DELL Help please

[Blarg]

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That's funny, cause i thought the same thing untill i checked the specs on the 4700. With the new model they moved to a PCIe slot for video cards, which makes getting the 8400 kind of silly.

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You're right. I remember reading about that and checking up on it just a little while ago, then forgot all about it. A couple of months back, they changed to PCI-Express. My bad.

[Blarg]

Unified drivers definitely are a great thing now; I just remember ATI's terrible reputation from a while back for non-support. They were sort of legendary for it. It's probably less of an issue for the foreseeable future, but I retain my paranoia to a certain extent.

But there are still problems with some software supporting only a certain number of versions of DirectX, and requiring you to upgrade your video card if your video card does not support those features. I experienced that with Everquest; many people had to buy new video cards or whole new machines when the game engine was reworked to work only with DirectX 9 and up. Maybe those problems will never come up, but they're a real pisser when they do. Anytime you put yourself very far behind the curve, you risk having things not only not work well, but flat out not work anymore.

And I remember how bad Creative and Microsoft were on a very nice new DVD drive (with hardware support for showing the DVD picture(back when software DVD engines were not very good) I bought that had JUST come out that month. I installed it on my Windows ME machine and it worked fine, then bought an upgrade version of Windows XP. Windows XP refused to recognize the drivers on a number of pieces in my computer, all of which were new, and had sometimes either no substitutes or poor ones. Creative, for their part, did nothing on the driver front for months, leaving me with only minimal functionality on my DVD drive, and I finally gave up trying. Similar things have happened with other pieces of equipment I've had.

The end of 2006 is only a couple years away, well within the lifespan of a computer for the average user.

Sometimes these things become problems, sometimes they don't. I've seen problems a number of times, so I keep it in mind. It's not being alarmist.

I agree that you're probably not giving up much of anything in the present by getting or not getting PCI-E, and the future is just very speculative. It will come around one day, though, so it's just something to keep in mind. I tend to keep my computers for quite a while, so upgrading becomes an issue with me.

[astroglide]

directx(version) support is hardware dependent, so an upgrade issue with that isn't going to be exclusively related to software. creative has always been abysmal with driver support. when talking exclusively about video cards here, i think your position is alarmist. software shouldn't be a problem. other stuff can be a nightmare.