Video card installation guide?

[FSPilot_123]

Hi everyone,
I just bought flight sim and, of course, now I need to upgrade my system, specifically my video card. I'm a huge noob with this kind of stuff. Is there any kind of guide out there to help me with selecting and installing a new video card? I'm using an Nvidia GeForce 5200.


2Ghz AMD Athlon 64 processor
512mb SDRAM

[Brian_Neuman]

Well,


One of the 1st things you need to state is whether you have an AGP or a PCI Vid Card. (I will guess AGP). It wouldnt hurt to give the specs of your computer as well, that will help with selecting and installing it (If you choose to do it yourself, which is very easy).

[noell]

The main thing affecting performance when you run flight sim is the processor. While a better video card may improve image quality somewhat and perhaps even speed up texture loading a little, you would see very little if any increase in FPS as your 2GHz processor is really the limiting factor.

If you decide to go ahead and upgrade your video card anyway,
bear in mind that a system's performance is all about balancing your components.What I mean by that is there is no point putting the best video card available in a system with a slow processor. Nor is there any point in doing the opposite like pairing a super fast processor with a very low-end video card. In the case of the former, the processor would limit performance and in the case of the latter, the video card would limit performance.

Applying that reasoning to your system, means there would be no point in spending money on a video card higher than something like about the level of an NVIDIA 6600 or equivalent. (NOTE: Your current video card is most likely AGP so make sure you get an AGP card and NOT a PCI Express card. I think a 5200 may also have been available as a PCI card. So, if your system is very, very old it may not have an AGP slot. If that's the case, you are pretty well stuck with what you have).

As for installing your new video card, there are a couple of ways to do that. You could simply follow the instructions that come with a new video card and then, if you want to update it to the latest drivers, follow my driver installation guide pinned at the top of this forum. Or you could first download the latest video drivers for your new card before you even remove your old card. Then, follow my driver installation guide up to and including step 8. When you have completed step 8, shut down your computer and unplug the power cord. Remove your old video card and install the new one. Next, turn on your system. When it reboots, do steps 10 and 11.

The other limiting factor in your system BTW, is that you have 512MB of RAM. You would see some overall improvement by increasing that to 1GB.


....Noell

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