video card location

My device manager(XP Pro) says my ATI Radeon Express 1150 video card is located in PCI slot 8, PCI bus 1, device 5, function 0. But a look inside the case reveals only one PCI slot in use, for the dial-up modem. I see a black doohickey on the motherboard with ATI on it, which seems to indicate this is what is called "integrated", correct? If so, why is the device manager so ill informed?

(that profile info below is incorrect and will be fixed)

 

Even a full tower case only has 7 slots on the back for pci or agp or pci-e devices to be mounted. So the pci slot 8 is indicating that the video is on the motherboard at the first "virtual" slot after the 7 possible real ones. Remember before agp all the slots could have been pci so they are just using a naming convention that jives well with the fact that it is on the buss but on the 8th slot. To the cpu it doesn't matter if its plugged in or wired in, it still has to be in some order for it to make sense for the instuctions to work in a reasonable manner and to assign IRQ's and stuff to the device.

You shouldn't have to open the case to determine if you have onboard video or not. If your monitor hooks up at the back plate (the rectangular plate that defines the "hard" motherboard connectors) then you have onboard, if it connects to a device that uses one of the horizonal slots, then you have a card installed.

Since you did go inside you should look to see if there is an AGP slot at the top of the pci slots, cause if there is, for less than $200 you can install a much more powerful card into the computer and disable the onboard to improve your systems funtionality in both gaming and video processing. Go with nVidia if you can since many of the newer ATI HD AGP cards are junk.

 

Thanks for the info. No, don't have AGP slots, just PCI and PCI express. A new video card is being shipped.

I'm not a gamer and AGP level graphics aren't needed, just reliable operation. A pci card fits the bill for me.

 

I don't know why I assumed AGP, I should have known with the ATI Expess that it was a newer board, they didn't have ATI Expess onboard during the agp era I believe. But let the explaination stand. Your system needs to keep devices in order whether wired in or not.
If you bought a pci card over a pci-e and you have a pci-e slot, I think you made a big mistake. The pci-e slot is so much faster communicating to the system than a pci slot, its a no brainer.

 

That info is appreciated but too late to act on. A new Geforce FX 5200 is now mounted and running, a $40 item plus shipping. Yes, PCI express slot is available.