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Old July 4th 18, 03:57 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Paul[_28_]
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Default Need VGA video card for T3104 eMachine

VanguardLH wrote:
Wayne wrote:

The onboard video in my eMachines T3104 is out. The MOBO has a free
PCI slot. I would like to try a VGA video card in it if I could find
a cheap one. Anyone know what I need and where?


What you need depends on what you intend to do with the computer. If
you intend to play video games or do graphics/video editing, you'll need
a better video card than what is needed for e-mail, word processing, web
browsing, and other normal tasks. The onboard video isn't much to brag
about, so it doesn't take much of a video card to surpass onboard video.

The specs on that computer regarding graphics say:

S3 Graphics Unichrome Pro 64MB DDR Shared memory

That's very low end so just about any video card will do. You said
"PCI" but that could mean "PCI (non-Express)" or "PCI Express". If all
you have is just PCI, those are getting tougher to find. Found some at
Newegg:

http://tinyurl.com/y7ww92bm

If there is an AGP card slot, use that instead of PCI. Newegg has a few
AGP cards:

http://tinyurl.com/ybtj36ye

You never mention what connector is on the end of the monitor's video
cable. You need to get a video card that matches the connector on the
monitor, or use an adapter to convert.


The ATI 7000 on one of those pages, is ancient,
and won't necessarily have drivers in all OSes.

The 3450 is nice, and is actually a PCI Express
with a PCI bridge fitted to it. Some of the
movie processing features (3:2 pulldown) can
be disabled when using a PCI bridge, because
on a regular 33MHz 32 bit slot, there isn't a lot
of bandwidth. The driver situation might be a bit
better on the 3450, and it's possible the driver
won't even know the path is PCI (except for discovering
only an x1 lane is wired and working on the bridge).
Back when they made PCIe x1 video cards (by not wiring
the other 15 lanes), the driver could sense the
wiring and deny a couple of movie features in the
video decode block.

For the price you might pay for a Visiontek, you could
put the money towards a refurbished computer instead
(at Staples or Walmart).

I can also see several 6200 cards (which would be good
too), but they have ripoff pricing.

The OP was quite happy with integrated graphics up to now,
and the only reason for this shopping trip, is because
the chipset graphics seem to have failed. One thing to
watch about such a situation, is some motherboards *require*
you to change a graphics setting in the BIOS, to "turn on"
a plug-in card. Otherwise, some of these older motherboards
can continue to attempt to use their non-working integrated
graphics block instead. Fully automated switching came later.
I had one poster, who changed his CR2032 on a damaged system,
the BIOS reset to integrated graphics, and because the
integrated wasn't working, he couldn't see the BIOS screen
to correct the graphics setting. That's the danger with some
of this older stuff. If the user manual claims it automatically
switches for you, then that's one less thing to worry about.

Paul