Graphics Upgrade

Would the graphics card ati radeon 4870 work on the following motherboard?

My friend knows little about computing and he has asked me to get a gpu for him. He has a dell pc desktop with pentium 4 630 and motherboard 0wg216 from dell (not very good lol), he has like 3gb ram I think and I wanted to ask would the graphic card that i have mentioned above work on this pc? it has a 775 socket btw. thanks.

Public Comments

1. It would be bottlenecked by a P4 chip anyways. And it all depends on whether or not his board has a PCI Express x16 slot which I'm guessing he doesnt
2. The socket of the PC has nothing to do with weather a certain gpu will work, what matters is what kind of socket the motherboard has for a GPU, older models used an AGP interface while most motherboards now use PCI express slots. Another factor you need to look into what power supply he has in his computer. ATI recommends at least having a 450 watt power supply. The dell your friend has probably only has a 350 watt but as long as he isn't running 4 hard drives 3 DVD drives and a bunch of other things drawing power from the PC he should be ok, I ran the 3870 on one for awhile. Your friend could never get the full portenteial out of a 4870 with his single core pentium processor to to the bottle neck created by the slow processor sending data slowly to the GPU when the GPU can Process much more information. a HD 4670 or 4650 would be a much better choice until he upgrades his processor plus they are more than a $100 cheaper than a 4870
3. If it has the proper PCIe x16 slot empty for it, it will work. Like the previous poster said though the computer CPU will bottleneck the graphics card. Its sort of like putting a turbo charged V6 engine in a beat up Toyota Corolla or something. Additionally, you need to make sure that the PSU (power supply unit) on the computer has enough power for 4870. It looks like most 4870s need around 450-500 watt PSU. You might get buy with a 350-400W though, although I don't know if I would recommend it.