Realflight 3.5 / Video Cards

[TheSaint]

So I bought myself Realflight 3.5 and have been playing with it, but I think my graphics card may need upgrading. The symptom is a slowness in the response of the display.

Don't ask me what's under the lid right now but it's a 1-year old Compaq 2.2 GHz pentium 4 model with a gigabyte of RAM driving an SVGA flatscreen. I figure the bottleneck must be the graphics card - as I'm not normally into gaming the card was not high on the spending priorities.

Anyone else had this and got a moderately priced suggestion for a new card?

[mattclark]

In my experence as a gamer i would say you need a new card but its hard to give you the right info, If you dont know whats in the case. if you could find out what slots you have and are not being used i could most likely help. :)

[TheSaint]

Okay, got up early and took the lid off the big gray box under the desk.

It's an HP Pavillion a1340N

Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz w/ 1 gig PC4200 DDR2 RAM in a single SIMM, spare slot for another gigabyte, also on the wish list.

Video card is on-motherboard ATI Radeon XPress 200, with 128 MB of shared video RAM (guess that means it nicks "real" RAM from elsewhere).

It has two spare PCI slots and one spare PCI Express slot.

Want to keep the price under $200.

Ideas/suggestions?

[IPFlyer]

I just bought an ATI X1650 Pro (AGP - 'cause there was no PCIe slot) and that thing ROCKS! Cost @120 US. AS a refernce point the CLearview sim operates at 180 fps. This is an old Intel 1.7 gHz machine BTW. With the PCIe vrsion you would get even better results. Here's a good site for card tests: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/05/the_best_gaming_video_cards_for_the_money/

[TheSaint]

Like this beastie?

Prefer to buy in store not online BTW just in case it doesn't work.

http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?pfp=cat3&product_code=342120&Pn=X1650_PRO_Video_Card

[IPFlyer]

That is the one - PCIe version though. Happy so far (although I must say ATI install instructions were USELESS!)

[TheSaint]

You think that's bad.

A major oil company that shall remain nameless recently handed out freebie thermal mugs as a thankyou for a design job we completed for them at Chrimbo.

The mug came with instructions - that, in itself, should be a warning!

"This mug is intended for left handed or right handed use". Duh!

"To drink with left hand [last time I checked I still used my mouth, but...] hold mug in left hand".

And so on.