gufus said:
Hello, All!
Can someone suggest a good PCI video card for win7.
Newegg lists maybe fifty entries for PCI video cards.
The thing is, there are lots of older technology cards, things like
FX5200. The problem with those, is whether Aero would work. You'd
want a DX9 card minimum, with 128MB RAM, and it has to have a (WDDM ???)
driver to be fully functional in Windows 7. I'm sure you can use a
lesser card, and fewer of the visual features of Windows 7 would work.
In such a case, you could use something like an ancient 7000 card,
which would barely function as a frame buffer. And if it didn't have
a driver, you'd be in pretty bad shape. Maybe the Windows 7 install
wouldn't finish. Perhaps a 6200 would be a good compromise between
cost and features (i.e. it might make most things work in Windows 7).
What I find though, looking at the products, is anything with
a newer GPU, costs too much. Now, this is a reasonably recent
GPU, but they want $83 for it. And the thing is, this would not
be a strong gaming card. I'd really expect to pay $50 for this,
not $83. So these are overpriced. And I can see even more expensive
ones than that, which have a wimpy GPU and PCI interface. Perhaps
the cost is caused by needing a bridge chip on the video card,
to convert from PCI to PCI Express on the GPU ? That really shouldn't
add that much to the product cost.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131325
(The square thing at the bottom of this picture, is the bridge chip.
I think I see "PEX" printed on it, a plxtech.com product.)
http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/14-131-325-Z04?$S640W$
Some of the older cards are "native" PCI, and don't use a bridge.
Or they have some way of wiring the card, that it doesn't need an
expensive solution to make the bus connection.
One thing you should know about cards like that, is sometimes the
driver disables certain features, based on knowledge of the interface
type. For example, that video card has video playback acceleration,
and can almost completely decode certain movie formats on its own.
But if the driver detects the card is in a PCI slot, it might
disable "3:2 pulldown" or other kinds of features. The driver
disables such features, on the assumption it is better to disable
them, than to allow the user to experiment with the feature and see
for themselves, that it doesn't work well. Any feature which uses
a lot of bus bandwidth, would be a candidate for being disabled at
the driver level. So if you compare a 4350 PCI Express x16 card to
a 4350 PCI card, you'd find some features disabled on the PCI card,
due to bandwidth issues.
In terms of basic screen usage, a lot of frame buffer operations
will be smooth, because once a window is loaded, you can move the
window around on the screen without repainting it (compositing done
at the GPU level, stored in the 512MB video card local store).
So the PCI slot bandwidth doesn't become a big problem then. But
I have noticed, if you're using things like QuickTime Player, if
you drag the playback window around, it repaints the rectangle,
and that is slow and choppy. I discovered that while testing my
FX5200 PCI. Not all video operations are cleverly done.
So by that definition, there *is* no good PCI graphics card, because
of the bandwidth restrictions of the slot you're using. PCI is
133MB/sec best case. PCI Express x16 is 4000MB/sec. AGP 8x is 2133MB/sec.
You can see from those numbers, there is a big ratio in favor of the
other slot types. As long as the card makes good usage of memory
chips on the video card (local memory), you can move windows around
the screen and the result won't be choppy. But any graphics operation
which pumps a lot of data through the PCI slot, is going to stutter or
be sluggish, and there is no way to fix that. You could try all 50
different graphics cards for sale, and see the same problem with all
of them, and it will be because of the PCI slot.
PCI slots come in several different types, but the most common (95+
percent of the time), is the 133MB/sec variety. They come in faster
flavors, but desktop computers don't normally have the faster ones.
For example, you can have a 64 bit slot, running at 66MHz, giving
533MB/sec peak transfer rate, which would be every bit as good as
an AGP slot, but only server/workstation motherboards have a slot
like that. Desktop computers virtually always have the 32 bit
33MHz crappy type (133MB/sec, maybe 110-120MB/sec practical speed).
So, go ahead, buy a card, but don't expect miracles. You won't be
playing Crysis at 30 frames per second with it.
http://image.jeuxvideo.com/images/pc/c/r/crysis-2-pc-1300965014-121.jpg
*******
Here is another card with a modern GPU. The first review comments
are interesting.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161353
"Cons: Terrible performance, even with the latest drivers from HIS.
100% gpu load when simply dragging a window around on-screen with
Win7 Aero enabled. Or resizing the window.
Disabling Aero made it even slower/laggier."
And further down...
"Other Thoughts: I bought this as a second card to power a second monitor
to get better performance in Photoshop. The screen connected to this
card was horrendously slow. I switched out of Windows 7 Aero theme and
performance improved ever so slightly. It was a painful chore to even
play freecell on that screen."
It really shouldn't be that bad, and perhaps a 6200 would work better
(due to features being unavailable).
Hmmm. Same kind of comment on this (older) 6200.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130477
"Pros: Works with Windows 7 64-bit!
Cons: Significant system lag if using Windows Aero themes
Other Thoughts: I purchased a total of 3 of these cards - one for a
friends computer and two for my own, both Windows 7 64-bit systems.
I'm now running 6 displays (infrastructure admin) without any issues,
although I did have to drop Windows Aero theme (still using Vista/Win7
basic theme). Some programs (MS Outlook is one) would cause my CPU usage
to skyrocket even if I wasn't doing anything within the program or had
the program displayed on a monitor connected to one of these video cards
due to using the Aero themes. Once Aero themes were disabled, I'm a
happy camper! The only PCI videocard I've found that works with
Windows 7 64-bit."
HTH,
Paul
