Well, this isn't really for gaming, more for scholarly interest and a hobby, rather than a real need to have one of these cards. I am building a small PC to be hooked up to our living room LCD TV so we surf the web from there. The 8500GT is there to let it run some basic games (The CPU is a far more limiting factor in that system anyway - a VIA C7-D 1.5Ghz isn't anything to brag about).

The rig in my sig is what I game on, thank god

I was already thinking about getting a 2400Pro PCI, since it is cheaper (And originally I wasn't planning on getting a card at all, but the IGP on the VB7001G motherboard lacks support for 1366X768 resolution), but then I saw that nobody can find these cards and benchmarks are solely lacking, and I decided to see what I can do to rectify that issue.

I have exams going on at the moment, but I hope next weekend I'll upload a full review of this thing somewhere, and link to it from here.

just buy a new motherboard

Please do, I'm sure it would be much appreciated by visitors of this thread.

Thank you for belaying the obvious, but has it occured to you that many people participating in this thread are in it for the fun of squeezing out something out of old tech ? Or people who really cannot afford to do that, or cannot replace the motherboard inside the case due to space limitations ? Or those who have smaller cases with only PCI slots and fit into any of the above categories ?

Sorry, double post.

Just don't post other advise!

AGP's owner will tell you the same thing. If you want to change every year your hardware, there are many forums for this. For me there is no glory but it's my opinion.
you can see that here, lot of people has a second PC with PCI-Ex slot...

Yeah, not to mention how easy you make that sound. If you have a computer thats still using PCI-E x1 or PCI slots, chances are your computer is pretty old, or just isn't very good. Since one of these is probably the case for most people here, why go to the trouble of buying a new motherboard for a computer that is obsolete in other ways? also, most new motherboards might not support everything else in your computer. If that is the case, then you would have to buy yet more parts for your computer. It would be easier just to buy a new computer. And finally we've had several thousand ideas on this thread already. And if you look at the title, it says "So you only have PCI slots and want to game?" Notice it doesnt say,
"How to replace practically everything instead of looking for a solution."

Great post. I got my 8500 GT all the way from England today, and I get 7 times the frame rate non-overclocked in ATi Tool over my FX5500. Framerate went from 21 fps to 140 fps in ATi Tool. I got this precisely because I did not want to install a new mobo and other necessary parts at this time. I plan on building a PC from scratch later, but for now, this is the best solution for me.

Plan on playing some games on full settings eventually with this baby, but nothing can play Crysis on full settings @ 60 fps at the moment BTW including this card. I may go for Oblivion on full settings if I get a new power supply for my PC and I overclock my card, CPU, and memory. If you are serious about gaming and want to stick with your PCI bus, go for the 8500 GT, you won't be disappointed and it's better than everything here in America.

Good to see you upgraded your card General. The 2400 is probably one of the better cards you could have gotten since your PSU is a liability and likely to burn out anything new you install in your PC. For those that are sticking with PCI bus and are willing to spend $150 dollars on a PCI card, I recommend the 8500 GT, all the way from England. For those that don't wan't to spend quite so much, there is the x1550 Diamond version, which is probably the second most powerful card, and is also the second most expensive after the 8500 GT.

You and me both should upgrade our PSU's General, yours so you can count on your new hardware not dying. Mine, so I can overclock through the yin-yangs and get unheard of PCI performance benchmarks. Remember to upgrade to the largest PSU possible, so you can run your card as fast as possible and not have it burn out (I fried my FX5500 testing it with ATi Tool finding Max Mem speed. It wouldn't shut off like it was supposed to and ran all night running several times the speed it was supposed to.)

I completely agree that you need a PSU that is capable of supplying the various rails (+5, +12, vcore) at sufficient current, but having an inadequate PSU doesn't cause components to burn out. Your fried 5500 was probably due to overheat from prolonged OC'ing it. An inadequate PSU may cause a BSOD ,random reboots, vanishing devices and random errors, but it shouldn't damage components

I didn't OC it for very long and I stopped before artifacts appeared in the ATi Tool test. I had it for a week or two before I fried it and I didn't use it that terribly much for gaming or anything. Moral of the story is, OC'ing uses more resources and OC'ing like I did on that test so high for so long obviously contributed greatly to damaging my card. I won't OC my 8500 GT until I get a much bigger power supply, biggest I can get my hands on, then I'll OC it to be a 8800 or somthing.

Hello, I haven't been here in awhile. Just wondering if there are any better PCI cards available for my PC since the last time I was here. I currently have a Diamond Radeon X1550 Series.

Any better cards out now? If so, is it that much better than my current card?(is it worth getting the new card)

Thanks.

If you have a Diamond Stealth X1550 that is already a powerful card, plus it has a 128BIT inferface. I think you could try out a 2400 HD Pro PCI card, i will do some serious testing tho with games.

Alright just want to say a few things:

About my PSU, 90watts

I have had this computer for over 5 years i believe, maybe 6. And my PSU still blows out very cool air. Room temps are very important, if the room is cool, my tower is cool. And i use 2 programs to keep an eye on how my GPU is. It pretty much stays at between 39c, to 44c, or 50c. I have use plenty of hardware and bought many stuff for this computer. This gateway computer was built with perfection and everything has been working just like i bought it from day one.

The items which i have install on this rig and use

I bought 2 sticks of ram, for a total of 512MB, one stick is dell (256 ) and the other one gateway (256mb )
Soundblaster Card, with EAX features.

I bought and use a Radeon 700064MB PCI card, a Radeon 9250 256MB PCI card, a FX5200 card, a FX5500 card, a BFG 6200 card, a Evga 6200 card and now i am using a 2400 HD Pro Radeon 256MB PCI card, which is the best. Neither one of those cards takes a strain on your computer, because all of those cards only needs 50 or 30watts.

I also upgraded from 20GB to 80GB WD Internal HD
I'm using a High Speed 2.0 Hub
500GB My book edtion external HD

As you can see i have use plenty of stuff on this computer, the 90watts PSU is made for this computer and really the things which i am using doesn't strain my computer like people think.

My PSU unit

I cant upgrade to a higher PSU because my tower is not small, but its not big either. I think i can only use 90's PSU's. I bought a second 90PSU, just in case the one i am using now dies on me, but that is not possible anytime soon

About using PCI slots

Well first things first, PCI cards are not the best obvious, but they do get the job done with certain stuff and games. I think PCI cards are amazing. Yea i could of bought a more powerful computer years ago, but i have been using this computer for years, no problems, so why get rid of it? PCI slots are for gaming, and even tho not AGP OR pci-e, they do get the job done to some degree

From Win9x to XP

This computer ship with windows98se, and on march 22 i finally did upgrade to XP. And not only is my computer faster, but everything is more smooth. And again, using xp doesn't take a strain on my computer at all really.

My last upgrade to this computer

I do plan on upgrading from 512MB to 1gb SOON

My Next big buy

Well this computer with the PCI slots is my first computer and i use it for everything. I do plan on buying a secondary computer tho, to enjoy the newer games , so everything is cool !

I'm thinking along similar lines and invested in some extra cooling too. While the heatsink on the 8500GT is huge, it may be in a part of the case which doesn't get that much airflow . I ended up with one of these :

http://www.amazon.co.uk/AZEN-BT-SC70...8241986&sr=8-1

Antec also do a couple of good blowers (The Vcool is good) but they take 2 PCI slots, and I only had 3 in total and the 8500GT takes up 2.

The heatsink being huge on the 8500 GT is an understatement to say the least. That thing should do a half decent job defusing the heat from the GPU, even with poor airflow. I agree, keeping your card cool is very important, especially when OC'ing. It seems difficult to me to attach a fan or cooler unit to that thing when It already takes 2 slots and I haven't even installed my sound card yet.

Like you, I only have 3 PCI slots(1 AGP slot on the mobo with no connector soldered on.), so there is no room for error there. I hope to tap into the potential of my GPU, CPU, & mem soon through OC'ing, but I want to be responsible as I have already learned that lesson the hard way.

You are stretching that antiquated machine as far as it will go. Nothing wrong with that, but you should be aware of it's limitations in relation to your gaming needs. I would go to crucial.com to know exactly how much RAM your system will take, 512MB may be the max on that old machine. I put 2 GB in mine, only to have the system not recognize it. I had to do a Google search to come across the Crucial site I found in a thread similar to this one. My PC manufacturer's website states close to the same as Crucial, but Crucial is more accurate I believe and stated I could get more powerful memory to work, and it does as opposed to the manufacturers claims on memory capacity.

Diamond Stealth x1550 card is probably more powerful IMO, but not a huge leap over your 2400 PRO. Reason being is that the x1550 Diamond is 128 bit, which makes a huge difference in data transfer rates. I can't wait to build my own PC one day, saving a lot of money in the process and future proofing economically for a few years (not to mention finally getting some PCI-e slots as well.)

Diamond Radeon x1550 is the best there is in America. There is better, but you have to order it from England (the 8500 GT PCI is what I have and I ordered that from England). 8500 GT is the best PCI card bar none, but still pales in comparison to PCI-e cards at the same price. This card eats my FX5500 for breakfast and I can't recommend it enough. Got mine off of eBay from a guy named Advanced Data Systems. Best price I could find.

I have seen some fans for PCI which fit across the sides of the card. A bit hard to explain but they attached parallel to the mobo and are held in place by the screws holding the cards in place like this

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?...20fan&doy=15m4

If your case is deep enough they could force some airflow across your GPU/Sound cards. Also I strongly recommend speedfan which can report the core temperature of most PCI graphics cards I have seen

My machine a a little newer but not much. Apologies if you already do this, but it's well worth going through all the services and assorted startup programs to pare these down to the minimum. After boot, login and wait 2 minutes , then in Task Manager see whats running. I have 18 processes running. I have seen "vanilla" XP PC's where it's >60. I made a decision to only run a manual AVG check as and when. I don't run the AVG shell extension and resident stuff, and it's behind a router firewall, so no firewall either. If I had more resource I wouldn't go that far, but it all helps the FPS.

Also worth checking that IRQ's are evenly distributed i.e no intensive devices are sharing (GPU, Soundcard, LAN).

I also disabled in the BIOS & removed everything I didn't need (floppy, serial & parallel ports, modem) which helps the UPnP service to deal the IRQ's more evenly. Also might save you a few watts.

Uhm...Would a Diamond x1550 be able to handle a 410watt psu?