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P4C800-E Deluxe and PCI Express
In article , Slow Lazy Dog
wrote: I have a P4C800-E Deluxe that's just about 4 or 5 months old. I built a new sys with a P4 2.4ghz, 512MGB of PC3200 and twi SATA 120GB hdd's. The only thing I didn't upgrade was my video card, an ATI 9000 Pro 128. After installing The Simpsons-Hit and Run. I found out my vidcard isn't supported even with all the latest driver updates. So... time to put the 9000 Pro on the shelf and move on. Which leads me to PCI Express. This MB doesn't support it... does Asus make a MB comparable to the P4C800-E Deluxe in terms of features with PCI Express support? Any recommendations if they don't? Thanks for any input. SLD DirectX 8.1 hardware support and T&L. http://www.ati.com/products/radeon90...pro/index.html http://www.vugames.com/product.do?gamePlatformId=424 System Requirements Minimum Requirements: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP PIII 700 MHZ or equivalent 192 MB of ram 4X speed CD or DVD drive 32 MB DirectX 8.1 hardware T&L video card (Geforce 2+) 1.2 GB HD space DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card Keyboard and Mouse That means it should work. Did you install: 1) Chipset drivers ? Something like INFINST.exe or the like. In Device Manager, (system section?) you'll see Intel(R) 82875P Processor to AGP Controller - 2579 That means the chipset driver got installed for the AGP interface. 2) Catalyst driver. Get the latest from ATI. It consists of a video card driver, and a control panel. If, in your Display control, you see a "SmartGART" tab, that means both the driver and control panel component installed OK. 3) Microsoft DirectX. It is hard to say what minimum version the game you want to play requires. While Microsoft thinks people should always upgrade, my experience is, older games will malfunction on you, if you use more modern versions, so which version you upgrade to, is a personal decision. I would think 8.1, as listed in the above requirements, would be the minimum to take advantage of all hardware features. The Catalyst installer may have something to say about this as well. Now, once all this stuff is installed, get a copy of Powerstrip: http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/ps.shtm The options menu item, from the Powerstrip taskbar popup, shows what options are enabled or disabled. And, that will help tell you whether everything really is enabled on your combined hardware and software. In my case, I have a system disk that started as win98, upgraded to win98se, upgraded to win2k, moved through three hardware upgrades, and no matter how much installing and uninstalling I did, I could not get the AGP texture transfer working on my ATI 9800Pro. A clean install of the OS fixed everything up fine. ******* Your plan to upgrade to PCI Express will not change the mundane realities above. There will still be drivers to install, and software to fight with. The P4GD1 will be the least cost upgrade for you, as you get to reuse most of your hardware. It doesn't seem to be a North American product, and may appear in other markets. There is little mention of it that I can find, in Google. http://www.asus.com.tw/products/mb/s...1/overview.htm http://www.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/sock...1675_p4gd1.pdf The P5AD2 family would be the most expensive way to go. LGA775 processor socket (so your S478 processor won't fit). DDR2 memory. See the top items on the list on this page: http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/mbindex.htm Have a look through the other P5xxx products, and you may find the right compromise set of technologies for your budget and plans. Stuffing a fat-ass AGP card in your current computer will also fix this problem (i.e. the need to upgrade could be satisfied quite well, using the P4C800-E, so at least for the moment, you have quite a good base to build on. You can stuff a 3.4GHz socket 478 Prescott processor in there if you want.) There are AGP cards with very similar core and memory clocks at the moment, to the PCI Express cards, and the AGP cards tend to be more available to buy, as compared to high end PCI Express cards. Some AGP cards (newegg approximated pricing): ATI X800 Pro core=475MHz memory=900MHz ~$400 ATI X800 XT core=520MHz memory=1120MHz ~$500 Nvidia 6800 Ultra core=400Mhz memory=1100MHz ~$500 These will add a fair load to your power supply, so you may need to upgrade that too. In case you were thinking PCI Express has something to do with increased performance, it doesn't. It just introduces one more incompatible interface. The PCI Express standard was created, to make hub interfaces for expansion cards possible. The AGP slot didn't need this "improvement", as AGP 3.0 is already a point-to-point parallel terminated hardware interface, and changing it to PCI Express does nothing for the end user. (And SLI is a crock... In that it doesn't accelerate all game titles. A computer with SLI dumps ~300W of heat into the room.) Have fun, Paul |
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