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Graphics Card Issues

This page was created to collect issues regarding the installation of graphics cards.

We recently upgraded the Matrox G200 SDRAM in a AMD k6III450mhz CPU machine. We used 3D Mark 99 to benchmark the system before and after the upgrade. The results surprised us. The new card was a Geforce DDR pro 32mb AGP. Some of the results were slower than the 8MB Matrox card. Bearing in mind the drivers were those issued with the geforce we updated detonator 6.33 drivers. This made some but not a lot of difference to performance. Tweaks were made to the registry etc, until eventually the geforce beat the Matrox if only just in every test. Being intrigued by this we looked further. We installed the geforce in a Intel Pentium III 800Mhz machine same ram hard drive etc and ran the benchmark. What a difference. This processor definitely lets that beast out of the cage. Its worth mentioning that the cache, chipset and RAM benchmarks on Intel chipsets make a big difference to the likes of SIS, ALi,  etc chipsets.

Graphics cards nowadays sometimes do not seat properly and end up seating to high in the expansion slot. It is sometimes necessary to loosen the two fixings holding the back plate and sometimes a screw holding the corner to the back plate, so as to slide the card so as more is able to insert into the expansion slot. Remember that most screws etc only need to be slightly more than finger tight.

More graphics cards are supplied with a fan. It is common for the fan to stop, with no warning to the user. Regularly servicing the inside of the computer gives you the opportunity to check its function (new PC cleaning guide soon) Because the cards usually end up upside down in midi and tower cases the heat is rising back into the heat sink and the fan is not drawing air down but drawing air up. The only good thing I can see from having expansion cards mounted upside down in a tower case (most pci) is the dust settles on the back of the card making them easy to keep clean.

Installing todays graphics cards is quicker than ever. Most manufacturers supply good setup programs and as long as the PC graphics driver is set to standard pci graphics card (vga) before installing the new card everything should work first time. Some installations will also remove previous drivers. Remember to reinstall the latest version of direct X.

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Last modified: December 15, 2000