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xxbio Warfare11

Graphics card problem

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SO today a buddy of mine gave me a graphics card from a broken custom computer he had. so today i opened up my pc, pulled out the dinky little one i had and placed in the newer one. and then the pc booted up fine but when i try to play games like fallout 3 it still says i have the old card in. And on the internet some gaming web sites couldn't detect the card because its either unusual or too new (highly doubt it) or too old (Highly doubt that too)so can anybody help?

also my old card was an ATI Readon express series 200 i belive. and the one i just put in....i have no clue who made it or anything..

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Might help if you took some reasonably clear photos of the new card (both sides) and posted them. You'll probably need to uninstall the existing video driver, but there's little point doing so while we don't know what to replace it with. Let's just hope it's not the video card that broke your friend's custom PC.

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Well, there's your problem. The green card is not a video card - so, in all likelihood, your video card is still in the machine.

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EDIT: What Bucket said. I didn't even bother looking at that pic. Remember that your monitor will be using whatever card it's connected to, and if your machine has one built into the motherboard it may need to be disabled in the BIOS.

One of the reasons GreyGhost asked for pictures is because cards can be identified by what's written on them. Your pictures are too blurry for that. If you can find a part number that looks like it identifies the whole board then that's useful.

Speaking of the pictures, couches are not a good place for computer chips. Static can be nasty.

What does it say under "Display Adapters" in your device manager? (On XP, right-click My Computer, choose Properties->Hardware->Device Manager; on Vista/7 just type it in the start menu). It will list all the installed cards. You should have two now. If the Device Manager shows the new card then tell us what it is. If it has no idea what the card is (shows a question mark) then right-click it and choose "details." There should at least be one entry called "device ID" or "hardware ID." It looks cryptic (mine is "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_6719&SUBSYS_31281682&REV_00"), but we can use it to find a driver or figure out what it is.

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on the newly installed card the only thing that has a manufacture name are some of the chips on it and they read samsung. another thing on locating the device in the device manager it would be under display addapters?(only one with ati expres...ect) other than that i see nothing on the list that is new or reads ati express...ect

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ATI Express is an integrated (on-board) graphics chip. You can't remove it. You have to tell the BIOS to use the dedicate card instead.

The problem is, it looks like the card your friend gave you is AGP. That's an ancient card, and I doubt your FO3 framerates are going to get any better.

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I think what Bucket's suggesting is that the AGP card's performance mightn't be any better than the R300-based integrated graphics in your Xpress 200 chipset.

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I'm not so sure. There are lots of AGP cards that will run circles around those - the R400 cards being the obvious example.

Xxbio, if you can't find the option in your BIOS to enable the card then give us the model of PC it is. If it's some generic weirdness then we need the motherboard model. The BIOS should tell you that at least.

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The last agp cards I know of was the geforce fx line, but even as good as they were back in the day, I don't think I could've ran anything more modern than ut2k4. I know for a fact I couldn't run doom 3 on my old 5900.

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Had a Radeon X300 in a crappy, overpriced PC dad bought. It ran Doom III quite well, but it also ran so hot the PC kept crashing. The solution was to plug in a fan (taken from a dead 486), screw it to a stack of glued playing cards, and carve the cards so they fit in the PCI slot under the video card. Worked great.

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Quast said:

The last agp cards I know of was the geforce fx line, but even as good as they were back in the day, I don't think I could've ran anything more modern than ut2k4. I know for a fact I couldn't run doom 3 on my old 5900.

The 6000 series was probably the last that was widely available in AGP, but it even went up to the 7000 series. The Radeon HD 4650 is also still being made in AGP.

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Newegg offers Radeon HD 5450s and GeForce 9400 GTs in PCI form factor. Not PCI-e, regular PCI.

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Before I got my gaming comp, I was using int graphics from Intel, sucked balls, tell ya that... But when I did get my g-comp, I had ordered it with a HD Radeon 4850 and a quadcore 2.2ghz Phenom II (back when 2.2 was high), it ran a lot of games nicely, sure not on macho-graphic xtreme, but hey, it ran games.

Doom worked fine, many oldies worked (well, ones that didn't need DOSBox to run perfectly).

But fyi on Radeons, they loove to run hot so try to keep a fan nearby or have a typical cold room and DO NOT FORGET TO DUST THE FUCKER EVERY 1-2months! I swear that was my #1 reason why my comp crashed due to over heating.

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Does your friend's computer even have an AGP slot? X300 chipset and AGP slot would be quite unusual, unless it's one of those hybrid/transitional motherboards that had both AGP (kinda) and PCI Xpress slots.

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Bloodshedder said:

The 6000 series was probably the last that was widely available in AGP, but it even went up to the 7000 series. The Radeon HD 4650 is also still being made in AGP.

Manufacturers don't make motherboards with agp slots yet, do they? Or is AMD just producing these for the poor souls with 10 year old boards?

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Quast said:

Manufacturers don't make motherboards with agp slots yet, do they? Or is AMD just producing these for the poor souls with 10 year old boards?


Until 2008-2009 at least there was still a niche market for AGP gfx cards using the latest chipsets -and even for PCI ones, believe it or not. If you look hard enough on e.g. newegg.com it's not impossible to find PCI cards (not PCI Express!) with 1 GB of RAM and using relatively recent chipsets.

Actually, the PCI-only option made sense for mobos that had no other means of upgrade (some office/small factor mobos had no AGP slots or even PCI-Ex slots, just plain old PCI).

And, YES, there are some recent AGP motherboards still being made, e.g. this one:

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?item=N82E16813157115&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&AID=10446076&PID=5551177&SID=skim23176X817180X530c1e092bb05554556b0a2f5235a81a

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Maes said:

Does your friend's computer even have an AGP slot? X300 chipset and AGP slot would be quite unusual, unless it's one of those hybrid/transitional motherboards that had both AGP (kinda) and PCI Xpress slots.



im not sure i havent seen his computer. although i do know it was completely custom.

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xxbio Warfare11 said:

im not sure i havent seen his computer. although i do know it was completely custom.


This day and age, buying a motherboard yourself and installing it into a case (rather than buying a Dell or a Compaq, let's say) hardly counts as "completely custom". With some serious case modding & ricer bling, maybe :-) Or if your friend actually designed and soldered the motherboard himself....

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Maes said:

This day and age, buying a motherboard yourself and installing it into a case (rather than buying a Dell or a Compaq, let's say) hardly counts as "completely custom". With some serious case modding & ricer bling, maybe :-) Or if your friend actually designed and soldered the motherboard himself....


I don't know I'm just going off of what he told me.

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Well, pass him this message from the DW Repair Drones:

"Identify yourselves! State your type and model number".

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Maes said:

Well, pass him this message from the DW Repair Drones:

"Identify yourselves! State your type and model number".


The first thing that springs to mind here...

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Eris Falling said:

The first thing that springs to mind here...


Close, but no cigar ;-)

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Maes said:

Or if your friend actually designed and soldered the motherboard himself....

Soldering surface-mount components by hand is a PITA. :(

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GreyGhost said:

Soldering surface-mount components by hand is a PITA. :(

Especially when the component is a 4mm x 4mm QFN 16:



Taken through one lens of the stereo microscope I had to use.

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If your friend had a custom build computer, I'd ask them to help you. The card you removed is clearly not a video-card, it looks likes an ethernet card, or modem card, or maybe even a sound card.

From what you've said, after adding the new card (which is an AGP card looking at the connectors) your computer didn't recognize it. I've never had that problem, after installing a new video card, all the computers I've had have recognized it and either installed the new drivers if it's plug and play, or asked for an install disk. So if you already have an intel integrated graphics card, and it's not recognizing it, I have to assume you've just hammered the new card into a slot where it's not supposed to go, or you haven't hooked up the power cables correctly.

And in the end, if you look at the video card, it has a little plastic tab on the side. That helps to connect it to the proper AGP connector. If you didn't have to remove a card to put the new card in place, you're putting in the wrong place.

Computers usually haven't come with AGP slots since 2006, you can get them, but PCIe has replaced them. It sounds like you're trying to do something that your motherboard won't allow you to do, and I'm pretty sure if you managed to cram that AGP card in any port, the port is ruined.

In the end, not all cards will work with all motherboards. Without seeing your motherboard, I can't tell you if it will take PCI, PCIe, or AGP cards. But from the info you've given, it doesn't sound like this card will work. Especially when the information is "It's not too old, but it's not too new".

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Jello said:

Computers usually haven't come with AGP slots since 2006, you can get them, but PCIe has replaced them. It sounds like you're trying to do something that your motherboard won't allow you to do, and I'm pretty sure if you managed to cram that AGP card in any port, the port is ruined.


There's always the off chance that he has one of those transitional mobos that had both PCIe and AGP slots, with the catch that the AGP slot was not a real AGP slot, but a tweaked PCI or PCIe one: I once had an Asus with an "AGR" (Advanced Graphics Riser) slot: it looked like an AGP one, when it worked it was just like an AGP 8x (only) slot, but it was only compatible with certain AGP cards (there was even a list of specific models).

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