Want to upgrade video card, are PCI and PCI express the same?

[PunishmentInc]

I have a computer that is about 2 years old now, it still works fine, mostly. My system specs are below. My video card acts a little funny playing games lately, WoW and Doom 3 are pretty bad looking. I think something might be wrong with it, plus its a little bit older. I am not looking to replace the whole computer till the end of the year at least. I am thinking of just upgrading to an ATI Radeon X850XT off of newegg.com. I know I have a PCI slot, but is it the same as PCI express? Any input is much appretiated.

Processor:
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
Motherboard:
ASUSTeK K8VSEDX
Memory:
x2 512MB
Videocard:
ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256MB
Soundcard/Speakers:
Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS
Hard Disk(s):
MAXTOR 6L200PO

 

[DonNagual]

PCI and pciExpress are two different things. But no worries, you have an AGP8x slot and there are still plenty of decent cards for AGP, including that X850XT you are looking at.

 

[Shadowrunner]

For one, PCI and PCI Express have a different pin connectors, two, it's alot faster than PCI and is used only for video cards, three, you can put two cards in (SLI) for up to 90% better performance, and four, if you ask this question, ask yourself this, "If I ask what PCI Express is, do I nessacerilly need a board with it?" And no, you cannot get AGP and PCI boards, wither one or the other, not both. PCI Ecp is 16X while AGP is 8X (believe me, you'd probably never get your card up to six) Unless you're a serious gamer, than a PCI board and a nice set of SLI cards would probably be on your near-future wish list. And yes, you can get some killer PCI Express cards out there. Like the ATI FireGL V7350, 1GB VRAM (that is nuts, a world first too.., no wait, I heard something about nvidia or possibly Alienware makign 15 or so of 4GB video cards, they got so hot they almost burnt out in about 10 minutes, if that. These cards are aparently like 15 grand, this is from my cousin, don't believe anything he says...) and the ASUS N7800GT, 2 GPU's for the price of about seven in one card (it's bigger than those old sound blaster cards, makes the thermal take armor's look like a $300 20kg toy) Anyway, </rant>

 

[Spike]

And no, you cannot get AGP and PCI boards, wither one or the other, not both

Just in the interests of accuracy, here's one such board...

http://www.nzoczone.com/product_info.php?products_id=564

 

[kerpunkin]

Hey have you tried cleaning the inside of your comp with some canned air,i have few comps and i had a 9600xt in 1 and it started acting funny and i cleaned the fans off good on the graphics and the other fans and it started acting fine,i never realized how much dust collect on the inside on the fans,i was suprised it even turned. And also check all you setting on the card and game settings sometimes they default to the lowest settings and make it look crappy and the graphics card you got overclocks pretty good too,my friend has 1 in his and he has it major overclocked and plays battlefield 2 with medium settings.and if your playing doom3 and wow i suggest getting a little more ram its cheap and helps alot.I play doom3 too and when i windows out of the game and look at my task manager im using close to a gig or more sometimes.

 

[Shadowrunner]

Didny know about that board...

 

[CrossFire851]

Go look at newegg.com


There is lots of 8x agp and 16x PCI-E Boards.

 

[DonNagual]

Have to be kind of careful with those boards though. Some of them (not all) due some sneaky things to get both the agp and pciEx16 slots on there, especially with the AGP slot (actually a modified PCI slot) like having the AGP on a 33-bit PCI interface for example. A high-end AGP8x card would be wasted on a slot like that.