Hola everyone!

I was recently gifted a Dell Optiplex GX280. The Desktop mini-tower version, I believe. It's sort of hard to tell in the documentation on the dell site, but that is beside the point.

Not yet having actually taken a look at the hardware yet, going on the assumption that is has a 1.38 gig pentium4 processor and a gig of ram, I plan to upgrade to 3.8 and 4.

My question falls to the graphics card. The new ATI Radeon™ HD 3870 X2 looks good but I don't even know if the system could handle it since I don't even recall how to tell what PCI slot has what functionality to it. =P

Any suggestions for recommendations or insight? As far as I can tell I have two other open PCI slots as well so if any of you can think of anything to stick in them to make running of oblivion any smoother, please let me know. xD

the new pcie slots are longer then the old pci slots
x1 and x4 are ridicilously short and usually hard to find
if you have one of those you are out of luck otherwise you coudl make do with an x8 or x16 see this wikipedi artciel for more information and picture of the slots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCIE

Ahh. Well in that case, as far as I can tell, I am looking at a 16x PCI-E slot.

Anyone's input on whether it's worth the expense to go to a 1gig video card over a 512mb card?

Though I just found out you can't overclock dell computers (at least that seems to be the general consensus based on what I can find) so for the cost of the desired upgrades, I may just buy a barebones system. xD

On the video card an 1gb card is only worth its money on a really big screen 24inch and up. under that a 512mb card is more than enough.

On the dell these computers are hardly upgradeable and if they are very expensive.
Your better of looking for a new system if you want to upgrade. This is just how dell wants to make money making their systems in a totally different standard.

While that statement is not false. Its also not very true. Yes it is really worth it on a big monitor with a large resolution (Upwards of 2560x1600 or whatever the biggest is). That is not what makes the 1GB video cards worth they're money. Its when you are running ultra high texture details/resolutions. The memory is what helps the texture render at a reasonable speed. If your memory is low. Then it can't handle rendering 200+ textures at 1024x768. So higher memory means an ability to have a better looking game. That is why the 8800 GTX/Ultra were such good cards. The 768MB or memory gave the cards that extra head room for high resolution textures. That is also why the 1GB 8800GT/GTS cards are extremely good for they're price.

Well, in my opinion, there are a couple of problems with these statements.

Number 1, the more GRAM on the graphics card, the better. The higher memory amount helps with large texture sizes, such as for example Qarl's Texture Pack, which quadruples the texture size in Oblivion.

Numer 2, Dell's are very upgradeable, and they are actually easy to work on. unlike HP, which is hard to work on. Dell's are just as upgradeable as any other computer.

Now my comments to the OP.

All Dells and HPs are not overclockable unless you go with the XPS 700 series or the Blackbird series computers. In fact, all name brand computers, with the exception of those two series, are not overclockable. (I think Gateway might have a series out there as well that you can overclock, but I haven't seen them) If you want to overclock, then you need to custom build.

As for graphics cards: is the gx280 you have the Slim computer or a standard minitower Desktop? If it's the slimline, then you're stuck with either a geforce 8400 or a Radeon 3450, as they are the only two decent low profile cards.

If it's a minitower, and it's pci-express, then you'll be interested in either the geforce 8800 GT or the geforce 9600.