Dell Dimension B110 Video Upgrade

[Dennis J]

Hello,
I am upgrading an older Dell B110. I need to know if there is a motherboard jumpr that has to be added or removed to install a PCI video card.

Thanks,

Dennis

 

[house70]

You might need to go into BIOS settings to make the discrete card the default one ( if not so already). I am not aware of a jumper that needs to be set on the mobo itself for that.

 

[bambiboom]

Hello,
I am upgrading an older Dell B110. I need to know if there is a motherboard jumpr that has to be added or removed to install a PCI video card.

Thanks,

Dennis

___________________________________________________________________

Dennis J,

Something you will benefit from is downloading the users' manual for the Dell 1100 /B110 >

ftp://ftp.dell.com/Manuals/all-products/esuprt_desktop/esuprt_dimension_desktops/dimension-1100_Service%20Manual_en-us.pdf

> and this gives all the specifications and instructions for adding cards, setup etc.

The 3 expansion slots are "PCI" and that is the type of dedicated video card to look for- be sure it's not called "PCI Express" or "PCIe".

This is the kind of card you might consider >

http://www.ebay.com/itm/PNY-Nvidia-VERTO-GeForce-8400-GS-512MB-PCI-video-card-New-In-Box-NIB-2-/221195831587?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item33804c8923

> a GeForce 8400GS with 512MB memory and 32 CUDA cores. Not a screamer gaming card, but appropriate to the B110 and it doesn't take too much power. The B110 power supply is 250W, so the 8400GS at about 30-35 Watts is about right.

As far as I can tell, the onboard graphics system shares the system RAM, and while you're supposed to switch off the onboard audio when adding a sound card, I don't see instructions to change a BIOS setting to disable the onboard video. I recently changed my mother' computer from onboard video to a PCI Express video card and all I did was plug the card into the slot. By the way, changing from onboard video to a dedicated card (GeForce GT 240 PCIe card with 1GB memory) alone in my mother's computer changed the Passmark Performance Test 8 score from 262 to 1394 and the 3D score went up 40X !

While you're at it, you might visit Dell support drivers site and update the BIOS if it hasn't been done in awhile- this is quite easy and it will run better on more modern Windows versions and programs>

http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/19/DriverDetails?driverId=R106545

> and you just download the *.exe file and run it from the downloads window the same way you install any downloaded program.

If you don't have it, you might also have the maximum RAM memory-2GB- which can be either DDR333 or DDR400.

Good luck! I heartily approve of keeping the older computers going- they're surprisingly useful. I have 5 computers, and the oldest, a 1998 Dell dimension XPS T700R Pentium III 750MHz / 768MB RAM still runs Autocad R14 all day long. Also No 4. is a Dimension 8400 Pentium 4 3.0GHz / 3GB RAM /Quadro FX570 from 2004 that runs AutoCad 2004 on XP 64- bit and Photoshop /Illustrator CS 3, etc just fine !



Cheers,
BambiBoom