PCI video card question

This question may have answered before but after doing several searches I couldn't find what I was looking for. I have a PCchips M758LMR+ with integrated AGP graphics and shared memory. I want to upgrade the graphics with a PCI 2.0 video card (PCI Chaintech P-FX20 128MB DDR FX5200 TV/DVI (Ret)). Because this is using the PCI bus is this going to degrade my system? I am not a gamer but I do a lot of video capture and editing.

Thanks,
D.E.

 

No, in fact it will improve things. PCI is not as good as an AGP card (which is a dedicated bus with a clock multiplier) but by moving the load off your processor and motherboard onto a seperate card you should see better performance.
Note that you will want to consult your motherboard manual to find out how to disable the onboard afterwards or it will continue to work away and load down your system (having two seperate video displays generated even if one is not used). Some you disable in the BIOS, some you move a jumper on the motherboard.


Note that you will want to have both working intitially and may want to borrow a second monitor so you can see them both. The bios displays through only the default card, which is currently the onboard. And the new one will just display a "you have successfully installed your new card" and an extension of the desktop (off to the right) which is blank or blue or something like that in most cases until you change it to mirrored (showing the same on both cards) and then you can boot to bios, change the default to the PCI , boot back and verify that you can see bios and windows on it and then disable the onboard.

 

Yes, it should be quite a good upgrade.
As oshwyn5 said, the AGP bus is dedicated for graphics and runs better than PCI.
Onboard graphics shares memory with the "system" memory though, the PCI card has 128MB of it's own memory, so it will no longer have to utilise the motherboard RAM to run the graphics and thus free it up for your programs.

My concern would be the motherboard. PCchips have "basic" motherboards and do not have very good upgrading potential. If you may want to do any "major" upgrading in the future, I would start planning/saving now (we are ready and willing to advise you, we LOVE window-shopping! ).

Matt

 

Thanks again. This information has been most helpful. I'm doing this just to get by a little longer. I am going to build a system from scratch mainly for video capture, editing and burning to DVD, along with some audio applications but I have to wait about 6 months (painful). I have been putting together a list of components starting with ASUS MB (ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe Dual RAID SATA 3GB/s Dual GLAN (Sock-939)) and for a processor AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice 1GHz FSB 512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Processor. I have been using this system for a while and it has worked well for VHS video. When I started processing digital video I ran into problems with jerky and grainy video after encoding to MPEG2. One fella I talked with had more severe problems than me. He added 512 MB more of RAM to make 1GB and his problems went away and his system produced excellent video (we both use MainActor by MainConcept). So I thought I would give it a try. I had problems trying to match the 512 MB I had already installed 2 years ago so I thought a video card might help. When I get ready to build I will post back and see what happens.

Thanks again,
D.E.