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can anybody please answer?

Sorry, you don't give enough information. Your question is too open ended.

What slot does your MB have? AGP? PCI-e?

Your monitor. Is it VGA or DVI?

What wattage is your power supply?

What's your budget?

Is this just for EQ, or for other games?

What's your objective?

Stuff like that.

I would agree, on principle, with the above poster. Stick with nVidia chipsets. Avoid the MX5??? family, tho. You want the 6??? family for much better performance.

Edited, Wed Jul 27 12:37:42 2005 by Fallonn

I looked up Dimension 2400, no AGP slot, no PCIx. Your options are extremely limited. Like the others said, get NVidia, but you aren't going to find much if at all that will work in your system and improve performance. You are better off bumping that memory to 1Gb or start over and get something that has PCIx or at least AGP. Good luck!

Edited, Wed Jul 27 15:11:13 2005 by Bewilde(bad link)

Edited, Wed Jul 27 15:11:58 2005 by Bewilde

I am sorry to say Dell Dimension PCs do not have an AGP slot my company uses them. Also you only have 2 memory slots so a memory upgrade means pulling an exsisting 256 meg Dimm. Best thing you can do is find a PCI Video card with 256meg on board, being obsolete you will have to be happy with what you can find still better then on board Video IMO.

Ok, a few things here.



My understanding is that if the MOBO has DDR2 slots, you can't put DDR sticks in it without causing major problems. One post on the official Dell forums to support this can be found here. There's also a good comparison of DDR2 to DDR here. It also shows WHY DDR isn't compatible with a DDR2 MOBO (the notches are different and there is a different number of pins).



The newer 2400's at least can go to 1g, so he would be ok getting there. You can expect to pay about 100 bucks for another 512 stick of DDR2. There's a problem though. DDR2 needs to work in pairs, like DDR. So you probably have 2 sticks of 256 right now. To get a gig, you'd have to get 2 sticks of 512... see the problem? That's about 200 bucks for an additional 512megs of RAM.

So, for memory, that's something you're kinda screwed on. BUT, back to your original question:

There's not really much available in 256meg for PCI cards. Doing a quick search I found some Radeon 9250's and an NVIDIA FX5200. The cheapest 9250 at Newegg is $58.50 and the NVIDIA is $89.00. Neither one of these cards are blazing fast, but their probably going to be the best you can do with no AGP or PCI-e. As for the Radeon vs. NVIDIA argument... I don't know. I've never had a problem with Radeons. One thing you have to keep in mind is that MOST game makers design their games to work better with one chipset then the other. They can't optimize their game for both without sacrificing something. It just so happens EQ is optimized for NVIDIA cards (you should've seen the mess that happened with the move to a requirement of DX9.0...). Some games are optimized for NVIDIA's, some for Radeons.



The Radeon drivers are actually pretty easy. All of their Radeon cards use the same driver suite, so you go to the site, download and install. Simple. A site some of you with video problems (or stability problems in general) might want to check out is http://www.tweakguides.com/ That guy has some awesome articles on getting your system and GFX cards/drivers running smoothly. He also has some tweakguides for specific games.

If you want a pc you can upgrade, bite the bullet and build your own from the ground up. Dell pc's aren't meant to be upgradeable. They are built to make you buy a brand new pc if you want to upgrade it. How much money is Dell going to make if you go to Best Buy to get your upgrades?

Sorta... I too have a Dell (8400). While I would've loved to build my own, I really didn't have the time to do it, so when I found this PC at a really good price, I just hopped on it. Dells are pretty good PCs, but just like most other large PC company's, they like to use "proprietary" stuff a lot, including their motherboards and cases. If you ever need to replace your motherboard, you're kinda screwed. Normal aftermarket MOBOs won't fit into a Dell case, regardless of the formfactor. To get a MOBO that fits, you have to buy it directly from Dell, and they will charge you up to twice as much as a comparable aftermarket board. So, as long as you never have a problem with it, you should be alright.

I had a problem recently where all 8 of my USB ports got fried through my cable modem. Dell said I would have to buy a new motherboard, but I refused to pay 180 bucks just to get some new USB ports. The fix I came up with? I bought a 35 dollar PCI USB card, plugged it into an empty PCI slot, and had all my USB devices hooked back up and working flawlessly in 5 minutes. One thing that disappointed me was that I always thought Dell didn't outsource their tech support, but after being on the phone with them with various techs and sales reps for hours, I'm fairly sure that "Stanley", "George" and "Sheila" weren't American, or at least English wasn't their first language...

I have built three comp now and really think you get you moneys worth by useing the uberest stuff that was around like 12-15 months prior to the build example my current comp has a AMD Duron 2800 with a MOBO that was the cats meow 20 months ago the two items with cooling fan and pwr supply cost me under $300 add a $100 for a hard drive ,$80 for 2 sticks of 256 ddr and 79 for pci-e 256 viedo $40 for dvd/cdr drive and my free 15 yr floppy drive $14 case and poff a very stable comp (it never locks up)about &600 and really works better than most 3200 sys out there
today. I will run doom3 flawlessly on Med rez at 1024Xwhatever
And thats the my ****** is better than your ****** post of the week.