zephead said:
...this is your problem: the fact that it's a sony vaio. not only is your power supply too weak to drive the new card, but your case doesn't have sufficient cooling. there's even a chance you have a type of case that lacks physical space for the bigger cards. and, because it's a sony vaio (and thus oem), you'll find it impossible to get replacement parts to make your computer able to accept the desired upgrades. and, it uses sony-engineered chips and boards, so it's performance will lag even more. plus, the 4x agp slot more just about halves your potential graphics performance.
the bottom line is, you can't improve the performance of your vaio: it's stuck where it is. if you want to change that bad, a radeon 8500 or something is the best you'll do. it's too bad, but true nonetheless. in the future, i reccommend that you build or buy a custom pc, probably available at a local pc shop to avoid setbacks such as this.
zep, I can understand not liking Sony, but there is no need to misrepresent the facts. Personally I don't like Sony that much, but I have a Vaio, slightly later model than the OP, and I can tell you:
1 The PS is not too weak to drive an upgraded video card, if you don't try to buy a top-of-the-line GPU. I have put an ATI 9600 PRO in mine, and it's been running just fine, thank you, for more than a month. If you take a reasonable approach, you get reasonable results ... you just have to live within the unit's limitations.
Virtually any AGP board will kick the crud out of the onboard Sis video. Virtually all of my 2D results doubled in performance, and the benchmark program wouldn't even RUN 3D tests with the onboard Sis vid drivers. With the ATI board, the 3D results were ok, not fantastic, but obviously better than Sis onboard.
2 His case has plenty of room for the boards that the unit is designed to accept. PCI, AGP, and RAM slots are all there, plenty of room, easily accessible.
3 It is not impossible to get upgrade parts. That's just flat out wrong. I have added 512 mb of RAM (std. Kingston PC2100), a faster DVD-RW (from 2x originally to 16x upgraded), the ATI Radeon, and a new 250 GB Seagate hard drive. I added a USB 2.0/firewire PCI board since it came with USB 1.1. I am currently considering upgrading the cpu. Where do you get off saying it's impossible to get upgrade parts?
4 The difference between 4x AGP and 8x AGP is negligible in all the reviews and benchmark evals I have seen ... NOT "half the performance."
5 No one's Vaio performance is stuck where it is. Adding RAM increases performance for most machines for most uses. Adding the video board dramatically increases vid performance. Adding more storage easily increases performance for disk-intensive apps like Photoshop, which needs large swap space on the HDD, for digital video apps that needs mega space, etc. Adding USB 2.0 significantly increases performance of USB over 1.1.
Zep, I am sorry to say that either through your lack of knowledge or your prejudice against Sony, you have lost all credibility. I am not even defending Sony, since I don't particularly like them, just presenting the facts.