Video Card Upgrading

Hey guys, posting this before the problems occur.

I'm upgrading my video card from a 64 mb ddr sdram Nvidia MX420 w/ TV out to a ATI radeon X 700 pro 256mb GDDR3?? AGP 8x/4x (my mobo supports 1x, 2x, and 4x) so I figure that should be ok

Now, I've heard that when you upgrade from Nvidia to ATI or vica versa there are usually issues.

I think if you do certain things ahead of time you can minimize those issues.

I've heard things like uninstall drivers and such.

Assuming you don't see anything wrong with the new card I'm gonna use in my computer should I do anything else before actually switching the cards?

Oh yea, system has windows xp home edition, sp2, 768 mb pc2100 ram, pentium 4, 2.53 ghz.

Thanks in advance.

 

There are some incompatibilities with AGP cards as not all of them run at the same voltage. There's AGP 2.0 and 3.0 make sure your motherboard meets the version of the video card. Odds are it does.

driver cleaner pro works wonders for uninstalling drivers tweakguides.com is a good site where you can learn how to do it manually. Of course, you can just uninstall with add/remove programs, but what fun is that?

I would suggest a better video card though. I don't know how much you want to spend, but you can get a 7800gs for ~300$ a 6800gs for ~200$ a 6600gt for I don't know much less than 200$ I'd gather. Or anything from the ati x800 series should do fine. I haven't heard many good things about the x700, and I'm not even sure they make an AGP version, but I'm guessing I just never bothered to look. Of course AGP cards are becoming a scarce commodity now-a-days.

 

if you dont want to or dont need to play modern games at max settings then that will work fine, it is the ati equivelant to a 6600gt. My friend has the pci-e version and it works fine for him.