Dell Dimension 8200 AGP Video Card Upgrade!

Pretty much any current AGP card will work well for you.  I cannot say for the 8200, but I had trouble with the 4670 (and presumably would with the 4650) in my 4100 due to driver issues.  Everything up to 3850 will work fine.  If you went with the 3850 you would need to upgrade the power supply.  Here are some GPU comparison charts  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units

BTW, what CPU and RAM are you set up with?  The nice thing with the 8200 is that it can be expanded to 2 GB RAM.  My 4100 has a 512MB limit.

David

I recently upgraded the original GeForce MX2 32MB card in my 8200 with an ATI Radeon 9550.  It worked fine.  Dell currently recommends this video card (as an Xtasy) for the 8200.  I don't know about the GeForce 6200, but it appears similar to the 9550, only 20-30% faster.

The video cards memory data width specification is inconsequetial to compatibility.  It is all internal.  The wider the data width, the faster data moves between memory and the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) on the video card.

An 8200 video card needs to be AGP, support 4X (most, if not all AGP 8X cards do), and not draw too much power (i.e. be concerned if it requires a separate power connection).  The Dell 8200 power supply is described as 250W, but if you read the specs, it really is 250W peak power, and only 200 Watt continuous.  A weak power supply for any high end video card.  My 8200 is pretty fully loaded, and idles at about 100 Watts, peaking to 160 Watts while under load.

Hello

Thanks for your responses!

Does your ATI Radeon 9550 run under Windows 7?

If it does then how are the drivers for it? do they lag?

Does the card Run well?

The 6200 will work, as will the newer ATI 4350 and 4650 models.

I haven't tried the 4650 AGP with a Dell but I have done so with a circa-2005 Athlon XP and it works under XP, Vista, and Windows 7 and supports Blu-ray HD playback.

I'm not sure if it's a good investment, though, especially considering that Biostar is offering a new Socket 478 mainboard with DDR2 memory support (up to 2GB), a PCIe-16x slot (both DDR2 and PCIe cards are much cheaper than the older DDR and AGP technologies they supplanted), and four SATA-300 posts.

Hi there! I have also an old 8200. You said in your post that "My 8200 is pretty fully loaded, and idles at about 100 Watts, peaking to 160 Watts while under load." What was your method to measure the wattage load? I ask that because I don't know how to do it and I intend to buy an ATI HD3450 AGP and I'm wondering if it'll work in my PC. Sorry for being out of topic! :D All the best!

The 3450 is relatively low on power consumption, so I'm sure you'd be OK. There's always the 4350, which draws a mere 18 watts, though.

I too have an old Dimension 8200. Over the years I did some things to improve it. After RamBus memory came down I upgraded RAM to 2 gigs. The biggest improvement was cutting the case with a metal nibbler so I could put in a bigger, better power supply. It took a bit or effort and metal chip and filing containment and clean up is vital. But there is no other way to install a powerful enough power supply to run a good video card. I basically cut away everything leaving the mounting holes intact. Their location is universal pretty much so once everything is cleared away a replacement unit will fill the void. The biggest problem with thr Dell unit is the power cord connector is in a different place than almost all other power supplies. I currently have an 850 watt unit in mine. If you have the 2 GHz processor it will directly accept the 2.3 GHz processor and the 8200 can be found cheaply these days. I bought one from an online auction site for $50 which was a complete tower plus a copy of XP Pro. That's where I got the faster processor from.

The sound card Iinstalled is old now, but still works splendidly- a SoundBlaster Audigy 2Zs platinum which feeds a Gigaworks 7.1 surround sound system. The video card I am currently using which wors well and is stillavailable is an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro with 512 MB memory. If you hunt one be careful because there is a PCIe card with the same exact name and model number. Make sure it is the 4X/8X AGP version! My preference has been for nVIDIA products but they bailed on AGP cards and all their new development went into PCIe back when it was new. ATI made the last powerhouse -relatively speakng- AGP board. There are AGP boards still being made with as much a 1 GB memory, but they are not 4X compatible. I recently tried a nVIDEA 4X/8X AGP board with 512 MB memory,  a GeForce 7950 or something like that. While it worked OK any attempt at playing any of the games like Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas crashed the game and generated BSODs. I tried all the tricks I know but it just won'y work right. The fan in my ATI board was failing which was why I tried it. I just bought another ATI card because I know it works and works well.

The only other thin I added to the old Dell was a 4 port USB 2.0 PCI card.

I have a new PC coming I am having custom built and wil drop nearly $6K on! And that's without a monitor, mouse, or keyboard! The Dell will remain in service although in a diminished capacity. It has served me well!

Just a follow-up to my previous post- as I mentioned I bought a new nVidia GeForce 7950 GT 4X/8X AGP video card after the fan failed in my ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB  rendering it useless. The card is no longer manufactured in AGP, but the designation still lives as a PCIe. I'm currently hunting for another via an online auction site since I have thrown in the towel on the nVidia GF 7950 GT.

The 7950 runs all my regular software just fine. Web surfing with IE8, Outlook, Word, Excel, Access, various ausio and video editing programs, utilities, etc. all work. But, it will not play a game. I had Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas installed and was playing them when I switched to the 7950.In the case of  Fallout 3 I had played it  through 3 times and was on the third time. According to Steam, I had some 55 hours playing New Vegas. I also had all 3 STALKER games installed and was playing a modded version of Shadow of Chernobyl, played through 3 times in its original form, once with my own mods, one with the Complete 2009 Mod, and was 3/4 of the way through with the Oblivion Lost mod. I had finished Call of Pripyat and was in freeplay mod. I had finished 2 run throughs with Clear Sky and had just installed the Complete 2009 mod for it. With the nVidia GF 7950 GT, if they came up at all, they would work for maybe 10 seconds, freeze up, and just hang or a BSOD would immediately appear. I thought maybe I would try a fresh install of something so I loaded Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 3, The Battle over Europe. It played the opening parts with the video clips just fine and even brought up the set-up screen just fine. On commencing play it was the same thing- about 10 seconds of flight, freeze, then BSOD.  All throug trying to run the games I tried different drivers from the newest for the cardfrom nVidia's site  to the one that came on the installation disk to some others recommended on other forums  to people who were experiencing this same and other problems with this card. Nothing made any difference in the problems with games.

When i changed drivers I did the clean install, uninstalling previous drivers first, rebooting, installing new ones. I did  full wipes using uninstall  utilitiy software to clean up after standard uninstalls, and still, nothing works. I ran DXDiag and when it was coming up it popped up boxes saying that errors had occurred last time I had triend to rn... and did i want to bypass it. There was an error for just about everything imaginable. I responded "no" to the bypass question and every test I ran passes and even before running the tests, the window at the bottom stated "no problems found" .  i'm baffled by this other than I know all this stuff worked fine before i put in the nVidia card and after putting it in not a one of my games will work (except solitaire and the frrebie games that come with the OS). They will launch in as far as the setup screens, the intro videos, splash screens and what have you, but when trying to start the game it's immediate BSOD of about 10 seconds of game the either freezes requiring cycling the power to exit/recover or 10 seconds of game and a BSOD.

 I am using 2 monitors, a Dell 2407 WFP and a Mitsubishi Diamond Point NX86LCD and set the games to single primary monitor in the nVidia utility, but that didn't help either. I had the same monitor configuration with the ATi card and never had any problem. I'm running DX 9.0c. My powersupply is 850 watts and the power line to the video card is not shared by another component. RAM is 2 GB, processor is the 2.2 GHz P4. AGain, nothing but the video card was changed and it has run along happily and stable in this configuration for years.

The only other anomaly I notice is that occasionally, like when it's booting up, the destop image will sort of twitch. It happens just for a split second. It looks like a strip of the image across the display, from left to right (or vice-versa)  will shift to the side so that part of the image isn't quite lined up with therest of the  image above and below it. It just glitches for a fraction of a second and then it all lines back up. It generally happens in the middle are of the display and never when things are already up and open.

I suppose it may be that I got a flaky video card, but after researching the problem, there are far too many compalints of what I am seeing with games not functioning, the freezing and BSODs and the #2 complaint, no video signal message and no display, I can't say I'd recommend this nVidia GeForce 7950 GT 512 MB card at all. But, if you ever get a chance to grab a functional ATI X1950 Pro 512 AGP card, by all means, grab it!