DVI/VGA question/help needed please

tijuana taxi

tijuana taxi

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Rich
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Please bear with me as i'm not too well up on PC's and their innards so bit of help needed

Getting a new IPS monitor for Christmas and although it can take DVI and VGA my PC only has a VGA port

Firstly Will it make a big difference if I had a DVI connection?

Secondly Am I right in saying I would need to install a graphics card to get the aforementioned DVI access, my machine has integrated graphics. If this is the case, any suggestions for a reasonably priced card would be very helpful, only used for photo editing with LR3 and Elements 9

Thirdly If I did get a new graphics card would it need a new power supply, know our old machine did when my daughter had a new graphics card installed for her games.

Thanks and all suggestions welcome

Rich
 
DVI will give you a clearer picture than VGA in most cases (i ran 2 identical screens on each connection side by side and you can see a difference). however you wont see any performance increase for photo editing with a fast graphics card (some later versions of PS allow graphics acceleration but this is mostly just for rendering zooms etc).

you can install a graphics card even in a machine with dedicated graphics, there is normally an option in the bios to disable the onboard graphics and youll get a bit of your system memory back.

depending on the computers age will depend on whether you need a PCI-e or AGP card. what make/model is the PC?

depending on the graphics card you may need to upgrade your PSU.
 
Thanks Neil, my PC was made up for me at the local computer shop when the old bits got a bit weary and knackered

AMD Athlon II x2 240 2.81 GHz running Windows XP with 4GB DDR3 Ram, know the graphics is integrated and has a Micro Star motherboard along with 500GB hard drive
 
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What is the motherboard? You need to know this to understand what you can plug into it. Something like CPU-Z will tell you if you don't know.

You can probably get away with a very cheap graphics card upgrade. You'll need to know what power supply you have though (it's only the mid-range+ graphics cards that need an extra power supply rail).
 
Thanks Andy, apparently my motherboard is Micro Star International GF615M-P33 (MS7597)

Graphics are Nvidia GeForce 6150SE nForce 430
 
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Thanks again Andy, only edit photos, don't even own a game so no worries about that

Are they easily installed? Ok with opening the case and installing RAM, also replaced the DVD reader/writer, but no expert by any means as i'm sure you have already ascertained
 
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I've just replaced an ati 4650 in my desktop, that was a pretty good little dual dvi card. While it didn't need a dedicated power connector it did need a min of 400w.

Got a 4550 in the media center, single dvi with VGA and hdmi. Again no dedicated power connector and had it running on a budget 300w.

Install is easy, just a case of slotting it in. YouTube should be able to help for tutorials. Just remember to disable the inboard graphics in the bios once the card is in.
 
Thanks to you both, not sure what or how to disable the existing graphics in the bios though, out of my depth with that i'm afraid
 
tijuana taxi said:
Thanks to you both, not sure what or how to disable the existing graphics in the bios though, out of my depth with that i'm afraid
Click to expand...

When you turn on the computer you should see something like "press del/f10 to enter setup" itll be in there.

Manual download is here if you don't have it http://www.msi.com/product/mb/GF615M-P33.html
 
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Head to: http://www.msi.com/product/mb/GF615M-P33.html#/?div=Manual download the file and then refer to pages: 21 to get into the BIOS and then navigate to the Integrated Peripherals menu. It doesn't show it in that manual, but there will be something like "Onboard graphics" Enable/Disable. There might also be a "Primary Graphics" which selects which of the graphics subsystems are the primary. You want to set that to PCI-E.

One potential issue and that is the board is a PCI-e v1.0 board. The graphics card I linked to is a PCI-E 2.0 one. Normally, they will coexist happily, but there is the slight chance of an incompatibility there...
 
Excellent, thanks very much for the advice

Suppose it would be sensible to try the new monitor with the VGA lead and see what its like. If it needs changing i'm a lot more confident now on what to do, not exactly a fortune either which is handy

Cheers
Rich
 
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