quick upgrade question for a friend's dell

[furryrabidbunny]

My friend has a dell slim pc. I has some empty pci slots and that horrible intel integrated graphics. I told her that a videocard would give her a nice performace boost seeing rendering wouldn't come from the cpu/ram, but am I right? Would a 64-128 video card from newegg that would plug into a pci slot override the intel graphics and get faster graphic rendering (just want reassurance)? She isn't going to buy the top of the line, no gaming, but it sad when iTunes slowly renders when maximizing. Her pc isn't even that old, fairlyl fast, and I've done other upgrades to it (ram and HD).

 

[Kelmon]

I think the answer to your question very much depends on the card slots available and the options in the BIOS of the computer. What I mean is the following:

1. You'll need at least one free slot for a video card to be inserted into. Typically this will either be a PCIe (PCI Express) or AGP slot. If you don't have one of these then you can pretty much abandon this exercise now. A "regular" PCI slot is typically not supported by graphics card manufacturers, although exceptions may exist.

2. The computer must provide the option of being able to use a graphics card as opposed to the integrated chipset. I believe that such an option would be located in the BIOS that you can access at start-up and that (and I may be wrong) you probably cannot run both the integrated graphics and graphics card at the same time.

Experience with "brand" computers over the years has indicated that if they did not come with a dedicated graphics card that can be swapped out then your chances of being able to add one later is slim. The reason for this is that the manufacturer, if they use integrated graphics, normally doesn't bother to provide the necessary AGP or PCIe slot to take a dedicated graphics card.

Best of luck but I wouldn't be surprised if what you want to achieve cannot be done.

 

[SmurfBoxMasta]

Not sure about the current crop of peecees, but the last 2 I had (an HP & a compcraq) both allowed the option in the bios settings to allow a plug in card to override the onboard graphics.

Granted, they didnt provide AGP or PCIe slots, but even the regular PCI-based 64mb nVidia cards I put in them were WAY better than the onboard 4mb & 8mb setups.......

So buy a cheap pci card & see what happens, it certainly wont be any worse than it is now

 

[dogsbody]

A friend of mine has a Dell PC (fairly cheapish - about 2 years old) and he just bought an NVIDIA GeforceMX 5200 128Mb PCI card (not PCIe) for his PC. It was cheap, from Amazon, and although he had to reinstall Civ IV before it knew the card was there, it now runs much better.

The BIOS didn't allow disabling of the on-board graphics (horrible intel crap) but he disabled it in the Device Manager and that seemed to work pretty well.

I'd recommend it.

 

[furryrabidbunny]

Newegg has plenty of pci graphic cards and how i was going to handle it was to just uninstall the drivers for the intel graphics, would that work?

 

[jeremy.king]

Newegg has plenty of pci graphic cards and how i was going to handle it was to just uninstall the drivers for the intel graphics, would that work?

No, they would just get reinstalled on a reboot. The BIOS selection may be an option.

Edit: Check to see if there is an AGP slot before you go the PCI route. Which model Dell?