So you only have PCI slots and want to game?

I agree, after playing Pacman on my Atari 2600 it just doesn't compare. There is one thing though, I saw someone was using a Casio calculator the other day and guess what? It has a colour display!

Sheesh.

Whoever said games are judged based purely on their looks? There are several games out there such as The Monkey Island series, The Sam and Max series, Braid, World of Goo etc. that do not have "OMG!" graphics as their main focus; the gameplay is the main reason they are so successful and well-known.

Exactly. :approve: Divine Divinity from 2002 looked even outdated then because of its 2D isometric graphics but even today there are articles written in praise of the gameplay, top notch story line, very interesting side quests that actually mean something, a HUGE non-linear world, indepth character character creation with 480 different skill combinations, etc.

By the way, its still selling.

I ran the Crysis Timedemo a few times, and got rather surprising results, but not in a good way. Apparently, even the puny 8400gs can be bottlenecked by the rest of the system- With all the settings as low as possible, I got an average of about 8.5 FPS, whereas my current system gets 45 FPS. I had the Task Manager open during the test, and both the CPU and Ram usage were at 90-100% during the entire test.

Well i ran crysis with my 8400gs on my old p3, got way more than 8 fps. I was hitting 20 in some spots, but overall the game ran like a POS.
I recently tested crysis on my intel pentium d 805 / xp 64bit / 9800gt, all high specs, 1280x1024 i get 40-70fps easily. Not sure why you are still bothering with PCI cards Technochicken when you have a powerful rig.

You should grab a 5670 dude or spend 65 bucks on a pny 9800gt ee edition like i did at best buy.

Did you run the built in timedemo? I'm sure if I actually played the game I would get over 8.5 fps in some spots, but I doubt I would average much more than that.

Also, the 8400gs PCI card is not in my Phenom II rig, it is in an HTPC I built, which uses and ITX motherboard and only has a PCI slot for expansion. I listed the computer's specs earlier on in this thread.

Oh yea i see what you're saying now, i never run that thing, because it shows less performance than it should. I haven't tried it on my quad or pentium d yet tho, i may do it just to see what i get.

Yes i know, thats why i ask why are you still using pci in general, meaning ever since i bought my first pcie card a while back which was the 9500gt, i am never looking back at pci. If i had a rig that only had pci, i would either throw it away or replace the parts in it and use pcie.

I am not using PCI in general- my current rig has a PCI-e card in it. As for the system with the 8400gs, I got about 90% of the parts for free, so I figured it was worth it spend 40$ on a PCI video card and have a system that could still run some older games and play HD videos.

i have uninstalled the driver of the geforce pic card and disabled the onboard video driver as well (should have done this later).

now after xp sign is loaded after the reboot, it is all black (shouldn't have disabled the onboard card that sooner).

now what is the best way to enable the onboard card again?

again, it is that stupid dell 2400.

Load PC in safe mode and start over. The correct way, which you figured out.

problem is my dell can't start in safe mode, driver is stuck in mup.sys!

I seem to recall doing something similar, and ended up finding that the S-video from the card was working, so sorted it out using a TV as a temporary monitor . Have you tried booting with no card in and checked what the default is in the BIOS? Windows should default to the onboard graphics at boot time, and use it's generic VGA driver at the very least

My Dell 2350 never seems to boot into safe mode from the BIOS, I have to boot normally, then run msconfig, then tick the Safe mode boot, reboot , then later uncheck that option in config.sys

i have no idea how to tell wat slots i have

i see 2 that look like white PCI slots then i have another one that looks the same but black

*sry for double post*

Awwwww i remember the pci days lol. I still want that rare albatron 8600gt, but don't have the slightest idea on how to get it. Even at the market computer shows, they don't have it anymore. I just want that card because it looks so cool and its very rare, would be nice to do some testing on my quad with it. I guess i may come across it one day.

The black one sounds like a PCIEx16 slot or could be a agp.
Can you download cpu-z and pcwizard and post some info?

I don't ever want to have a PCI graphics card again for any reason, except possibly the very first GPUs as some kind of historical piece. Like collecting old PC's like Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, etc.

That guy sounds like he has a dedicated graphics card slot, Everest can tell you. 3DMark06,05,03 can tell you too. There are several other ways. It may be printed in small type font on the mobo itself.

You can game with PCI graphics cards, but you can't seriously play anything released in the past few years that uses polygons. Unless you are cool with an ultra choppy slideshow, which I have played games at 0-2 FPS throughout with onboard. XD

But its nice to have the albatron one tho, it looks good. The only pci card i have left is the visiontek 2400 pci, but i tried that on my single core le1620 when i had it and it ran like a pos. I think the card is dying tho.

Anyways, i sent albatron a email asking them where could i find it, hopefully they will get back to me with a decent answer.

In other news, my gts 250 and 9800gt is gaming perfectly. I do plan on buying a 5750 soon, and maybe one of those gtx cards, most likely a gtx 460, just waiting for a super price drop.

I was going to upgrade to the current generation GPUs when the next ones come out so I don't have to shell out $300+ dollars for something that will be outdated in a year. I'll upgrade to a nice Phenom II X4 while I wait.

Outdated stuff is still powerful.
I have a Phenom IIX4 810, its really good, even tho i plan to do a major upgrade with the CPU to a six core, and some ddr3 memory and a new mb, but i plan to keep my gateway case.

If i was you and you didn't feel the need to go six core, just buy the most powerful x4 you can find over at newegg. Those motherboard/cpu combo deals are always nice.

Actually, the current generation ATI cards will probably be outdated in 6 months, not a year.

I wanted a i7 930 setup initially but finances dictated that I went AMD. Now I am waiting for the Phenom II X4 955 95W to come out because I accidentally got a mobo that had a max CPU power draw of 95W. Wasn't able to unlock any cores on this CPU, so now I need to buy a quad that is intended to be a quad. Let that be a lesson to those buying AMD CPU's hoping to unlock cores, there is a strong chance you won't be successful.

Six core isn't necessary for a gamer. Perhaps for people that do a lot of graphics editing or use WinRAR type programs frequently, but that's about it. May pick up an octocore which will be out soon. Six cores will still be useless most likely when that comes out.

Can't wait for the Phenom II X4 955 95W to come out so I can use it with my GTX 285 I got cheap. Dying to play Just Cause 2 with that which is optimized for quads on PC. I've come a long way from my 2.8GHz Celeron+Intel Integrated Graphics days.