Hiya I have just finally bit the bullet & ordered a new graphics card to go into my P.C I bought about 2 months ago.

The current system has onboard graphics which are Geforce nvidia 6150+nforce built onto the motherboard which is a Asus M2NPV-VM.

The graphics are ok but on rFactor & Battlefield I have to turn detail & resolution down to minimum to get 45+ fps & it doesn't look too pretty.

The new card should hopefully be with me by Friday & is a nVidia GeForce 7600GT 256MB PCI-E 128bit DDR3, Dual-Link DVI, Tv-Out SLI
Cost £82 plus about a tenner delivery.

Do I just open the case up & whack the card in the PCI-E slot & start her up & the card will work ? then install the drivers ? Or do I have to turn off onboard graphics in the bios ? the onboard currently uses 128mb of my 1 gig of DDR2 533 RAM so Buying the new card will up my Ram back to 1 gig.
I'm hoping it to be a simple painless job anyone with any experience of going from onboard to PCI-E know how it works ?

Also anyone with a similar card know what I can expect compared to my old onboard graphics ?

My completed system will be when the card arrives -

Athlon 64 3500 (single core)
1 GIG DDR2 533 PC4200 RAM
256MB Geforce 7600GT
160 gig Maxtor SATA 7200 RPM HDD

Any help /advice gratefully received.

Thanks

Neil

Yes, you should first connect it, then on first bootup, enter BIOS and turn off onboard graphics, and activate the new card. Then boot up and install drivers. That should work

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Will it not auto detect the new card & disable onboard graphics automatically ?

I had some fun and games with this just before Christmas

Bought a new Nvidia Geforce 7600 Fx agp card to replace my ropey old 5200fx.

Took out old card, put new one in and first of all the monitor kept saying 'no signal input', then i tried putting old gfx card back in 2 c if i'd damaged the circuit board and my pc had a fit, just kept booting up, shutting down, booting up, shutting down. Thought my pc was dead!

Decided to go and calm down for a few hours lol but then came bk 2 it and read the manual more carefully, i had forgotten to connect the 4 pin connector to the gfx card from the cpu... LUUUUNATIC

After i did that i installed the drivers and everything worked fine.

Just make sure you take your time in ensuring everything is connected up like it should be before switching the pc on.

After everything was up and running I was able to run RACE with all settings at medium and then Flight sim X with all settings at medium high and get decent fps (which says a LOT cos FSX is VERY demanding) i was only just able to run FSX with settings at Low with my old gfx card.

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Chris Hill
#14 Cheetos Chevrolet Camaro (Trophy)
SRD International

No, that will not happen.

First you will need to uninstall the driver for the onboard graphics chip.

Then you need to reboot, go in the BIOS and disable the onboard graphics. In principle that's all you need to do, as the card in the PCI-E/ASP slot will be detected automatically.

When you boot up, install the driver for the new card, and off you go...

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Folco Banfi
#17 Pepsi X / Top Gear Chevrolet

Thanks for your help it comes tomorrow so hopefully I will have it up and running tomorrow night. Will have a look on the nVIDIA site for the latest drivers & download them today to save time tomorrow.

Just looked on the nvidia site and confused on exactly which driver to download is it the XP/2000 one or the XP Pro X64 edition ? I am running XP Pro Corp with an Athlon 64 3500 processor but didn't think this was a 64 bit operating system?

If I play safe& download the XP/2000 one should I be ok ?

Yes, that should be a safe choice. But I think you would know if you had Windows XP Professional 64.

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All in & working quite painlessly. Uninstalled the drivers for the onboard then turned off the PC. Added the new card then rebooted into the Bios.There was no option to turn off the onboard graphics so booted back up & it recognised the neww card. I then Installed the latest nVIDIA drivers and that was it. It automatically gave me my 128 mb of Ram back that my onboard graphics was using.
Tried a few games with everythng turned up to the max & am getting good frame rates in Battlefield 2 rFactor, LFS . The games look like new after running in minimum detail just to get reasonable frames before.
Thanks for everyones help & advice.

Neil

excellent news. Well done Neil. I must admit, PC upgrading has become far far easier these days. I am old enough to remember that computers used to only be dealt with by very specialised technicians, and I don't think "upgrading" was at all possible by untrained people.

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