A Series of Tubes

I’ve been called back into The Guild of Writers to do some work for the Kehlbet project, so I once again find myself in need of a Windows PC. I have plenty of old computers lying around in my house, so finding a victim base to upgrade to modern standards was not too difficult. The computer I chose is an old Dell 8200, my old “gaming” computer. Ha. I got it for $50 from my dad’s work, and being the first computer with a dedicated video processor (a GeForce 4 MX 4000), I used it for my graphics-heavy work (Uru).

Of course, this computer is not nearly good enough for Vista. After installing a DVD drive in it to even install the os, I was awarded a solid 1/5 in the Windows Experience Index benchmark thing. My lowest spec was, of course, that graphics card, being 4 generations old (and the base model of that generation). Of course, half a gig of memory wasn’t helping much, either, but the main thing was that GeForce 4.

So anyway, I paid a visit to Microcenter today and picked up the cheapest card my motherboard supports (the mobo doesn’t have any PCI-Express slots, and the AGP is only 4x I think, so I’m limited to PCI cards only), a GeForce FX 5200 with 128mb of memory. Certainly better than the card it was replacing, right? And it even says ‘Vista’ on the box, though it isn’t Vista Certified, it just says Vista on it. “Oh well,” I thought to myself. I bought the card for $47, and brought it home only to find that nVidia doesn’t support any cards earlier than the GeForce 6’s for Vista. I searched in vain, but nothing made Vista utilize the card. It certainly recognized it, but there was a driver issue and it disabled it, defaulting back to the GeForce 4.

I’m returning the FX 5200 tomorrow and picking up instead a GeForce 6200, which I’ve read is supported by Vista, and is indeed capable of decent performance under the hog of an OS. If I had a PCI-E slot, this would be so much simpler, because the newer PCI-E cards are actually cheaper than these old PCI ones, and they’re much more powerful, not to mention actually supported by nVidia still.

I’ve been called back into The Guild of Writers to do some work for the Kehlbet project, so I once again find myself in need of a Windows PC. I have plenty of old computers lying around in my house, so finding a victim base to upgrade to modern standards was not too difficult. The computer I chose is an old Dell 8200, my old “gaming” computer. Ha. I got it for $50 from my dad’s work, and being the first computer with a dedicated video processor (a GeForce 4 MX 4000), I used it for my graphics-heavy work (Uru).

Of course, this computer is not nearly good enough for Vista. After installing a DVD drive in it to even install the os, I was awarded a solid 1/5 in the Windows Experience Index benchmark thing. My lowest spec was, of course, that graphics card, being 4 generations old (and the base model of that generation). Of course, half a gig of memory wasn’t helping much, either, but the main thing was that GeForce 4.

So anyway, I paid a visit to Microcenter today and picked up the cheapest card my motherboard supports (the mobo doesn’t have any PCI-Express slots, and the AGP is only 4x I think, so I’m limited to PCI cards only), a GeForce FX 5200 with 128mb of memory. Certainly better than the card it was replacing, right? And it even says ‘Vista’ on the box, though it isn’t Vista Certified, it just says Vista on it. “Oh well,” I thought to myself. I bought the card for $47, and brought it home only to find that nVidia doesn’t support any cards earlier than the GeForce 6’s for Vista. I searched in vain, but nothing made Vista utilize the card. It certainly recognized it, but there was a driver issue and it disabled it, defaulting back to the GeForce 4.

I’m returning the FX 5200 tomorrow and picking up instead a GeForce 6200, which I’ve read is supported by Vista, and is indeed capable of decent performance under the hog of an OS. If I had a PCI-E slot, this would be so much simpler, because the newer PCI-E cards are actually cheaper than these old PCI ones, and they’re much more powerful, not to mention actually supported by nVidia still.