ATI Radeon 9250 PCI 256MB

I got this graphics card the other day hearing it was really good and it worked great. so last night i installed it and its took 4 minutes to load the first page of guild wars (i re-installed the game to aviod any problems). now its loading fine but its stuttering and i get lag all the time. any way to improve this problem or something? i spent $100.34 on it

9250 is a very bad deal.

I got the 9800 128mb for $119.99 and have never had a problem with it. Plus it was extremely cheap to, i think it was a one time deal though... IMO get a 9800 or better. Get a card that will last because i had a 9250 also and it burned out in 4 months. Truly the biggest waste of money.

turn down all setting to the min. try to change the resolution to the same as your desktop is running at

i have a 9500 256mb and it works perfect. lag every once in a while but still works great. it might be you internet connection try and check that.

Take it back and get a 9800 pro or better, and increase your memory if your under 512 ram.............768 or 1 gig is a huge improvement for lag and slow loading screens in Guild Wars.

I'd like to call attention to the part where it says PCI in the topic title. I do not know the answer to this thus I ask; do these replacement ideas come in a PCI flavor (9500, 9800 Pro etc)? I would likely assume the purchase of a PCI card was originally made because this person has no AGP slot, perhaps?

to answer that small truly irrevalent piddling detail of no significance what-so-ever .....................NO they dont come in pci

they do come in agp though and i hear if you use a shoehorn and a lot of thermal grease and a ball peen hammer it can be squeezed into a pci slot.

dont try this at home or work or even a shop unless you want to watch sparks and flying plastic

sheeshhhhh

Do you have the up-to-date drivers?
I know older ones(divers) that come with hardware usally are most of the problems you might be having...

I would reccomend 768 or higher ram.

Okay then. So assuming as stated in my assumption I made in my previous message that this person purchased a PCI graphics card due to a lack of (AKA non-existant) AGP slot, then why would people be suggesting AGP cards?

Q: Can you give me some information about hippo racing in Canada? (USA)
A: A-fri-ca is the big triangle shaped continent south of Europe. Ca-na-da is
that big country to your North…oh forget it. Sure,
the hippo racing is every Tuesday night in Calgary. Come naked.

Now I have a better idea how Canadians answer questions like this feel.

I'm guessing that he has an AGP slot, unless his motherboard is super old. If thats the case, then forget about the Video Card, this guy has bigger issues to take care of first. If he only has PCI, then Nvidia has some decent PCI cards. I think you pretty much get what you pay for when it comes to Video Cards, unless you just get a smoking hot deal on a returned item.

ummm..............he did some checking before he got what he thought was the best he could get for what he has.

if he had an AGP slot he would never have looked at PCI cards to begin with.

even if he did check pci he would have seen better AGP cards for less and purchased one of them instead.

i guess

I'm just assuming that he knows the difference between AGP and PCI. It doesn't state in the post, and for all I know he is just reading it off of the Video Card box that he just bought. I would definately go with AGP or PCI Express if the board is compatible. If he has an outdated motherboard then it probably has a lower bus speed, and a PCI Video Card isn't gonna do much good. The AGP slot will bypass the bus speed and go straight to the processor, thus it was made for gaming and rendering high end graphics.

Assuming you only have a PCI (ignore wsmcasey, he seems out of touch with the state of some 'prebuilts' that are out there... no offense, please) the 9250 is theoreticly as fast as you're going to get. Unfortunately the 9250 doesn't have the power to utilize the memory, so information will travel slower through the path of memory. If you still can, I would return the card you have, and try to find a 128mb version. Really though, there won't be much of a performance difference.

My similar card could run at max detail and max resolution at about 15-20fps (playable, but not pretty), and 30-40fps at 1024x768 on all low.


If you could give model numbers for the card itself (as well as manufacturers) and the computer/mobo it would help in diagnosing the problem.

Exactly. I said that the 9250 was the best PCI card, and I still think it is.

I've got a 9550 pci slot one i THINK... but yeh its yet to fail on me yet, i got used to the smaller screen resolution, but i partially think thats because of my monitor, but yes its a great card and i got it f0r 74.95 because it was 50% off since it was open, so great card but i think i got a great buy...

The 9550 is only AGP, and the 9250 is like the 9550 in PCI. I think that is how it goes.

You can get a 9600 in pci form, I installed one for a friend the other day, after thier old 9000 pci died. but thats in the UK tho, dunno about anywhere else, and it was a third party

The 9550, 9600, and 5700 all come in PCI flavors.

Return it and get one of those.

No offense taken..............I don't do this for a living, but I have knowledge of the past 5 computers that I built for myself, including all the upgrades in between. I've ran a few PCI cards on old boards with some success, but the graphics capabilities were rather limited imo.

but the real question is...................

how were they compared to the onboard graphics chip and how happy was the pc to get its ram back from video duty?