Ugh Bought A Graphics Card That Didnt Work!

[dazappa 0]

Ok this can be quite a long story. Well first off I have about a 6 year old computer. Poor buddy he's seen good days. Well anyways I recently bought guild wars for it. First off I didn't bother to see if my computer's graphics card was compatible with the game. And you can probably guess what happens...it wasn't!! But that's only the beginning of the problems. Well, I decided it might not be supported, but oh heck i'll try it anyways. So I create an account, and I began to realize it wasn't going to work. First thing I noticed was wrong: the clothes models didn't load on the character. It appeared he had white armor and clothes. Well I thought I could live with seeing people dressed in white walking around everywhere. So I logged on. Well let's just say 1fps. That is not a very good start. So, I turn everything I can down to minimal. Graphics, details, etc. Everything good had to be sacrificed. But it still didn't work. Well I could log in and chat with other players, but if I attempted to move, it would appear I jumped about 20 steps ahead. After walking around a bit the program quit on me. So I decided to get the latest drivers for my video card. That did indeed help, but not by much. I can now successfully log in, but the fps is still very low, but the program no longer quits on me. The models are all still white. Then I tried walking around, I didn't jump ahead as far, but it is still unplayable. So I decided to fork out the cash and get a graphics card. So I went to overstock.com and bought a shiny, brand new Radeon 9200 se. Well, the good thing is overstock has $2.95 shipping always. So it arrived about 3 days later, and I was extremely excited. I opened it up and noticed it had no instruction manual. Turns out the only "instruction manual" was online. But I didn't bother, I opened my computer and was just going to find the slot and plug it on in. But I quickly realized I didn't have the right slot to plug it into. Well that just got really annoying. So I looked up my computer model and tried to find a way for it to work. Turns out my model is virtually unupgradable besides memory, floppy, cd and harddrive. Oh great... So I wasted about $70 total, although I plan to do research before buying next time. I would also advise anyone buying from the internet, or anywhere else, to see what they are buying first and to make sure that is what they want.

[Cool_Freaker 0]

Yep, researching first is always a good idea. They normally do display the slot type and the specifications when you buy computer components though. It's usually just a matter of making sure your own computer is compatible <_<A Radeon 9200 SE is VERY basic as a GFX card. As for whether it'd even play Guild Wars, my guess is that it'd have a bit of a struggle. $70 seems rather steep for it as well.

[terminal2k 0]

yeah you always need to check to see if your computer will work with something before you buy it, software as well as hardware. a lot of brand name computer manufacturers have a lot of information on their pcs online at their websites which is always a good place to checkon a side note cool freaker: he said it was $70 total, i assume that includes the price of the game in there too

[dazappa 0]

Yeah it does. But I do plan on maybe eventually getting another one.(gfx card) But suprisingly if I didn't buy it from the website I bought it from, it would have costed me about $30 more somehow. I guess cause there's the dumb middleman thing going on.