Chelon

I'm interested in buying a new video card. I'd like to get a Nvidia GeForce 8800, but I don't know if my motherboard will handle it. I am pretty unsavy when it comes to technical upgrades.

Is there a way to determine if I need a PCI or AGP card?
If I can use a PCI card can I use PCI-express 2.0?
What is SLI? If I'm not interested in that, can I still use an SLI ready card?

Thanks

Niber

This is probably the easiest way to tell if you have PCI express or AGP:

CPUID

Small program. Free.

SLI-ready will work regardless. PCI express speed doesn't matter as far as I know, it will just bottleneck.

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Chelon

Thanks.

I have a Dell Dimenson 8400 and just bought:

EVGA 512-P2-N757-TR GeForce 8600 GT 512MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Retail

• Chipset Manufacturer: NVIDIA
• Core clock: 540MHz
• Stream Processors: 32
• Memory Clock: 1400MHz
• DirectX: DirectX 10
• OpenGL: OpenGL 2.0
• DVI: 2
• TV-Out: HDTV / S-Video Out
• Model #: 512-P2-N757-TR
• Item #: N82E16814130290

Niber

I'd pickup a cheap stick of RAM too, I believe you have 1GB.

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Saladin

Screw the SLi, for most part not many games are optimised to run sli anyway, eq2 was coded back in the stone age and you would be wasting a good bunch of your dough if you fork out for another card to go sli, especially for eq2 alone. 8600 is an ok card. Assuming that you havent got any other upgardes im guessing you probably have a p4 550/560 3.2-.3ghz cpu (good back in their hayday but now trampled by entry lvl C2D) and have 512mb ram. Eq2 relies on raw cpu power so i guess you may be doing just about ok with that p4. I would be surprised if you get a mentionable increase in your fps with your new card. You have an intel 925x chipset which supports up to 4gb ram but its ddr and the best u can have is pc3200 which is surprisngly still expensive compared to the ddr2 whose prices are plummeting by day. Overall i would suggest another 1.5gb of ram to go with your new gpu but i would rather wait
and go for a complete system upgrade.