upgrade my radeon 1100 video card 128 to 256mb?
i wanted to know if there any way possible to upgrade my ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 graphic card to 256. it says you can. in the specs. but it requires more RAM. i have a 1gb RAM card. and im willing to update to 2gb becuase they are WAY cheaper. but i just want to do a little gaming. nothing TO serious. just wanna know if yall know if its worth the time. or if i should just upgrade altogether. (including RAM, and power supply.)
i have a dell optiplex 320.
intel pentium 4 GPU 3.20ghz
1 gb RAM (which is really 990, cheap bastards)
and a sloppy 1100 xpress video card (i think its built in to the mother board, but i have like 3 PCI slots)
help would be appreciated. and im a noob so i dont know how to rate you guys or whatever.
but feel free to use big words. im pretty computer smart.
Comments
unless there's an option in the BIOS to change the size of the frame buffer for the integrated video (which you have) your only recourse is get a discrete video card. If you only have PCI slots then your choices are going to very limited. Nvidia mada a PCI GF 8400GS 512 MB for PCI and ATI made a Radeon HD 4350 for PCI as well. Expect to spend around $60-$80.
Also I would consider adding another stick of RAM another GB would be good.
BTW your computer does have 1 GB of RAM. It's just that some of that RAM is being used by the Integrated video adapter you have (the 1100 xpress ) so anywhere from 8-128MB of that 1024MB of RAM you have is being reserved for the video. So it'll always show up as having less RAM than you really do. If you were to install a real video card, then your computer will report the full 1GB of RAM since the video card will have it's own dedicated RAM to use.
get at lease 3GB ram and a Radeon HD 3650 512mb they are really cheap and you can play some cool games but not on high settings,,,that 1100 xpress video card will play nothing