Best vanilla PCI video card for a modern-ish machine \ VOGONS

Best vanilla PCI video card for a modern-ish machine

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First post, by mr_bigmouth_502

Posted on 2013-07-28, 00:49

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Recently, I resurrected a Dell Dimension C521 so that my step sister could have her own personal machine to browse the web, watch anime, and play a few games on. It has an Athlon 64 x2 3800+ running at 2.3GHz (I overclocked it with clockgen 😁), 2GB of DDR2, and an onboard Geforce 6150LE (which was also overclocked). Surprisingly, this machine can run Minecraft and TF2 both at very playable speeds with the settings turned down, yet for some reason it struggles with some of the dumb Facebook games my step sister plays. I would slap one of my spare PCI-E cards in there, but unfortunately the PCI-E slot failed on this particular machine, which is a fairly common occurence for this model.

Anyhow, what would be the best PCI (NOT PCI-E) card I could throw in there to give it a boost in gaming performance? Even if it doesn't improve my stepsister's Facebook games, I would at least like this thing to work as a spare LAN gaming box.

Reply 1 of 6, by RepoOne

Posted on 2013-07-28, 01:22

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The best "modern" PCI video cards you can get are probably the Zotac PCI GT430 or the PCI Radeon 5450.

Reply 2 of 6, by Old Thrashbarg

Posted on 2013-07-28, 02:47

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I honestly wouldn't recommend investing the money in a 'modern' PCI card for that thing. The PCIe slot problem is just an early symptom of the usual 61x0 chipset failures... it's gonna quit working entirely before too long.

Reply 3 of 6, by nforce4max

Posted on 2013-07-28, 07:46

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You could swap out the board but if you are determined then a cheap GT520 that is pci from Zotec or a 9400GT from Jaton should work. The 9400GT from Jaton has the same specs as the rare 9500gt pci but not all that stable in some boards and lacks low power modes (no idle clocks set) but simple tweak can fix that.

On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.

Reply 4 of 6, by m1so

Posted on 2013-07-28, 10:34

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Facebook games lag because Adobe Flash is the worst thing ever. I remember playing Macromedia Shockwave/old Flash games on my mothers 100 Mhz Pentium PC and they werent really much more primitive than the Flash games today (well, except for the lack of 3D). What the fuck happened to Flash? These horrible high level languages and tools are the reason why a 2D game like Bad Piggies has occasional LAG on a 4-core 1.4 Ghz CPU.

Adobe Flash = Trash.

Reply 5 of 6, by sliderider

Posted on 2013-07-28, 13:31

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RepoOne wrote:
The best "modern" PCI video cards you can get are probably the Zotac PCI GT430 or the PCI Radeon 5450.

A GeForce 9500GT PCI is still faster than either of those. Both Sparkle and Jaton made them but they are getting to be a little hard to find now.

Reply 6 of 6, by mr_bigmouth_502

Posted on 2013-07-30, 13:19

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It turns out there's no need for me to install a PCI video card. I decided to drop in a PCI-E Radeon HD 6570 I had kicking around, and it works perfectly! 😁 It even had low-profile brackets.

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