Is putting a spare graphics card in a PC with integrated graphics advisable?

rubadub

I have an old PCI graphics card and was wondering if I was to put it into a PC with integrated graphics would it be of any benefit. The PC is an old dell dimension 2400, not sure what the graphics card is. I am not concerned with games, just go browsing the internet, would look at videos etc.

I was wondering if the dell mobo is using processor power and/or ram to power the integrated graphics, and so by putting in a card does the card take over, leaving better performance on the rest?

Monotype

It depends on how old the graphics card is, I suppose. If it was ancient, you might have trouble finding drivers.

The integrated graphics is probably stealing some RAM as you say, but you'd have to find out how much.

Type in msinfo32 into the start menu and press enter. You should be able to find the total RAM on the first page and the RAM taken up by graphics on the Components\Display page.
Your windows version could be useful too.

If it's just like 64MB out of 2GB, I wouldn't be worried, but if it was hogging 512MB, I would be a bit more concerned. If it's only internet browsing, you can also usually reduce the size in the BIOS menu.

rubadub

Cheers, I probably have plenty of RAM to spare, it has 1.25GB and I have another 1GB on the way to give me 2GB, max it can take. Task manager shows lots of unused ram most of the time.

It is the processor I probably more concerned about, it is the fastest the motherboard can take. I also thought the onboard graphics might sort of disrupt the other ram's operation, even if there is loads to spare.

Turned out the graphics card was AGP and not PCI, I still think I have another PCI knocking about.

Reading up a bit more many do say it will use some CPU so I will definitely try and see if there is a difference.

Also I went into the BIOS and noticed "onboard video buffer" was set to only 1MB, so changed it to 8MB. msinfo32 shows 64MB

Monotype

Yeah, it would put a little extra pressure on the CPU, but if it's internet browsing, it shouldn't be too much - on the other hand, the internet is a colourful place these days.

If it's an AGP card, it's probably not too old (relatively speaking) and is likely to give some performance improvement, although it looks like the dimension 2400 doesn't have an AGP slot. SSDs can breathe a lot of life into an old system but it looks like that doesn't even have SATA connectors either and you wouldn't be getting much performance by the time you've used adapters.

While it's nice to try and use old technology as best as you can, it's really not that efficient and you can end up spending more on electricity than is worth your while in the long run.

If you want to hack away at it anyway, it might be no harm to open up the task manager and see what's happening when your browsing around to see if the CPU is struggling - and a comparison after you add in a card too might be in useful.

rubadub

Monotype wrote: »

it looks like the dimension 2400 doesn't have an AGP slot.

Yeah, I knew the dimension was PCI, I thought my spare card was too, thats what I meant by "turns out my card was AGP".

It is more of a learning project & hobby and I am interested in the theory. I upgraded the processor & ram, the best processor was only ~€8, and did make a good difference. Used ram is really cheap too, so I have not put much into it.

I also have put Lubuntu on it and its a perfectly usable PC with that on it.

Monotype

€8 isn't bad! It's a bit more worrisome when you see people investing near €100 in 5 year old processors.