Wanting to upgrade graphics card.

[lm54]

I have a HP pavilion a250n with a NVIDIA GeForce MX440 with AGP8X. It only has a 300W Power supply.

I ran across a game that requires 128MB and mine only had 64 MB.

I do much stereo 3D gaming with Edimensional LCD shutter glasses. I understand that NVIDIA supports this by default, so wanted to stay with that chip set.

I am looking for an inexpensive upgrade to get me at least the same gaming capabilities and with the memory upgrade (128MB or more if I can get it).

Thank you.

 

[Uberragen21]

I recommend checking out Newegg.com. I've had a LOT of good experiences with them, and only a few returns (which happens). Here's a link to the video card page utilizing AGP 8x. By the way, stick w/ the brand named video cards. Avoid stuff like "sparkle" whatever that crap is. EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, XFX, Asus, BFG tech will be pretty safe to purchase.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010380048%201069609639&name=AGP%204X%2f8X

Hope that helps.

 

[jyjjy]

Wow, an MX440 is horrifically bad at this point. Heck, 5 years ago it was bad.
Unfortunately Nvidia stopped making AGP versions of their cards long ago so it's impossible to buy one that is considered decent by today's standards. However since you are upgrading from an MX440 you can still get a card that's several times more powerful. This is the best I'm seeing in stock at newegg;
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814143102
It would be worthwhile to look into whether ATI cards can work with those glasses effectively. If so you can get something about twice as powerful for a similar price;
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125281

 

[megamanx00]

Well, on the Nvidia side the best you can do for a new card is a 7300GT AGP. While that's alot faster than your 440MX it's painfully slow by todays standards for modern games. Still, if you want to stick with nVidia that's the best you can do without building a new system. A Radeon 3650 AGP would be a heck of alot better and should be O.k with your 300W PSU as long as it has enough amps on the 12v rail. If you search the internet though you may get lucky and find 6800 or 7800/7900 series AGP cards, but I would really recommend you upgrade your anemic power supply before putting in one of those.

 

[lm54]

I checked the spec on the 7300GT AGP and it says that it needs a 350W PS and I only have 300W. Oh Well, Thanks for the lead anyway.

 

[jyjjy]

Don't believe what they tell you about power requirements. In fact they are best entirely ignored. They are always massively inflated to account for cheap PSUs that don't deliver the amount of power they are specified for. They also try to account for the entire system of which they know nothing about apart from the video card.
I just looked it up and the card actually uses 29 watts;
http://mark.zoomcities.com/images/gfx/GFXpowerchartby3d.png
Also an HP PSU is likely to be ok quality. I don't think you need to worry at all about powering that card.

 

[darkvine]

Like jyjjy said either of these cards will work just fine in your computer. They inflate the PSU watts needed to cover their asses in case someone has a really crappy PSU.

Radeon HD 4650 would the more powerful, newer and should work fine, 7300GT is much slower but solid card.

 

[lm54]

Well I got the BFG GeForce 7300 GT. It worked as a video card, but opened up a whole bucket of worms! My requirements, more memory than the MX440 and stereo glasses support. I got 50%, no out of the box stereo support.

Bottom line, finally got it to work with a lot of work.

To make a LONG story short, I loaded and unloaded different driver versions for a week they were all supposed to have stereo support, but dang if I could find it to set it up. I finally found a link to ForceWare 93.81 x86 and NVIDIA ForceWare 93.81 Stereo Driver. This driver set has the option for the Control Panel User Interface Type. Here I could select the classic panel because I can never find anything for stereo setup through the "New NVIDIA control panel".

I still had some hiccups as some games required a lower resolution than my MX440 in order for the stereo to work.

Wanted to give closure for those who may be interested.