PCI card worth it over onboard?

[abalavsan]

A few weeks ago, I removed a video card from an eMachine for another computer. The eMachine works fine, but I'm wondering if it's worth picking up an older PCI based video card. Max resolution this PC ever does is 1280x1024, but my main thing is freeing up the 8MB of memory the onboard is now using. I can probably find a card for about $10, but just wondering what everyone else thinks?

[Goldaar]

It's not just about the 8mb when you think about it, it's also about CPU cycles which are used to allocate that RAM and hdd space when you have to increase your page file, so yes, even a PCI card is a worthy upgrade over on board, not to mention dual head support for future upgrades.

[BigLoo]

I dunno. I guess if you can get a card that cheap, go for it, but do dual head PCI cards even exist? Even if they do, I am guessing DVI is out of the question.

[Goldaar]

Actually the 5000 series of Nvidia cards have DVI, and one of them night even have dual output.

[edogridge]

I got to agree with Goldar. If you can get it cheap, I think you open yourself to more options by getting a dedicated video card. Add to it the saved resources and you'll be good.

[DJOnster]

It's a refurb, but ATI has a 9200 PCI Video Card for $33.25 with free shipping.

[akia]

I disagree with everyone. If this was a decent PC, say something over 2.4GHz, it may actually be worthwhile. Assuming this is a piece of junk (a PCI videocard? WTH?), I cannot see any saved CPU cycles or 8MB of memory worth the trouble of getting back.

[pF.TK]

I disagree with everyone. If this was a decent PC, say something over 2.4GHz, it may actually be worthwhile. Assuming this is a piece of junk (a PCI videocard? WTH?), I cannot see any saved CPU cycles or 8MB of memory worth the trouble of getting back.
Spoken like a true windows user :biggrin2:
In the linux world, the saved cpu cycles and memory would be a huge advantage, esp when running a cli based server for samba shares or the like. In my case, it's a headless P4 1.6GHz with 512mb ram that is a FreeNAS server, even though it runs headless, a simple STB (remember those) 8mb graphics card alleviates the cpu from having to give memory and cycles to gpu processing and memory allocation. I did in fact, notice an improvement in performance...

[MixMasterMatt]

I have an old gateway PIII E-1400 microcomputer that has room for 2 full size PCI cards. It has onboard everything, but I wanted to use it as a cheap movie storage and playback device so I put in a 160gb hd and a 256mb PCI video card that has rgb, s-vid and dvi. It does what I want it to do perfectly and the vide card was only 30 bucks. In fact, I just downloaded superman returns and am watching it right now.:)

[ricercar]

PCI video card is the answer.


Sharing system RAM with video frame buffer is architecturally sloppy, inefficient, and drags down performance of all processes, even with dual-ported dual-channel RAM. Unified Memory Architecture is the most stupid invention the x86 world stole from Apple.