Re: Graphics Card/ Motherboard help needed!

You can't convert PCI to AGP or PCI Express. It's a question of
bandwith. The regular PCI bus can handle small amounts of information,
which is why it works fine for sound cards and network cards, but it really
cannot handle the load of larger textures moving across it.

I would not say never buy a Dell, but you need to make sure that any
computer you buy has a PCI Express or AGP slot for an add-on graphics card.
You also need at least a 400 watt power supply. Dell power supplies have
proprietary connectors and you have to get special adapters for them, which
is why they are best avoided if you ever want to upgrade your system.

For a gaming system, you probably should look at a Socket 939 Athlon 64 or
Socket 754 Athlon 64/Sempron motherboard, one gigabyte of DDR 400 RAM, a PCI
Epress graphics card would be prefferable but isn't absolutely necessary,
but either way the GeForce 6600 is a good choice (if you just want to play
the original Unreal Tournament, a GeForce 6200 PCI-Express with turbocache
would work fine, and costs less than 100 dollars). 128MB of memory on the
graphics card is fine, and getting a better graphics card would be
prefferable to buying a card with lots of memory but poor performance. The
total cost for all this will be between 550-900 dollars.


.

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