JeepGuy
07-18-2011, 12:21 PM
First a little background..
I have never been a member of a computer forum so I hope I picked a good one. I have a little experience building PCs, I built one back in the late 90s when I was in my teens from scrapes to play some old games on. I have also done some card swapping in newer machines.
The equipment I have..
Dell XPS 410 aunt gave it to me, it has a 256mb geforce 7300le graphics card, a 2.4 dual core p4, and 4gb of ram
17 dell fullscreen dad gave to me years ago
19 dell fullscreen and 17 dell fullscreen picked up on craigslist for $50
17 gateway widescreen picked up for barter on craigslist for $15 and some speakers that were going in the to the church yardsale the next day
I would like to hook up all of these monitors to make an awesome workstation for school stuff. This would enable me to run cadd , a pdf, an instruction video, and email all at once on different screens and make my engineering work run 100% smoother without a million atl+tabs.
If you hadnt noticed at this point that I have minimal money in this project at this point and do not want to spend hundreds on a graphics card setup to put it all together. The current card is in a PCIe x 16 slot and I would like to keep this card and add another dual output card to another slot. I have PCIe x4, PCIe x1, and multiple PCI slots available.
I have never upgraded a video card and would like some guidance. In searching newegg and tigerdirect it looks like I can get a 512mb pci card for around $50. This option seems appealing to me because for cadd work and playing sc2; a 512 should allow me to turn up my graphics setting on the game.
Is this the right direction? Should I look at something else? Please share any comments or advise.
I have never been a member of a computer forum so I hope I picked a good one. I have a little experience building PCs, I built one back in the late 90s when I was in my teens from scrapes to play some old games on. I have also done some card swapping in newer machines.
The equipment I have..
Dell XPS 410 aunt gave it to me, it has a 256mb geforce 7300le graphics card, a 2.4 dual core p4, and 4gb of ram
17 dell fullscreen dad gave to me years ago
19 dell fullscreen and 17 dell fullscreen picked up on craigslist for $50
17 gateway widescreen picked up for barter on craigslist for $15 and some speakers that were going in the to the church yardsale the next day
I would like to hook up all of these monitors to make an awesome workstation for school stuff. This would enable me to run cadd , a pdf, an instruction video, and email all at once on different screens and make my engineering work run 100% smoother without a million atl+tabs.
If you hadnt noticed at this point that I have minimal money in this project at this point and do not want to spend hundreds on a graphics card setup to put it all together. The current card is in a PCIe x 16 slot and I would like to keep this card and add another dual output card to another slot. I have PCIe x4, PCIe x1, and multiple PCI slots available.
I have never upgraded a video card and would like some guidance. In searching newegg and tigerdirect it looks like I can get a 512mb pci card for around $50. This option seems appealing to me because for cadd work and playing sc2; a 512 should allow me to turn up my graphics setting on the game.
Is this the right direction? Should I look at something else? Please share any comments or advise.