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Run Vista Aero Glass Without AGP and PCI-express slots
Thursday, November 16th, 2006
While most desktop systems nowadays have either "PCI Express" or AGP slots available 
for video cards, what about those users with motherboards a couple years old, with might have a fairly decent processor and bus speed but lack PCIe or AGP slots?.
You don’t need to be running an ancient Pentium III to have a PCI-only motherboard, a case in point is the Supermicro P4SCA I own which is about three years old but which can run a P4 CPU at 3GHz, sports a 800MHz bus speed, yet lacks both AGP and PCIe slots, being a originally a server/workstation motherboard. One year+ old Dells also seem to be on this category, and this question has even been showing up on Vista newsgroups as well, so it’s hardly an isolated case.
Clearly, video card manufacturers became aware of this sales opportunity to provide new cards to those users who are still not ready to give up their working motherboard, but for some reason want to taste the eye candy in Vista. And this brings us a new crop of "Vista Ready" PCI cards. To my surprise, when I looked around I found ATI’s 9250 PCI video card sporting 256MB of memory, and I thought it would be a good choice to test Vista on my ancient test desktop. Don’t do it. After checking with the firm, ATI’s reply was "the 9250 is a DX8.1 card, not 9.0", and when I asked what effect it would have the reply was, "It would fall back to something that looks similar to XP". ATI’s suggestion: "Diamond will probably be a better bet…" Get Vista’s Aero Glass eye candy on AGP and PCIe-less PCs
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