ATI Radeon 9250 256MB PCI Graphics Card

[slimdog55]

I'm going to be getting a ATI Radeon 9250 256MB PCI Graphics Card after I get my 512MB of RAM. Your probably asking why PCI? Why not AGP? My motherboard doesn't have a AGP slot. But it does have a PCI slot. So I want to get this.

1. Has anybody used this?

2. Right now I have a 64MB graphics card that is On Board. (On the mother board.) Will I notice a really big difference going form 64MB to 256MB?

3. How would this perform playing HD video? (With the 1GB of Ram that I will have, and a Intel Celeron 2.6GHz processor.)

[UFProductions]

Not sure about the HD video, but the new RAM and Vid-card will make a difference, big time. The Celeron is plenty fast, I'm runing a P4 3.0 gHz with 1 gig RAM and 128 MB vid card, and the performance is great, especially compared to my last computer, which by specs is roughly comprable to your current setup. Is it a PCI-e x16 slot, or something else? If it is a Pci-e x16 them you have no worries, they are actually faster than an AGP slot.

[slimdog55]

No it's the old PCI slots. PCI 2.0. But I think it would still work pretty good.

[UFProductions]

It'll still make a big differnce over the on-board graphics. You doing the installations yourself?

[slimdog55]

Yeah, I'm not going pay Best Buy like $50 to do something I can do in less than 1 minute for free. After I install it, I'm going to go online and download the latest drivers for it.

[Truggy]

9250? wow that is kinda old, But hell of alot better than onboard lol...

[Scott_Talbot]

video cards are mostly for rendering 3D objects and enviorments. the ram on the cards is for storing textures to apply to the 3D objects. (used in gaming and rendering the viewports in 3D modeling) as far as video-editing though, the video card is barely used. in fact, video editing specific computers rarely have the fastest newest cards (the old Matrox is very common) The process load goes entierly to the CPU. Your celeron, while plenty fast to preview DV, might not be fast enough to preview HD, especcially if you start to add effects and layers of video. you may have to upgrade your CPU also in order to edit HD video.

(as you did not say specificly that this question was about video editing, you may disregard it if that is not your situation)

[jcdenton]

I have a 9200se. It's good enough. Well, not a high end card. But fast enough for me. And best of all, my card has no cooler vent, so it's absolutely quiet.

And yes, buy that PCI Card - as long there are PCI Cards available!