I got a call that seemed very straightforward: Cannot play World of Warcraft because the graphics card is not powerful enough.

So I thought it would be just a matter of getting an off-the-shelf graphics card, and I’d be finished in an hour or two.

Although this was just a 2 year old PC, fairly quick pentium 4, once I opened it up, somethings didn’t look right:

– The height allowed for the card was much less than expected… I’ve not seen that before, but then I don’t keep up with everything on the PC front.

– The slot for the graphics card looked odd: It seemed like an AGP slot, but I haven’t seen any PCI-e slots yet, so it might have been one of those… it didn’t have any of those “spacer” lugs that stop you from inserting the card the wrong way around (they do something similar with RAM sticks).

So after asking at a local store (was told: sorry, we don’t stock those ones anymore, nobody buys them), I go back to the customer & ask to take some pictures of the AGP/PCI-E slot, so I can do some research.

I eventually find out it is an AGP slot, but it doesn’t look like other AGP slots I’ve seen. I also read about how the different 1X, 2X, 4X 8X, etc AGP speeds actually also mean different voltages on slot pins, so I have to be careful about what I buy.

I eventually buy something not too new (I wasn’t sure about the AGP 8X cards, they might not have coped well in this PC), a geforce2 mx100 card with 64MB ram and a half height backplate.

Despite being unsure of wether it would work, I walked in, the card slipped in with no difficulties, the PC fired up ok, & the game started correctly. phew!