I may not have the information on exactly the same system that you have, but
I think that you are out of luck when it comes to up grading the video card
in the Dimension 2400.  These sytems use integrated graphics (part of the
motherboard's chip set), and the motherboard does not have an AGP or PCI-E
slot that would accept a dedicated 3D video card.

You probably still have a PCI slot open, and there are PCI video cards.
Unfortunately, these are very low end video cards, as far as 3D rendering is
concerned.  When I take a quick look at NewEgg, the fastest ATI based video
cards in PCI form appear to be the Radeon 9250, and the fastest Nvidia based
card appears to be the FX5500.  I'm not sure how the two will compare in
performance, but I think they are pretty similar, as their clock speeds
appear to be similar.  (When shopping for these cards, which often appear to
be the same, note clock speeds for core and memory, as well as whether they
are using a 64 or 128 bit memory bus.  You may find cards that seem to be
the same model, but the manufacturer is selling a downgraded version (slower
clock speeds or narrower memory bus).  There is no need to get a card with
more than 128 MB of memory with these models.  They won't have the
horsepower to take advantage of it.

One of these cards will be better than the integrated graphics you are using
now, but don't expect this to turn your system into a real game system.  It
may be alright in a turn based strategy game, like Civilization 4, which is
less dependent upon pushing frames per second to make it enjoyable.  Most
games will have a list of video cards that they are compatible with; so, it
might be a good idea to see if the 9250 or the FX5500 is listed, especially
if the games you are interested in use DirectX 9 video features.  The FX5500
looks like it may do a better job of supporting DirectX 9 than does the
9250, which may be limited to support for DX8 features, only.  See
Anandtech's GPU cheatsheet for a quick specification comparison.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2195&p=1

John Sproule

----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, December 18, 2005 2:11 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] dell dimension


>i have a dell diminsion dim2400, 2.66GHz, p4
> what options do i have for good video cards?
> something that will play games such as Civ IV
> any help would be greatly appreciated.

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