Hello,
I've got a Sony PC-RS410 (P4, 2.66GHz) with an integrated Intel 82845G (64megs) video card. However, most of my son's games do not work on this PC as the video card does not support Hardware T&L (Transform and Lighting) and pixel shader which are required now for most of his games.
In addition, inside the Sony box there is not AGP slot, just 4 PCI slots.
How do I upgrade the video card?
Others have told me to get a Radeon 9000 card but they all seem to be for an AGP slot. Will a PCI video card work just as good? Any recommendations for a good video card upgrade that's not expensive?
The Sony website doesn't seem to offer much help on this model any longer.
Thank you!
Mark
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The card above is $115 (not the $100 the poster states). It IS a very nice nVidia 5500 card.
If you're looking for something a bit less expensive, here's a somewhat slower 5500 card for less than half the price (but still quite nice for basic gaming): http://www.newegg.com/Prod
... and here's a very nice 256mb Radeon 9250 for $59 (read the reviews):
http://www.newegg.com/Prod
... I've put this card in a couple of systems -- it also works very well for many games and is only $49 (read the reviews on this one too):
http://www.newegg.com/Prod
A comment on video cards & gaming: For MOST of us, you can buy a perfectly acceptable card for $50 - $100 these days that will work very nicely with most games. The "gamer" community wants MUCH more -- maximum frame rates; full anti-aliasing; maxed out anisotropic filtering; etc. These operations are very computationally intensive -- thus they need very high-powered GPU's (graphic processing units -- the CPU of the graphics card). That's the market for high end cards. A good friend just built systems for her two teenagers -- she put TWO nVidia 7800GTX video cards in each one (SLI mode). But she also spent almost $1,000 just on the video cards for each system. Will it play "better" than one of the above cards? Sure. But 20 times as good?? Absolutely not. The law of diminishing returns is definitely in effect -- very rapidly -- as you go above the $100 point in graphics cards.
In short -- I think you'd be very happy with either the $49 eVGA card or the $59 Radeon; or either of the 5500's.
I worked on one of these PC's today, the onboard video does not disable when a PCI card is installed, and it stays as the primary video for BIOS POST etc. The BIOS (version 2002) has no updates on the Sony site and has no options for selecting the primary video or disabling the onboard video. Even when the I845 video was disabled in the device manager, the PCI card (Powercolor Radeon 9250 PCI in this case) could not get enough hardware resources to initialize the drivers. I was using the latest Radeon 6.11 drivers for the 9250 chipset. Sony sucks...
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by: maxfaraday311Posted on 2005-12-06 at 17:28:12ID: 15433014
Hey hows it going. There isn't a huge market for PCI video cards anymore ... but I found this one on overstock.com which will run the majority of todays popular games.
http://www.overstock.com/c
Only $100 ... pretty cheap too.
Hope this helps.