I have an old pc with a pentium 2 processor @ 350 mhz ,64mb sdram @133mhz,grapics card tnt 128(viper 3) 4mb ram
My problem is that I want to upgrade the graphics card but I don’t know the agp bus version of the mainboard .I’ve installed programs like sandra 2004 ect. but they collapse when I aM LOOKING AT THE MAINBOARD TAB. I wanT to replace it with a tnt model 64 pro with 32 mb memory for agp 4x .
If the bus is 2x can I put this 4x card ?
If it is a Pentium2, then it might not actually have an agp slot.
However, if it does, then you could plug the vga card in. If the card is 4x and the agp slot only 2x, the card will simply just be 2x.
It has that old ISA stuff(or whatever it is called) but it also has agp.However I am not sure for its version.I think that is 2x .However I think that I could have problems when connecting a 4x card to 2x slot (because you can not connect an 8x card to a 2x slot due to differnt voltage).Are you sure that I can just plug the 4x card in the 2x slot and only losse some performance ?
ps sorry for my bad english
As far as I know, you can, but maybe one should double check…
check out these: http://www.devhood.com/messages/message_view-2.aspx?thread_id=48118
http://www.ertyu.org/steven_nikkel/agpcompatibility.html
Look in the motherboard manual, it should tell you there. If you don’t have the manual, or mboard model anymore, go to thissite and download the mobo ID tool. I’ve used that before on an old pc and it helped me out. Once identified, you could the download the manual for the mboard. Quite a mission though…
good luck
Any other suggestions
1: Press TAB (or DELETE or something like that) while booting to enter the BIOS. Snoop around there, and there might be a setting for AGP. See what it’s set at.
2: See if you can find the motherboard manufacturer name and product name/number somewhere on the hardware. Google it.
also:
Yes.
T H R O W
I T
A W A Y.
Even the Red Cross or Salvation Army wouldn’t take a P2, unless it was a laptop. It’s worthless. Literally. You might be able to get $20 for it if someone felt sorry for you, but they wouldn’t use it… they’d bin it.
Old PCs are not always that useless ,you can easily find some uses about an old computer…
Anyway Knellotron i’ve checked the bios and the only setting I found was agp aperture size (or smth like that) that was set to 64 MB.
Have you tried the ‘mobo id tool’, as I suggested in post #5?
If I was you, I would try it out in any case. You can’t loose too much, it is very old hardware in any case.
If it helps at all, I have used a similar vga card (Asus nVidia TNT 32mb) on a Pentium2, before.
What about taking the computer to the computer shop with you. That way you can try which parts do work.
http://www.neoseeker.com/Hardware/faqs/kb/10,63.html
you -almost-for-sure- have old AGP 2x, and it’s -almost-for-sure- the AGP 2.0 1,5V thing. 4x AGP cards like geforce 4 (mx440 …, ti …) will work without any problems. Don’t try to put newer card like geforce 6200 and up (which are AGP 3.0 only). Geforce fx 5xxx series WILL work with AGP 2.0 2x, though. Get a cheap secondhand 5200 or a geforce 4 ti 4200 etc.
Blender, gimp et al. will work happily with pentium II/III 450 and pIII500 and up (100mhz fsb, get one for cheap, get pIII because of sse) if you keep vertexcount low, just make sure you put at least 256MB of ram into it (again, get secondhand).
Lies! It might work but it sure as shit isn’t happy about it. 
Whatever Sma, if you’re into self-torture like that I can tell what part of the BSDM community you’ll be… a submissive bottom. Your life is short, dude, if you want to spend all those wasted hours waiting for a render go right ahead, just know that most of us have video cards more powerful than your entire system and we still find rendering slow. god help you if you want to do anything complex.
Unless you’re poor, and I mean dogfood poor, there’s no reason you can’t get a nicer machine for a few hundred bucks… I mean fuck, you can pick up a dualcore AMD64 Turion, 512M DDR2 RAM, DVD rewriter, GeForce Go 6600 PCIe, 80G drive, firewire, bluetooth, gigabit NIC, 8 channel audio… LAPTOP… for about $1000. And that’s considered midrange by today’s laptops.
Hey, somewhere around here in a junk box I have a 486/66 CPU I bought when they first came out, I think the chip alone cost me $1,000… want to buy it? I need a laptop.
I’m all in favor of getting the most out of something, but dude… you’re hardcore.
Calm down man hehe:D.I have 3 computers ! My best computer has a processor at 1.7 GHz, 640 MB Ram and geforce 5200 @ 128 MB Ram.Not the best computer(especially the graphics card and the processor) in the world but I am quite satisfied with it.
I found that old computer(the one I am trying to upgrade)at school.They were going to give for recycling as it was rather old and I decided to take it in order to set up a small home network,as I am writing some network applications in Visual Basic and I wanted to test them.I don’t do something special with it and of cource not rendering with blender:)