HIS 3650 question

[jonathonball]

(all of this troubleshooting was done over the phone)

A co-worker was looking to upgrade his computer so his daughter could play the Sims 3. He's running a 2.8ghz single core P4 with integrated graphics... his initial attempts were met with some pretty hardcore failure.

I tried to convice him to spend like $400 on a completely new PC... but people are cheap and non-tech savvy people are even cheaper (when it comes to this stuff). In the end he (semi-independantly) settled on a HIS Radeon 3650 AGP solution. (Better than the FX5200 he had originally wanted to buy.) I warned him that he was still going to be pretty CPU limited but that's another post.

When he got the card and put it in, it gave him a video error saying that the power plug for his video card wasn't plugged in. We tried in vain for a minute while I tried to explain to him what the power connector might look like... so I got on newegg and took a look at the pictures for that card.

It just has the one 4 pin connector. I've never seen that kind of connector before on a video card... in a shining moment of "eh, it's not mine" I had him connect the power connector from his floppy drive and viola; bitch booted right up.

My question is... did I do the guy a favor or should I call him up right now and tell him to disconnect that junk before it implodes?

cliffs:
1. coworker wants to play sims 3 on old P4 system, refuses new PC.
2. coworker buys previously linked video card and can't figure out how to get it power
3. i tell him to plug his floppy power connector into the card and it boots right up.
4. did i cause harm?

 

[haroldmeyer]

Looks to me like it will work.

 

[Ehren8879]

'tis indeed floppy power you see there. My 9700 pro from years ago had the same connector.

 

[Red Falcon]

'tis indeed floppy power you see there. My 9700 pro from years ago had the same connector.

Exactly, mini-molex

 

[sirmonkey1985]

'tis indeed floppy power you see there. My 9700 pro from years ago had the same connector.

yup my 9700 is the same way.. but did you have the problem with the connector bending the pins outward due to the little locking part on the back of the power connector?



btw.. OPer is this a prebuilt system? and if it is or isnt could you try to find out what motherboard it is? if its the 478 or the lga-775 he might just be able to do a simple cpu upgrade for dirt cheap.. since Sims 3 really needs a multi-core processor..

or your only other choice is to show him them game on a system thats better then his to prove to him why they need a new computer..

its always fun to make people look like idiots when they say their systems fine until they see the same games performance on a much nicer system..



err nvm just noticed it was agp.. so scratch the whole finding out what motherboard it is part of my post..