Intel Motherboard upgrades

[kaelten]

I'm currently looking for a good motherboard upgrade for my girlfriend’s computer. She's got a slightly aged dell and the motherboard has no agp or pci-e slot so she's stuck with the on board Intel graphics (or almost stuck anyway).

I'm looking for a decent board that won't cost much to upgrade hers to that will have one of those two slots to allow me to get her a decent graphics card.

Her current chipset is the i845GL running a Northwood Centron 2.2GHz. Her ram is pc2700 DDR 512MB x 2.

Anyone have some good suggestions? Doesn't have to be top of the line but something with a little more headroom for upgrades would be great.

Thanks in advance.

Bryan

[Kerii]

So... you're looking to recycle most of the parts but just want to add an AGP/PCI-x16 card so she can play The Sims or something at high res?

If you want a board with good backward and well as foward compatibility, the ASRock P4Dual-915GL is a good board, has both AGP and PCI-x16, so you can toss her whatever old junk card you have laying around and it'll work.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813157075

I don't know if it would be worth it to upgrade such an old system though, or if a standard ATX motherboard would fit into that Dell case. I'm not sure.

Perhaps a PCI graphics card would do the trick? They're fairly inexpensive and do a fairly decent job for The Sims or RTS games and the like.

Maybe a GeForce 5200/5500 or Radeon 9250?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814130255
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814140027
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814102522

I'd probably go for the 5500 though, best performance of the three, though that's not saying too much.

An interesting comment I found for the 5200 card there:
Comments: I am using a 2.2 Celeron 512DDR, games I am running at decent settings are Call of Duty (high), Farcry (Low), UT2K4 (med), Castle Wolfenstien (high), Warcraft:FT (med/high) just to name a few. If all you have is a pci slot then this card is the one to get =] This card will definetly hold you over till you can upgrade to an AGP board.

[kaelten]

hmm, thats an option. The game we're trying to get running half way decent is World of Warcraft, right now she's only able to push .5 frames per second in Ironforge, wilderness gets around 15 or so. I just need something to pick it up.

Big thing is I can't afford to chunk out the change on a whole new barebones right now. Otherwise that'd be the path I'd take.

[DanielDev]

Like Kerii said, im also not sure that a ATX board fits in a Dell case.

Dell has used (im not sure if theyre still doing it) special connectors in the past,
wihc made it almost imposssible to change anything in the setup.
If this hasnt been done with ur gf's pc and u are sure a atx mobo fits in get a new atx board i say.

If Dell has changed the connectors on ur mobo or it is micro-atx or something like that,
i would go with the PCI vga solution, a gforce 5500 should be able to play WoW pretty good
(alot of people have lag in the big cities, so dont be too worried about it)

[kaelten]

I found a BFGTech geforce xt5500 OC with 256MB that goes in a pci slot

I'm probably going to go that rout until I can scrounge up the cash for a new bare bones.

[Kerii]

Good deal, let us know how it turns out.

Don't blame me if the only thing it can play decently is WoW.

Edit: Actually, I browsed through Fry's just now and found they have a BFG 6200 PCI card.
http://shop4.outpost.com/product/458807 ... IN_RSLT_PG

Same one I have except only 128MB of VRAM, and it has 128-bit memory too. If the PCI version is anything like the AGP version I have, it should overclock easily without voltmoding to 450/550 over the default 300/500 clocks, performs just as well if not better than a stock 6600.