A Geforce 8400GS, on PCI? Wut?

[jack2141]

Play.com (UK) : PNY Geforce 8400GS / 512MB / PCI / Graphics Card : Computing - Free Delivery

Now I've been thinking about getting anew graphics card, and I've been looking online for one, however I have recently just come across this, a 8400 on PCI bus.

I don't have PCI-E in my motherboard, and I cannot afford a new Motherboard at the moment, so I've been looking for an AGP card that will allow me to play ARMA 2 at decent settings, with a decent framerate for under £100.

Do you know anything about this PCI card, and at the price it is at, I couldn't complain if it performed well.

[AquaticPenguin]

Play.com (UK) : PNY Geforce 8400GS / 512MB / PCI / Graphics Card : Computing - Free Delivery

Now I've been thinking about getting anew graphics card, and I've been looking online for one, however I have recently just come across this, a 8400 on PCI bus.

I don't have PCI-E in my motherboard, and I cannot afford a new Motherboard at the moment, so I've been looking for an AGP card that will allow me to play ARMA 2 at decent settings, with a decent framerate for under £100.

Do you know anything about this PCI card, and at the price it is at, I couldn't complain if it performed well.

I very much doubt you'll get a card that can run ARMA2 smoothly, regardless of settings, without having a PCI-e motherboard and graphics card. The card you linked is pretty mediocre as they come, and the memory bandwidth will be a massive bottleneck since it uses old DDR2. Your best bet would be a card such as the 9600gt, which is PCI-e and costs around £65, it's much faster than the one you linked, but I'm still not sure how it would handle ARMA2. ARMA2 also depends on your system in general being fairly nippy. Given that you have an old motherboard, what's your memory and processor like? A lot of pre- PCI-e motherboards can only accept DDR ram, and given that ARMA does a lot of dynamic loading I doubt DDR memory would cut it.

[corp_calqluslethal]

I had that card its good for PR now. But for arma i suggest getting a GT 240 its 5 times the card as a 8400GS. I had the 8400GS 1 GB, i was able to run PR on all high with a pretty weak processor. Get GT 240 over 9600 or 8800 cuz it has ddr5 memory, faster memory for around the same price

[jack2141]

I've got A dual core Xeon processor, 2.66ghz x2
And I've got 1.5 GB of DDR ram.

I do have an AGP slot, but then I think I may as well get a new motherboard if i'm going to pay premium prices for the AGP cards.

[AquaticPenguin]

I've got A dual core Xeon processor, 2.66ghz x2
And I've got 1.5 GB of DDR ram.

I do have an AGP slot, but then I think I may as well get a new motherboard if i'm going to pay premium prices for the AGP cards.

Your best bet for AGP cards is probably Ati, they have a lot more newer cards in the range than Nvidia - Only trouble with Ati is their drivers aren't as reliable, but overall they're not too bad. AGP x8 has half the bandwidth of PCI-e 1.0 iirc, so it's not too bad. But I still think given the prices of AGP cards you'd get a lot more value and longevity out of a PCI-e motherboard.

I'm not sure what I could suggest to be honest. Your CPU sounds like it's pretty good, your best bet may be to try and find a motherboard that's compatible with your CPU and that has PCI-e and DDR2 slots (probably about £50 now), then add in 2gb of DDR2 (£25 or so) and a mid-range graphics card (£65). The trouble is I'm not overly familiar with ARMA2, From various message boards I get the impression that the engine is CPU bottlenecked which would mean your dual-core may not be enough, it's seems the consensus is that a quad-core or a lighting fast dual-core is pretty much a requirement. Either way I think those upgrades would probably be the best bang-for-buck you can get. If you wanted to get a more powerful graphics card you would need to have a new PSU/CPU as well and that would get a bit pricey for very little gain.

Really you can try and upgrade as above in the hope you can manage ARMA 2 on low settings, or if you just want it to be a bit nippier you can get a mid-range AGP card which will handle current games just fine. I don't think you'll be able to get playing ARMA at mid-graphics with a smooth framerate without a quad-core/mid range PCI-e card and 2/3GB of ram.

I had that card its good for PR now. But for arma i suggest getting a GT 240 its 5 times the card as a 8400GS. I had the 8400GS 1 GB, i was able to run PR on all high with a pretty weak processor. Get GT 240 over 9600 or 8800 cuz it has ddr5 memory, faster memory for around the same price

The GT240 is very good value for a PCI-e card, It's probably the best card you could get without needing a CPU/PSU upgrade since it has very little power draw and needs no power connectors.

[jack2141]

I've looked it up, and If I wanted to get a new graphics card, I'd need:

A new Motherboard, because AGP is outdated.
A new Processor, Because The one I've got is specifically for a workstation computer.
A new set of RAM, because the motherboard I've got only supports DDR.
And a new graphics card on top of that.

So, essentially a new computer.

I've managed to get a 7600GT from nvidia, and that's running ARMA 2 at a decent speed at low/normal, so I guess I'll have to stick with that for now.

[SocketMan]

Radeon 3850 AGP is probably the only decent option.
See if you can find a good (used) one (ebay ?)

[jack2141]

What would be better, A HD3850, or a HD4670?

I'm not sure about the differences, since they're both the same price.