If you look at the pictures on Newegg you will see that the HIS X1550 comes with a bracket for regular ATX sized cases.

The 6200 is defintely a better card than the FX5500. I know because I used to have a PNY FX5500, and when I upgraded to my 3DFuzion 6200, I saw a big difference in performance especially in Doom 3. Half-Life 2 plays beautifully at maxed settings (no AA), but then I also have 1.5Gb of RAM and a P4 2.8Ghz. Not sure how that compares to your Dell.

Well i think im going to buy the HIs card, because the pci bandwidth is too low for cover the 128 bit interface right? even is short for 64 bits right?
so i got more clocks on the his and that makes it faster, please correct me if im wrong , i just want the best, if someone got the his and have some scores or benchmarks please post them
thanks guys

Hi All. Firstly, I'd like to congratulate and thank you for a very informative thread. I thought my gaming days were over before they had even begun when I realised that my dimension 2350 only had PCI slots.

My 2350 has a 2.2Ghz P4 with 640mb of ram. Everything else is standard. If I was to upgrade my pc with a 6200 or x1550, would it adequately run Battlefield 2?

When the 6200 first got mentioned in this thread, it was the 128mb version and it was suggested that it could handle bf2. It now seems the 6200 is available with 256mb. I presume the 256mb version will handle bf2 equally as well as the 128mb, if not better.

I also note a graphics card upgrade may require a power supply upgrade too. Is that just if I get an x1550?

At this stage, I'm not looking to become a serious gamer. I was just intrigued to experience online gaming with bf2 after speaking to a friend about it. Therefore, I'm not looking to shell out mega bucks on more system upgrades or indeed a new pc.

Thanks in anticipation of your help.

The 6200 and both the Radeon X1K cards require a 300W minimum PSU.

I think it would work with a 6200/256Mb. My son has a 2350 (2.8Ghz P4 I *think*) he has the FX5500, which is a slower PCI card, yet could play BF2, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Call of Duty, Halo, and now S.T.A.L.K.E.R shadows of chernobyl. Many people will tell you these games will not work on PCI. They are wrong. They may not look beautiful, but we have achieved perfectly adequate performance . STALKER needs all graphics set low, but HL2 actually looks really nice.

Your memory is a bit light, and you may find your PSU is stretched. our Dell PSU started to fail about a year ago (random crashes and devices not appearing). I got a 400w supply for not too much. standard ATX works fine in the dell dimension. Of course you may not need it. We also have 2 disc drives and a DVD combo burner.

You also could benefit from a bit more memory. 1Gb is good.

I'd also recommend reading the XP tweak guide at http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

This is a really well written guide and has many suggestions I found helped a lot . For example I disabled in the BIOS the devices I don't use (Parallel port, serial port) I removed the modem card (never used) and I even took out the floppy (speeded boot and saved a little power). All these free up power, CPU and IRQ's. I also checked that the IRQ's for the PCI card were shared with as few other devices as I could get. For me the top slot was best, but this may vary. Also disable unnecessary services. This will help free up memory and CPU.

His section on page files is also very good.

Thanks for the replies so far. Having taken the side off my 2350, it seems the PSU is 200w (I presume this relates to the DC output). Just looked on ebay and there's plenty there for reasonable money. So a 400w is sufficient or should I aim for as high as possible? Also, I note that the PSUs have a number of connectors for the various bits of hardware (obviously). should I pay any attention to what connector it has or do they generally come with a standard set? I have a cd-writer, dvd-writer, floppy disc drive (which I may remove following jives11's comment) and the standard other components that need power.

well I'm surviving on a 400watt Sweex PSU, but you could probably get 500 watt for not much more. I always learn the hard way, but some PSU's are not necessarily well made. I'd look for a reasonable brand (google the name and look for some reviews). Most cheap cases come with a non-name free PSU. these are probably to be avoided and some on ebay may be people selling them on.

ATX supplies come with standard connectors for the Motherboard (normally a large block and a smaller 4 way block), plus a bunch of cables for Molex connectors for your various drives. Most also come with dual fans which will improve your cooling, which can also be an issue with a bigger graphics card.

A number also offer green/earth supplies. These achieve a higher efficiency so reduce your power consumption, but also typically cost a bot more. I have another PC with an Antec Green supply (500 watts) which is very good.

I guess your PC is probably 6 years old ? It may not last forever, though typically disk drives are the first things to go. The advantage of going for a bigger PSU is you can take it with you to the next PC, assuming you now have a taste for this stuff and would build from scratch (MOBO, case, PSU, memory, Graphics)

The PNY 6200 has passive cooling. You might also want to fit a $6 blower fan in an adjacent PCI slot. This will evacuate more heat, and reduce the workload on the main CPU case fan (mine has a green hood which enables a case fan to suck air across the CPU heat sink - quite a nice idea). I do this and (shock horror) block up some of the vents near the PCI slots on the back plate. These short cut the best air flow model which is fans along the back draw cool air in from the front, cooling disks, mobo, GPU and CPU as it passes, then blow it out the back. I also drop the voltage down on the blower to 7v to reduce it's speed & noise. You can get molex adaptors which do this which generate 7v from the 12v and 5v lines

A cheap 400W PSU from EBay would be sufficient but getting a good-quality one from companies like Antec, Thermaltake, OCZ, FSP Fortron, Corsair and others has a lot of advantages, mainly the fact that they will most likely never blow and take your other components with them when they do so. Antec, Thermaltake, CoolerMaster and Fortron FSP make inexpensive, good-quality PSUs too, that won't cost more than $50-60 for a 450W PSU.

Won't that "kill" the card?!

maybe, it depends on your ventilation, i read some guy hwo overcloked his pci HIS x1550 core clock to 700mhz, and it run fine
so i think it can be achieved, just take care on the ventilation.
Anyway im going to get the HIS in a week, ill tell u guys how much i can overclock it.

i got a question about the ram clock, the diamond has 520 mhz right, but its 2x260? or 520 x 2 =1040??? while the HIS got 800 mhz (2 x 400 mhz).
I just dont know about the diamond,
thanks for the answer

I think sruli was talking about the 64-bit bus not the clockspeed "killing" the card. My answer is I don't think so. If you only hav PCI slots, you probably don't have all that big of a monitor. The 64-bit bus will "kill" the card a high resolutions, but it should be fine at resolutions around 1024x768 or 1280x960. If you read the reviews on the other X1300/X1550s there is some confusion as to what bit size the bus is. Originally ALL of them were 64-bit, but the "Specifications" say they're 128-bit. I don't believe it though.

There are 64-bit as well as 128-bit versions of the cards available.

CW seems to be that ANY 128-bit card will run circles around a 64-bit card for obvious reasons. Limited personal experience seems to bear that out as well. Why HIS made their card in a 64-bit version instead of a 128-bit is puzzling to me. That difference alone should obviate the faster clockspeed etc...

What do you consider a large monitor? I have only PCI-slots. I currently use a 17", will upgrade shortly to a 20"... And isn't the HIS card made so that you can use a largescreen TV?

well I swapped my 5500 for a 6200 and it looks very good. It's a different chipset and also DirectX 9.0 is supported in h/w rather than emulation as with the 5200 & 5500. Running Performance test from passMark showed much better 3D, though curiously 2D was a little slower (128 bit Vs 64 bit ?).

But proof of the pudding was S.T.A.L.K.E.R which now looks very nice and runs at medium quality settings rather than low.

card also has onboard temperature AND the version I got (new) from Misco is a half-height card, so better air flow. Quieter too as it's passive cooling

Is it a 6200 or a 6600? I assume it's a 6200 since the 6600 is only available in PCi-E & AGP.

Apologies, that was a typo now corrected. Yes - it is a PNY 6200 PCI 256Mb 64-bit card

My FX5500 will be up on ebay later today.

One thing I did notice which may or may not be a problem is that the screen blanks for a second when I launch the nVidia control panel. It's not an issue, but if this starts to happen in game play, that's a sure fire indication that the PSU is over stretched. I suspect it's just a feature of this implementation as it repeatedly happens only when I launch the nVidia Control panel

Nah I think that's common. It just runs checks on the adapter as it fires up (I think), which causes that flickering. It happens on my friend's PC too and he has an AGP version of the card, so I guess it's a card specific 'problem'.

Where did you get the 6200? Online?

yes - I was outbid for one on ebay so I got it from www.misco.co.uk (I'm in the UK) but there seem to be plenty around. I think PNY have shrunk the board size, mine also has a different picture on the box to the one illustrated here :

http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/...Tab=0&NoMapp=0

Some auctions on ebay also had a picture of the board and mine is half that width with a ribbon cable connecting the VGA socket to the board.

I'm interested to see if the pipe mod works with this. I'm pretty sure it doesn't but I read that on the PCI-E version you can unlock

http://forums.legitreviews.com/about4464.html

That pipeline unlock is only possible with the early versions of the 6200 which used NV43 cores with 4 locked pipelines. Later NVIDIA started churning out separate cores for the 6200. I'm fairly sure it won't work on yours.