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Upgrading graphics on a Presario 2240

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First post, by Karunamon

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Greetings,

I picked up a beautiful system by way of a classified. It appears to be a completely stock Presario 2240, in great condition, with no upgrades. I'm in the process of maxing out the memory on it (48 megs) and getting a CF/IDE adapter to give those 20 year old hard drives a rest, but what I really want to do is to slap an upgraded graphics card in it. So far, stuff like Need For Speed and Urban Assault at anything north of 320x240 is like watching a slide show.

The natural choice here seem to be a Voodoo card of some sorts, but the problem I'm seeing is that everything below the Voodoo3 requires a separate video card, and I don't think the lone PCI slot on this system is v2.1 compliant for a V3 - worse, it's already taken up by the stock S3 Trio64V2, which means if I were to go for an older Voodoo, I'd have to swap that out for an ISA card of some kind and chain it into the accelerator.

So maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree. I want to take the graphics on this system as high as they can reasonably go within my (modest) budget. What would you all suggest for a sane upgrade given these constraints?

Reply 1 of 4, by derSammler

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First, the S3 Trio64 is a very fast card. It has no 3d acceleration, however. As for Need For Speed, you won't get more speed by adding a Voodoo card, as NFS does not use any sort of 3d acceleration. For Urban Assault I'm not sure, but it might be software-rendering only as well.

You could replace the S3 by a Riva 128, Riva TNT, or something similar. A Voodoo3 would be a complete waste, as the CPU is too slow for anything that would benefit from it.

Reply 2 of 4, by blurks

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Something between a Riva 128, TNT and a Voodoo Banshee should do the trick. If that fits in your modest budget, well that's another question. You could also try the Permedia 2 chipset although it lacks speed and compatibility with newer and more demanding titles compared to the aforementioned ones.

Personally speaking I would just take the risk and try a cheap PCI FX5200. In most cases it just works. And if not they make for a good replacement card for other systems or flashing bricked graphics cards back to life.

Reply 3 of 4, by Karunamon

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derSammler wrote:

First, the S3 Trio64 is a very fast card. It has no 3d acceleration, however. As for Need For Speed, you won't get more speed by adding a Voodoo card, as NFS does not use any sort of 3d acceleration. For Urban Assault I'm not sure, but it might be software-rendering only as well.

Good point, so my bottleneck might be CPU, then. This machine has an AMD K6 running at 200Mhz, with a 66Mhz bus, which limits upgrades substantially (it appears the absolute best I could do is a slightly later model which would only get me an extra 33Mhz) which could mean this is a dead end and it'll really only be good for very early Win98 or Dos titles. (Case in point, something like Unreal Tournament is completely out of reach with its P3/Duron 2Ghz min reqs)

That's fine, but at least I'd know for sure.

As far as Urban Assault goes, it does have hardware rendering (Direct3D) support.

blurks wrote:

Personally speaking I would just take the risk and try a cheap PCI FX5200. In most cases it just works. And if not they make for a good replacement card for other systems or flashing bricked graphics cards back to life.

I could swing that - the only question left, then, is if it's worth bothering since the CPU on this box is so slow.

Reply 4 of 4, by bmwsvsu

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I remember not having much luck with an FX5200 in my Pentium 2 rig. It ran fine in a p3 machine but in a 300mhz p2, it ran quite slow. I ended up going with a Quadro card in that build, which ran much better.

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