video card and ram compatability

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T-Bone193

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I have a Gateway 310s, I know I know not a gaming computer by any means but its upgradeable. Current specs are 2.4 celeron, 64mb video card, 256mb ddr ram, 40gb hard drive. Now what i want to do is upgrade my ram to 768Mb or 1Gb, and a new vid card. For ram my question is if my current ram that came with the computer is PC 2700, Would it refuse PC 3200 ram?
Now for the video card, i have found a nice vid card for an excellent price at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814166005 , it is a off brand but has a radeon 9600 GPU with 256Mb memory and a 4x/8x interface. Now could this work for me or not? Thanks Alot, Im in quite a dilema here, i want to get the computer up and running for current games because all of my friends are starting to play now. Anyways any Inputs would be of help.
 
Yes you can accept PC3200 ram :)

Also, for the graphics card, do you have a brown / AGP slot, or another weird slot at the top that looks different from the other 3 / 5?
 
You'll almost certainly have to use pc-2700 memory. The video card should be fine as long as you've got an agp slot on your motherboard.
 
Does anyone know if there is a AGP slot on it? how can i tell what it is, and is that specific Video card AGP?
 
Also i am sitting here looking at my computers insides and i dont even see the stock video card, i dont know to much about all of this but i am very understanding so with a little information i can figure it all out, now about the modem there is 2 white slots for some sort of cards and about that a differend looking brown slot, one of these i am assuming to be host to a video card, if i do put one in how do you get the old one out as well, maybe a stupid question but again thanks alot.
 
Is this what your Motherboard looks like?

It looks like most of the 310s's use the Intel (Thrasher) Motherboard.
It uses DDR 333 RAM or slower, and has no AGP slot.

If that isn't your motherboard you can go to gateway, click on support, and enter your serial number. It should give you the detailed specs on your machine. (and hopefully a motherboard model to tell us)

If that is your motherboard, then to upgrade you will need a PCI graphics card (not as good as AGP or PCI-E graphics cards but it'll do). If I where you I would just ditch the 256MB stick and get 2 512MB sticks or 1gb stick.
 
I just did some research and i have the 300S gateway not the 310, mine has the Essex2 motherboard which does infact have the AGP slot, its rated at 4x so is that vid card compatible?
 
Yes the Raedon 9600 should work. I'm more of an nVidia guy so I can't really help you out much more than telling you that the card should work in your system.

That 160W PSU that you have in there is really weak and might not take well to the additional load of a GPU.

My recommendation on the RAM is still to get a gb of ram, but you would have to get 2x 512MB sticks since 512 is the max allowable size per slot on your motherboard.

BTW just so you know this should run most of today's games, but it will probably only be more towards the low settings.
 
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