Older motherboard question

[PHeaD]

Currently I run an AMD Athalon XP 2600 on a Shuttle AN35N mobo, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, 1 gig of generic DDR 3200 ram, along with a 40g primary HD and a 180g secondary HD. Recently I fried the vid card fan after installing the new ATI catalyst drivers (apparently, ATI no longer supports AGP cards). I corrected the issues with the new drivers with the latest Omega drivers, but the toasted the fan in the process.

As money is very limited at this point, my dilema is as such;

a.) get a new fan
b.) get a new AGP card - I have narrowed my choice down to the HIS 1650 Pro
c.) move up to a PCI-E card

I would love to do C , but due to my processor, I am failing to find any mobo's that support my cpu with a PCI-E slot. Any suggestions or am I stuck with an AGp card for awhile ?

Thanks in advance.

 

[o1die]

Pci-e was never made on socket a boards. I would replace the fan on your agp video card with a fanless heatsink, preferably copper.

 

[Shadow703793]

Get a PCIe set up.

 

[GuyAmI]

You're gonna be stuck with an AGP card for now. If you tried moving to PCIe that would necessitate getting a new CPU, MB, RAM, graphics card (obviously).

But unless you're dead set on getting a new graphics card (maybe you're not happy with what you already have) then you may want to investigate o1die's suggestion and get a new cooling solution for your graphics. It could turn out to be cheaper than getting a new card.

 

[PHeaD]

Thanks for the replies guys.

 

[duxducis]

HI,

well what you say make no sense, ATI support all there cards, They might not update them but they are there. I install driver for my 2 older PC's that got ATI 7500, and 9600, and even RAGE FURY, 32meg very very old card all work with XP.

what im thinking: it's kinda impossible to kill fan with wrong drivers, maybe you have fan that can be controlled (RPM wise) and got set to 0 somehow. Usually fan's will give advanced warning before dieing, make noise grind and then slowly stop spinning or start sticking.

but in case it is really dead i would just replace it, if it got special fan that not sold u can always mount regular 80mm fan and do wonders with aluminum tape.

 

[PHeaD]

duxducis

apparently you haven't tried to use the 7.10 Cataylyst drivers on your AGP cards. They don't work since AGP is no longer supported. However, there is an Omega driver that not only supports the AGP cards, it also supports the PCIe cards as well.

I don't know if the rpm was controlled as I never messed with any of the settings. I dont overclock, I don't play with the Catalyst control thing, I just download the drivers. The fan stopped spinning due to it coming off the backing plate. My guess is it got so hot, it separated from the base to which was attached to. The only thing holding the fan in place is the circuit board, attached to the fan, to which a very small ide cable (?) is attached to it, as well as it being attached to a small micro chip on the heat sink, possibly a power connection of some sort ?

I have never replaced a fan on a video card, so I dont know what is involved and if this fan went, does someone make a better or possibly bigger fan as a replacement ? I dont want to frankenstein my computer, I prefer to have good quality components instead. I dont want to have to replace a fan every 6 months or so. I found a low cost replacement card that got decent reviews that I may just substitute instead, unless the fan replacement is a fairly simple process.