Very newbie question about video cards

[wolvie111]

I have a ECS k7SOM+ motherboard and I want to buy a new video card for it. I know I have 2 PCI slots but want to make sure if I can buy a PCI card for it. I just am not sure what to get, all my manual says is that the PCI slots are for expansion cards that have the 32 bit PCI interface. Thank you for any responses.

[glc]

Any "legacy" PCI video card will work. However, you can't use a "PCI-E" card - that's a new, different kind of slot.

[wolvie111]

Oh thats awesome thank you very much. Is it difficult to install the video card? Someone told me that I need to uninstall the onboard graphics. Is this true or will it be done once I install the new video card?

[aradon]

ive found that you can do either, i personally dont uninstall the onboard incase something goes wrong with my GFX card, and ive never had problems.

[glc]

Your board has no way in hardware or bios to disable the onboard graphics, so if you do uninstall it in Windows, it's just going to keep coming back. What you need to do is find the setting in the bios for which display to use first, and set it to PCI.

[wolvie111]

Wow, thank you very much everyone. I feel soo much better having some kind of idea on whats going on. Is there a pretty good PCI video card out there that I should get? I am looking in the price range of $125-$200.

[myrgo_31]

um i think the 6600GT is a good choice around there. However, the 6800 MIGHT be in that price range too, which is sufficient enough for the newest games, just dont turn up all the settings on high and youll be just fine.

[glc]

There are no PCI cards that powerful, myrgo. Only AGP and PCI-E.

The strongest gaming PCI cards made are the Radeon 9250 and the GeForce FX5500. That's not going to be a good gaming computer no matter what you do anyway with that soldered in Duron processor.