 512 MB memory and Nvidia is only $40.00, inexpensive.Lawsen

author: Mechatrommer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 04, 2011, 04:07:15 am
content: i will hold my faith on SSD and Moore's Law. until it can match or closer to the current sata drive in term of $/MB.