graphics controller advice needed

coco0981

Hey there need some help
Have a Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo L pc. Recently bought age of empires 3 but pc doesn't seem to be able run it i.e graphics not great and is reallllllly slow at times. (Know very little bout pc's by the way)
Have Intel Celeron 2.6 GHz processor
246 MB Ram
60 g hard drive
Intel 82845g Graphics controller (Have read in other posts about pci cards and agp cards, not sure which mine is or how to find out)
Do i need a new pc(preferable not cos money is tight), new graphics card, more ram?????
Any advice appreciated

K.O.Kiki

You don't have a graphics card; that's integrated graphics.

Hmm... how much money can you afford? Because a new GPU & extra RAM would be good for that system (cheaper than replacing everything, anyway)

TerrorFirmer

It's either a case of that graphics card being shared memory and eating into your already puny ram, or the graphics card being crap anyway, and the poor ram isn't helping.

You can't really win in this situation, more ram would definately help, but with that graphics option you aren't going to be playing any new games really...

coco0981

so do i even have the option of getting a separate graphics card or is that not possible with my type of pc. 300 euro would be about all i could afford

duridian

smurfman4ever wrote:

so do i even have the option of getting a separate graphics card or is that not possible with my type of pc. 300 euro would be about all i could afford

The first thing you must establish is whether or not your computer has a graphics card slot. I'm guessing by the description of your computer specs, that it is for an AGP slot you should be looking. (I don't think your pc is new enough to have PCI-Express so don't worry about PCI-Express for now as it is unlikely that you have this option.)
The only way to be sure is to open the case of your pc and have a look at the motherboard(that is the main circuit board inside the pc, onto which most other things are connected, you can't miss it!)
This might help you to identify whether or not you have an AGP slot.
If you have such a slot then you have hope of improving things. If you do not then you have quite frankly very poor options. In the absence of an AGP slot, the only expansion slots available to you are PCI slots (usually coloured white, do not confuse these with the newer PCI-Express technology) and for graphics this is pretty much a worthless option as PCI graphics cards available nowadays are rare, the models that are available the bottom of the range from the cards of 2 or 3 years back and they are above all else grossly overpriced for what they can do. They would be almost as worthless for any modern game as your current integrated graphics are and therefore not really worthwhile.
I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but based on what you've told us thus far about your system, I would suspect that there is a strong chance that you do not have an AGP slot, but I hope for your sake that I am wrong.
If you do have an AGP slot then the best way you could distribute your €300 would be to divide the money between a graphics card, a more substantial amount of memory (pref. 1GB), and maybe a Pentium4 to replace that Celeron. Ideally you should look for a few second hand parts.

AGP graphics card, something under a €100, ATI Radeon 9800Pro or Radeon 9700Pro would be ideal, or if you are lucky and can find one, a second hand Nvidia Geforce 6600GT would be good also.

RAM/memory, your system probably has DDR ram but again this is something you should confirm for sure before buying anything. Download and install CPU-Z from www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php This program will tell you what type of memory you have at present, so that you wil know what is needed.

CPU, your Celeron cpu is another weakpoint from a gaming point of view. ideally you should replace it with a Pentium4. Because of the chipset you have, again you probably require a Pentium4 chip which has a Northwood core and 533 front side bus. I believe that the newer Northwoods, which have 800FSB, and pretty much any of the Pentium4s with Prescott cores regardless of the FSB would fail to work in your system.

Anyway all of this of course dependent on you having an AGP slot. If this is absent I'm sorry to say that I really don't think you should invest any more money into the pc as it will never really be what you want it to be. You would be better off to sell the system as it stands and invest the money into something better and more suited to gaming... and make sure to do a lot more research and ask a lot more questions before buying again. There are plenty of people here on boards that will help you out if you ask.

coco0981

ok checked out the pc and it has a agp slot. have been offered a good deal on 512mb ram and nvidea ge force fx 5500 256mb. what do ye think, would this make the gameplay ok. Am not looking for super performance given that i'm only an occasional user so don't want to spend loads on it??? By the way am just curious as to wheter the monitor could be affecting the graphics. Its good quality when showing dvd's????
Thanks for the advice as well

TerrorFirmer

Dont take anything from the FX series of cards, not even for casual gaming. It's absolutely rubbish for the latest games.

When you say good deal, anyone looking for over 30 quid is ripping you off, those cards are worthless in todays market.

I'd say take the jump to maybe 768mb ram and something like a 9600/9700pro/9800 and leave it at that, not worth your while as practically all the main components in your pc at the moment are not designed for gaming at all...just pick up the parts you need second hand and for about a hundred twenty odd quid you should get your pc running fine for casual gaming and other activities.

The other alternative is to sell your pc, combine the earnings with your upgrade bookmarked cash and buy a decent pc second hand (There's an AMD 64 3400+ with a 6600 and 1gig ram going for 700ono on the fs boards atm) or from Dells outlet store or something....

If you want to go really cheap upgrade, for about 60 quid you could upgrade to something like 512ram and 128mb 9550 gfx or similar.....and still be able to play Age of Empires alot better then you can now as well as a few other games of this type, which normally have lower requirements then the bleeding edge FPS's.

duridian

Good, glad to hear you have an AGP slot.
Re: the deal for the 512MB and the GeforceFX5500. If you can get them for ~€80 or under then yes, it may be adequate for now, but bear in mind that the FX5500 is not a very powerful graphics card, and you will have to run most games on the absolute lowest resolution and settings. More demanding recent games (like FEAR, Quake4 etc.) will probably not be very playable on any setting. The 5500 is just a slightly faster version of the 5200(the have basically the same core but the 5500 has I believe better memory bandwidth than the 5200), and you have probably at some stage heard people on here talk of how weak a performer the 5200 is.
So what I am saying is that while FX5500 would be better than the integrated graphics of the Intel845 chipset, it won't be the kind of massive improvement you would get from the likes of a Radeon 9800 Pro. As it is already a pretty low spec card, it won't have great longevity, in the sense that it won't really run any new games that well and this situation will worsen as games get more and more complex. Also don't fall into the trap of thinking that all 256MB cards are automatically better than cards with 128MB of ram, this is not necessarily the case, there are other factors which are much more significant.

[EDIT] Havok's point about maybe selling your pc and combining this with the €300 you said you had as upgrade money to buy a better second-hand system is something I'd agree with too, as you would probably have a much better all round system that way. Fujitsu low-end stuff is very much a case of cheap 'n nasty.

gamer

get agp 9550 card video, 128ram or 256 video ram, , price elara.ie ,is now 67euro ,including vat, you need,512meg main ram, to play most games ,released since 2005.or else sell ,ur pc,get 1 with p4,or amd cpu ,3000+,cpu, or 3200cpu, i dont know a standard shop that sells 9550 cards, theres no point in spending 150 on an agp card,that 550 is very fast,gets good reviews.