Could someone...

thermophilis

thermophilis

Member
Teach mme about video cards? I basically know nothing about them, I'm competent enough with almost all other aspects of computers to find which part works with which mobo, but video cards I know pretty much nothing about, well, probably nothing...so yeah! if any one could help me that would really rock! I want to be able to do all this stuff myself and help other people do it...but yeah. Oh, and if I'm being to general let me know!
thanks!
 
Video cards, From a fellow 17 year old Oregonian! They obviously provide the visual interface between the computer and the computer screen. Hooked into a PCI-e (best) Agp (Old, but still workable) or PCI slot (complete crap). They are cabled using a D-sub, (or vga cord) or alternatively a DVI cable. A card using a DVI slot can still be used by a VGA monitor with the correct, and included (usually) adapter. The card itself has many specifications. Core and memory clock. Pipelines, ROF's and stream processors. Shader models, and their respective speed. Memory (or Vram, Gddr) Capacity and bandwidth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_card

May help. Things to note. Clocks can be increased, call it overclocking, It increases performance of the card without spending any monies. You can also volt mod to increase voltage, Not recommended by me, but not always dangerous. Memory doesn't make the card. No single, or even multiple spec does, the card needs to be measured as a whole. The main manufactures are NVidia and ATI, recently know as simply AMD who purchased them. THey both have held the title of greatest and it tends to be passed back and forth. Currently Nvidia holds that crown.

Questions! Feel free to ask any. :)

Addendum: benchmarks are the greatest card realizer, or test! All the specs in the world mean nothing next to some well prepared, as well as various, Benchmark!
 
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Awesome thanks so much! okay, so what's the difference between agp and pci (looks wise on the board I mean) are pci the really long ones? And I know what the pci-e look like! Man, I really do appreciate the help!
 
Agp clocks in at a 66.6 bus speed while PCI is half that.

Look-wise. AGP is almost always brown, though it can take a black color, while I've never seen a non white PCI slot.

pci_slot.jpg


As you can see here. when the AGP slot has a divider separating part of the slot from the other end it will generally be longer. The pins on a PCI card are different from a agp, case in point:
AGP
http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/video/nv18-nv28/pins-3.jpg (ignore the arrows)
PCI
http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/pci-connector2.jpg
 
Awesome! So a board that I have (my dad bought it at a garage sale XD) has one AGP slot and two PCI slots...so can I use any AGP cards, or are there more limits?

edit: hah hah, I put is there more limits
 
Sure! I'll say though, I've never seen a motherboard at a garage sell, And I've been to quite a few... Old people (main perpetrators of a GS) tend to avoid such things lol.

Anything else I can ya fer?
 
hah, I was really surprised, my dad brought it home (he knows nothing about computers) and said here's your computer for college...though, I would rather build something off a better board. *shrug* it'll work

http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/D865GLC/sb/CS-027147.htm

what I'm wondering about is the couple of interfaces (is that the right word?) on the board one says fpusb (front panel usb?) and the other front panel (wait two say fpusb) oh and there's a really small black one that looks like a fan connector but it only has two prongsm and it says intruder. Now I know this is technically off topic on this board right? But what do they do? I'm guessing the fpusb are for usb ports...on the front panel XD and front panel is for the power button, but I have no clue about the others...I hope I'm not asking too much!
 
Boards label such things awkwardly sometimes, To be absolutely sure (though your guesses on the two sounded spot-on.) of the other connectors you'll need the motherboard manual. To get this we need the Motherboard make and model. Look for the ident on the pcb, if you can't find that you'll need to look for any numbers or marks that can give any indication of the board, that are on the board. You'll also need the name to identify the CPU socket, RAM speed, etc.
 
Oh man, on that site that I gave you it had it! I was pretty happy! but I dtill don't know what the intruder is? On the manual it says chasis intrusion connector..but I have no clue where that would be. Also there's an "auxillary front panel power led connector" besides the front panel connector, would that just be like a system monitor led?

actually, here's the diagram, maybe this will help?

http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/2576/diagramun0.jpg

oh! and thanks for all the help you've been giving me! I really, really appreciate it!
 
Chassis intrusion sounds an alarm on the motherboard speaker when you open the case, how lame lol. You don't need it. The LED connector sounds like what you described it as, A frontal LED power connector.

It occurs to me that you won't be able to figure out if the board is functional untill you buy a few parts for it. That'll make things a bit harder.. THough if that turns out to be the case you could always just buy a new S478 mobo pretty cheaply.

You're welcome. Most of us are here to help (some just to gossip :P) But still, it's surprisingly rare to get thanks, so let me thank you as well, keep up the oft overlooked forum etiquette!
 
hah, actually, I just plugged in some ram that I had and the hardrive for this comp, and it booted up and ran just fine, it was great, made me quite happy, though the CPU is a bit slower. Well, you know, I've really learned plenty in these past couple hours to do all this stuff by myself just fine! I'll even be able to help some other people! Yay! :P
 
haha, yeah it's great. Good luck, and don't forget to ask questions when you need to, They are the single greatest thing any man can do you know, putting aside sex and eating Pizza. ;)

Wait.. we can't sex good either, damnit.
 
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