My current PC is: P4 3.0GHz 1MB L2 3GB 433MHz RAM XFX GeForce 7600 GT 256MB 2x500GB,1x80GB,1x200GB I'm looking to extend it's life and I was looking at this Visiontek Radeon HD 3850 512MB GDDR3 AGP graphic card. http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=30523 anyone knows anything about this card or any reason this would not be a good purchase ? I don't think there's any better AGP card availble right now and Visiontek is the cheapest one I can get. So thanks for your replies One of the reason I want to change it is because of a bug with the GeForce.. every time I minimize GuildWars and maximize it again.. the FPS drops at around 15 and won't go back up. I have to close the game completly and reopen it.. which sucks for wiki/vent.
Did you try updating your drivers first (i want to assume you did)? And if you did, did you try rolling them back to older drivers to see if they're any better? Also (while i cant be one to talk) you might be suited with an ATI card of the level as the Nvidia you have. You can probably find it at circuit city in the $40 section. By the time you spend a decent amount of money you'll be upgrading to a new computer.
yeah windowed is the same .. 15fps.. but now I have a more serious problem.. about 30sec after I posted, I opened up GuildWars and the whole thing froze. I can't believe it hehe.. at first I thought it was the graphic card but I tried it in another PC and it worked fine. I start the PC and my screen just goes to sleep. Everything seems to be running fine (no beeps,etc) but I have no signal at all. My best guess is the motherboard. Anyone have any thoughts ? I also notice that the mouse and keyboard seems to have no power running through them.
I have some thoughts, Turns on... powersupply should be OK. No output: processor might be dead. You'd be amazed at how resilient motherboards are. The whole thing about static frying a motherboard has one caveat. If there is no path from you to the ground through your motherboard you cant zap it. That is, if you unplug the powersupply from the wall, there should be no trouble. Also you're probably touching the case but still. I had a motherboard bare naked on a bed (from an old AMD computer) and it still worked after me grabbing it everywhere . Point is, if it is possible ,try another processor in the motherboard (o and be careful getting the old proc off, it probably is glued to the heat sink via the coolant paste). Pentium 4 processors are cheap. You may want to have a computer technician look at this if you're unsure of doing it yourself. No output: motherboard might be dead. Its hard to tell unless the above method of replacing the processor doesnt work, but that considered it should probably still POST with output to the screen (through the onboard video if possible). I had an old laptop that probably had the ATA bus fry as it only booted up with no drives attached to it (optical and hard). i could run linux off a usb keychain, but that was it. It was a somewhat new model laptop too (circa 2005). You can probably test this first. Disconnect all the hard drives and optical drives and see if the computer POSTs, that is you'll get output on the screen. If it does then its a good chance that the ATA bus fried. Theres no real need to fear yet, you can get a PCI ATA controller card and still get some mileage out of the motherboard. If this doesnt work then the PCI bus is also dead in which case its time for a new mobo. Im not that certified to fix this tho, but someone here might be more knowledgable about it.
Processors are a hell of a lot more resilient than motherboards, especially with the bulging capacitors of the 90s. Motherboards die alot quicker than CPUs. Reset the bios, reseat the video card, reconnect/tighten all power cables, check all external connections, reseat memory chips, etc
That is actually the best AGP card made. Your only concern will be whether or not your Power supply is big enough to power the card and the rest of your system.
I have it, I love it. Sometimes wow bugs out after alt-tabing and I have to restart. That's the only problem so far.