Kyro?? I want my Nvidia.

[ishmalman]

So I just bought a prebuilt system, thinking I could avoid the trouble that always comes with building your own system for once, and upon recieving my computer I discover that it doesn't have a AGP slot, and I might as well throw out my current card which I payed a pretty penny for.

So I bought myself a new card, a Hercules 64 meg PCI Kyro? supported card, because it was fairly cheap, without bothering to look if it had Nvidia or Geforce, which is required by many gaming programs.

Is there any way around this barrier? I've tried installing service pack 1 among other things, the error log is always the same for all the games, "Engine does not support Kyro" or something like that. If not, what would be your suggestion for a cheaper 128 meg PCI video card.

[Chandler]

I don't think that the Kyro cards have Hardware T&L which is required by pretty much any game these days.

The low to mid-range ATI and nVidia cards are available in PCI form.  I've seen GeForce FX5200, FX5700 and Radeon 9200SE available in PCI form.  The FX5700 is the fastest.

FX5700LE PCI

[Carskick]

Who did you buy your system from, and what are the specs. Nowadays, Celerons are usually the only computer that don't come with AGP slots. I'd call the place you got the computer and attempt to return it or excahnge it for a different model. The lack of an AGP slot or PCI-X slot is a major bottleneck if you are a gamer.

[Neon]

If you want to play games, make sure you purchase a gaming computer. STM Kyro is a pretty old graphics engine, and not capable of playing recent games.

If you plan to get another PCI card, the FX5700LE card should indeed be best. The other options would be FX5200 and Radeon 9200, just don't expect to be able to play Doom 3 with all of the eye candy turned on. Avoid Radeon 9200SE.

Note bene: PCI-E aka PCI-Express cards are just hitting the market, and this interface is not the same as the much older PCI interface. It is also not the same as PCI-X aka PCI-Extended ::), which is backwards compatible with PCI, but mainly used in servers for high bandwidth ethernet and cluster computing.