Video Card Memory

[newton's cat]

I'm using a Pentium 166 MMX PCI board with 64 Meg memory. I want to replace the video card (1Meg ISA) - Is there any practical limit to the card memory with this system? What benefits can I expect?

Thanks in advance

Newton's Cat

[ixl]

*coughing* Did you say an *ISA* video card?
Let's just say that you could randomly select a PCI video card from a used bin and get something 10 times better than that. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif I don't recommend it but...
You should be able to use pretty much any PCI video card. You will see dramatically better performance and support for higher resolution and refresh rates.

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[newton's cat]

Originally posted by ixl:
*coughing* Did you say an *ISA* video card?
Let's just say that you could randomly select a PCI video card from a used bin and get something 10 times better than that. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif I don't recommend it but...
You should be able to use pretty much any PCI video card. You will see dramatically better performance and support for higher resolution and refresh rates.



Right - thanks - I'll get a PCI Vid. Card as soon as my local S/H source has one.
http://www.cex.co.uk

For those of you in London - it's worth dropping into their shop (PCExchange - Tottenham Court Road) every so often. They have a rapid turnover of S/H bits and pieces and they'll exchange or buy your unwanted items.

Newton's Cat

[Paleo Pete]

I'll agree with ixl here you'll like a PCI card much better. Most give you very little trouble installing and setting up, and drivers are usually available on the net if needed.

The 166 CPU shouldn't have much, if anything, to do with the usable video memory. That's a whole nuther ball game. Unless you're into things like heavy gaming that require intense graphics, usually about a 4MB card will be fine. Mine is a Matrox Mystique 2MB card, and I like it pretty well, but would like a mamory upgrade someday.

Some of the better brands to look for:
Matrox- usually very good quality
ATI- Makers of the Rage series 3-D cards, also very good, my sister's Rage works quite well.
Anything with a Cirrus Logic chip- Cirrus Logic just makes the chip, but it's been a favorite for a long time, I have 2 that I like very well, and have used for 4 years on various systems.

Check around, other companies make good cards too. Check around on the net, you'll most likely find plenty sites that feature reviews of everything under the sun. A search for video cards on yahoo, infoseek or dogpile should keep you busy for hours...

Oh, and make sure you don't grab an AGP card by mistake...it won't work in a PCI slot, and your 166 probably doesn't have an AGP slot.


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[bassvax]

Just a little funny about legacy video ram-I am responsible for a few diff "confusers" at work and one of them is Pentium 133MHz Advanced/MA mobo with 1MB on board VRAM. I was having freeze ups due to the acceleration (I believe anyway) and was actually considering just adding another 1 or 2MB chip on the board, but I believe it would be better to obtain the pci card since they are so inexpensive now. I just installed a Voodoo 4 4500 pci 32MB on my son's pc and it works rather well even with the celeron 500MHz...he is studying c++ and had designed a few game characters and was unable to run them with the legacy 8MB AGP (can you believe this mobo has onboard AGP, but no AGP slot...NEVER buy e-machines...) anyways I had no probs installing and the results were immediate and sharp, of course this card runs about $140-150 new and as Pete pointed out consider your graphics needs before laying out heavy cash. Jerry