Bought a Dell 3000 for my wife.....and realized after I received it that the video card is built into the MB.....in other words it has no AGP slot on the MB.

My wife's favorite game is glitchy on this computer so I want you smart peoples to tell me this....if I purchased a PCI video card for this Dell would it work or not ???

Actually scratch my last post. If you get a PCI card and I am assumign this is a desktop it would work.

Edited January 15, 200620 yr by suryad

it will work

yes, it will.

btw, take in care that pci video cards are outdated and you probably won't find any card more powerful than your current onboard card (aka bottleneck).

What I do for my customers is to buy a new computerhousing, motherboard and a AGP video card. PCI video cards are an option but they lack b/c of performance of the PCI bus.

Tell us please what kind of games will she play? Then we have an impresion what we can advice .

EDIT: next time I will type faster, Simon your the man... B)

Edited January 15, 200620 yr by puntoMX

You can't buy a new OEM machine with an AGP slot.

PCI Express has replaced the AGP slot in all of the tier 1 OEM machines. Does your wife's new machine have a PCI Express x16 slot?

nope no PCI express slot either........the game is just a brickout style....it's Richochet/rebound....

I have been getting alot of different answers...........some say it will bottle neck others say it will work fine

If it´s not Quake 4, Need for Speed Most wanted or Battlefield 2 then a PCI card will work, it´s just slower then a AGP card b/c of the PCI bus.

But, the onboard isn´t good enough?

This took me quite some time, so... (for me PCI videocards are ancient history!)

According to this site your Dell 3000 has the Intel 865GV intregrated graphics processor. For a performance roundup, this site I found had the most similar contenders (Intel 865G).

I also did find a site with a PCI videocards roundup (the last one before AGP I guess). And I guess Club 3D PCI videocard is the top model with a PCI interface.

Though decision if you ask me, because if you watch those benchmarks I don't think you will gain much performance with the purchase of this ATI Radeon 9250 videocard.

I have an old HP that my sister uses to get her schoolwork done...p3 500 with XP installed no nLite...256 mb ram and it works fine. IIRC we took out its agp card and installed a geforce4 in the PCI slot and we got a big bump in gaming performance. It can playy Ghost Recon the gold editiong without breaking a sweat. So I think the PCI card depending on what you get will help. Just go for it.

As long as the PCI vid card has enough memory to hold the game textures you should be fine. The bottleneck is when the card has to buffer them out to system memory. This is a bottleneck for AGP cards as well, it's just not as noticeable because it has a dedicated bus that runs faster than the PCI bus.

Installing a PCI video card will also give you some of your system RAM back since the integrated video uses system RAM for graphics RAM (which is slower).