[dannymartinz]

Hello,
I have a PC thats about 3 years old. When I purchase it I was unfortunately unaware that it had intergrated graphics. The motherboard has PCI slots (3) and I have recently been browsing ebay for video card.

However, when I look at the pictures the cards listed as PCI card look like they are AGP with three teeth instead of the 2 on the PCI slot; one long one and one short one.

Do all PCI cards look the same phsically or do some have 2 teeth while other have 3 teeth (I don't know what else to call them. By teeth I mean the actual tabs you fit into the slots).

I recently purchased RAM bringing my system upto 768 MB. I want to play games but I need something that supports pixel and vertex shaders. I don't expect super performance and not expecting games like Half-Life 2 or Doom to run. I can live with 30 fps on simpler games but they require the vertex-pixel thing I mentioned.

Anyway, yeah is there a difference physically with the different makes of PCI (teeth). Also, when I was looking up PCI cards the description read support for 2x or 4x agp. ow does a PCI card support AGP? Sorry if I sound really stupid. I am new to all of this. Thank you for your time, I really appreciate it.

Best regards,
Danny

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PCI and AGP are different beasts. AGP adds a different channel to the comp, specifically for graphics, which allows higher bandwidth for that purpose only.
a 3 year old PC may have an AGP slot already. look inside your comp. the PCI slots are beige, and there will be several of them. there would only be one AGP slot. it would be short, brown, and the first slot you would see between the CPU and the PCI slots.

let us know if you have an AGP. if you do, give us some specifics on your PC (make, model, and/or that info on your motherboard), and we can tell you what speed AGP you have, so you can get an appropriate card.

[audioboy]

PCI and AGP are different beasts. AGP adds a different channel to the comp, specifically for graphics, which allows higher bandwidth for that purpose only.
a 3 year old PC may have an AGP slot already. look inside your comp. the PCI slots are beige, and there will be several of them. there would only be one AGP slot. it would be short, brown, and the first slot you would see between the CPU and the PCI slots.

let us know if you have an AGP. if you do, give us some specifics on your PC (make, model, and/or that info on your motherboard), and we can tell you what speed AGP you have, so you can get an appropriate card.

[dannymartinz]

It has three identical PCI slots. The slots are beige like you mentioned. My confusion is with the appearence of the acual cards. The 3 beige slots have two grooves to fit the video card tabs into; a small one and then another one probably twice as long. Some of the pictures I have seen of video cards labeled PCI look like they have 3 tabs of about equal length instead instead of one short one and a longer one to match up with the beige slots. Here are som images to try and illustrate my question since I fear I am over complicating it with my bad choice of words.

A. 2 tabs: one short then another longer one - Radeon 9250
http://www.novapcs.c...PC9250-256P.JPG

B. 3 Tabs: one long and two short - nVidia GeForce FX 5200
http://images.auctio...fx_5200_pci.jpg

Will the card from the secong image [B] still fit in the beige PCI slot? The second image doesn't look like it is a PCI card becuase of the physical difference between the tabs although the label reads PCI; but I am too much of a novice to tell.

Thank you for you effort and patience . I really appreciate you time.

Best regards,
Danny

PS. Ideally the best choice would be the most high end PCI card I could find but chances are I'll be buying a new computer within the next year to 18 months so I'd rather just get somethign basic that works to carry me over until then. At least now I know to watch out for intergrated graphics and such. But who knows whatever technological marvels with be revealed between now and a year.

Edited by dannymartinz, 11 May 2005 - 12:42 AM.

[audioboy]

I can see why you are confused by this. there are currently several types of slots available in PC's, with a newer one (PCIExpress) added in the last couple years to help confuse all of us!
most cards of different types will have those notches to differentiate what they are, and to make sure one cant plug a card into the wrong type slot.
as long as it is labeled as PCI, thats what it should be. some PCI cards will skip certain pins by putting a notch like that. it could have to do with power on those pins, or data.
someone told me recently is was getting hard to find PCI vid cards with a decent amount of RAM on them...dont know if thats true, but if you find something you like, might want to snatch it up!
do make sure you are looking at regular PCI, and not PCIE (or pciexpress, the newer slots, which are not backwards compatible with standard PCI).

hope this helps clear things up a bit.