The Preshotts are so energetically inefficient you have to see it to believe it 😵 .

That said once OCed to the edge and fitted with (relatively) ample amount of RAM they behave surprisingly well even by today standards (for some tasks, for others netburst is hopeless).

Cooling these beasts adequately makes an interesting and rewarding challenge.

maximus wrote:

The 8800 GTX is nice as well. I remember the graphics cards from those years were very alluring... my personal crush is the X1950 XTX (slow and overpriced for its time, but that stock cooler tho... damn). Luckily, the late DX9 / early DX10 stuff is right in the worthless valley right now - old enough to be obsolete, not old enough to be collectible 😁

You mention pornstars but you post no pictures 🙁

I can fix that! (Sorry for off topic!)
She looks much better IRL

Very nice find there! Especially the case!

I'm guessing most of the heat is probably the 8800GTX; if memory serves the Cedar Mill are actually not much worse-off than some of the higher-spec Core 2 chips in terms of heat output (80-100W), versus the 100W+ that some of the Prescott and Presler (oh lordy lordy) chips were notorious for. Personally I never understood all of the "hate" directed at the Pentium 4. They were expensive but isn't that most Intel CPUs?

Regarding Prescott vs Northwood - I kind of skipped Northwood myself, I had (and still have) a Willamette, which was temporarily superseded by an AthlonXP, and then a Celeron D (which is a Prescott with some of the cache disabled). That Celeron overclocked like it had something to prove - it started life as the lowest-spec model in the series (2.13GHz), but gladly spent better than a year at 3.2GHz (on the stock cooler, with barely any extra voltage, in a board that was not (and as far as I'm aware has never been) known for overclocking). I'm not sure what, if anything, the SSE3 functionality did for games - I know that Hitman 4 seemed to do a lot better on that system than the Wilamette or AthlonXP builds (even with the same graphics card moved to compensate). If I remember right max loading temps were in the mid-50s too. Still kind of miss that system... 😢

maximus: I was always partial to the 8800 Ultra myself:

And you're right about "worthless valley" on these things - I'm surprised how little they go for, and have been trying to come up with a reason to justify owning one (or more) for a few days now... 😵

The ATI is very nice too! I remember seeing a Rockwell demonstration system a few years ago with a pair of 2900XTXs (with the extender "sleds" so they locked into the front of the case) - very cool looking setup. It was loud and ran super-duper hot and probably didn't perform so well despite all that, and the cards are bigger than most dual-gpu boards, but who cares when they look cool:

This thread made be look for some of the faster and newer PCIe (vintage 🤣 ) video cards. I got all these cards with minimum bids:

- 7800GT 256
- 7800GT 512
- 7800GTX 256
- 7600GT
- Geforce 4 Ti (not sure which one)

I then forgot about an auction and let a Radeon 9700Pro AIW slip through my fingers. It went for like a dollar 😒

I don't have the time to play with this gear yet anyway, but many of these cards can be had for next to nothing. Although they take up more room than the older cards I think it's good to start grabbing a few.

Personally I would like to get all the "value" cars like the GF4 Ti 4200, 6600GT, 7600GT and so on. With the 8800GT it got a bit out of hand. I believe the last and final / best card with that chip is the GTS250, basically a 9800GTX+ and back then Nvidia had so many models with tiny differences. The 9600GT was also a very good card. Half the guts, but clocked higher and not that far behind the 8800GT.

For DX9 I believe any of these cards will do fine. I don't know if later cards / drivers cause issues with DX9. And what is the deal with Windows XP and new cards?

On Swedish "Ebay" cards like the 7600 GT and 7800 GTX still sell for $7.50 - $15.
The Geforce 7900 GTX with the nice stock cooler often sell for $15 - $20 and its the same with X1950 XTX.
The Original Geforce 8800 GTX 768mb sell for $25+ and the Ultra even more.

Perhaps people are upgrading their old Core 2 Duo rigs to SLI / Crossfire.
Or perhaps the collecting of DX9/DX10 hardware has started early here.

I sold my 7800 GTX for about 20 euro, but I'd love to get another one, I've got some nice memories from that card 🙁

Similar here. I had a pair of the original 7800GT's [EVGA 256mb] in SLI on an ASUS A8N-SLI/Athlon 64 2400+. It was a real "Half-Life 2 Killer" in the day. Now it's on loan to my brother who occasionally likes to play games from that period. One day I'll repatriate the rig back into the retro collection.

Skyscraper wrote:

On Swedish "Ebay" cards like the 7600 GT and 7800 GTX still sell for $7.50 - $15.

And isn't that a bargain for cards that cost several hundred dollars back in the day? The 7800GT I had cost me roughly AU$ 600 and that was quite a bit of money back in the day. The 7800GTX 512 or 7900GTX are even nicer with the massive cooler.

I believe though that Arctic Cooling sells a current cooler that fits all of these cards...

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

This thread made be look for some of the faster and newer PCIe (vintage :lol: ) video cards. I got all these cards with minimum […]
Show full quote

This thread made be look for some of the faster and newer PCIe (vintage 🤣 ) video cards. I got all these cards with minimum bids:

- 7800GT 256
- 7800GT 512
- 7800GTX 256
- 7600GT
- Geforce 4 Ti (not sure which one)

I then forgot about an auction and let a Radeon 9700Pro AIW slip through my fingers. It went for like a dollar 😒

I don't have the time to play with this gear yet anyway, but many of these cards can be had for next to nothing. Although they take up more room than the older cards I think it's good to start grabbing a few.

Personally I would like to get all the "value" cars like the GF4 Ti 4200, 6600GT, 7600GT and so on. With the 8800GT it got a bit out of hand. I believe the last and final / best card with that chip is the GTS250, basically a 9800GTX+ and back then Nvidia had so many models with tiny differences. The 9600GT was also a very good card. Half the guts, but clocked higher and not that far behind the 8800GT.

For DX9 I believe any of these cards will do fine. I don't know if later cards / drivers cause issues with DX9. And what is the deal with Windows XP and new cards?

The G92 appeared as:
- 8800GS
- 8800GT
- 8800GTS 512MB
- 9600GSO
- 9800GT
- 9800GT "Green Edition"
- 9800GTX
- 9800GTX+
- 9800GX2
- GTS 150
- GT 230
- GTS 240
- GTS 250
- GTS 250 "Green Edition"

That doesn't mean those are all equals, the 8800GS, 9600GS, GT 230, are all cut down to 12 ROPs and 48 TMUs (from 64:16 on the "full" chip), the GTS 240 is cut down to 56 TMUs. Clock and memory specs will vary too. Depending on who you ask and how, either the GTS 250 (and/or 9800GTX+ - I think the biggest difference is that 1GB 250s are more common than 1GB 9800s) or 9800GX2 will be the "best."

Regarding DX9 gaming:
The GeForce 4 will not do DirectX 9 - its a DirectX 8.1 card. The GeForce 7600GT will struggle with some later-era DirectX9 games run at high settings (like Oblivion or Hitman 4; I would suggest something else (faster) for games like Mass Effect, Fallout 3, or Skyrim (I think Skyrim actually lists an 8800 as its minimum requirement)). The 7800/7900 and 8800 boards shouldn't give you as much grief - especially the higher spec ones (like 7900GTX). I've personally never had any issues with a DirectX 9 game on newer hardware (up through Radeon HD 4870X2); the bigger issues probably stem from wanting to run the game on Windows Vista, 7, or 8 64-bit - but even there I haven't encountered any problems (the oldest DirectX 9 games I've got, Halo and Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, both run fine under Windows 7 64-bit on HD 4800s). I've also had no issues with getting those cards to work on XP, but the biggest "gotcha" will be the memory address limit - a lot of cards from the GeForce 9 and higher will come with at least 512MB (and more often 1GB) of memory, which will chew into the address space pretty seriously.

Beyond that, there are some *very* demanding DirectX 9 games, like Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, and Grand Theft Auto 4. DirectX 9 is hard to drop into a bin for a single generation of hardware - on one hand you have games like Halo and Doom 3 that will run (more or less) dandy on a GeForce FX and Athlon or Pentium 3, and on the other you have games like Skyrim that require a multi-core processor, multiple GB of system memory, and a 512MB graphics card.

Regarding XP and "new" cards - the newest I've played around with is from the Radeon 4000 series, and it had no problems under WindowsXP. I've had consistently bad luck with very-new cards (like Radeon 7000 series or GeForce 600 series) in terms of either the boards coming dead on arrival, the drivers not liking the board, or the boards not working with the PCIe motherboards I have.

Arctic does sell some very nice coolers, my personal pick is the Accelero Mono Plus:
http://www.arctic.ac/us_en/products/cooling/v … -mono-plus.html

It keeps my HD 4890 very cool and runs very quiet. It did turn the card into a triple-slot monster though... 😵 However for older-era cards, like the GeForce 6 and 7, I do not remember any of them being particularly hot running with their stock coolers. For example my 7900GS uses a reference single-slot design and runs cool, and is quiet. For older cards I'd suggest saving your money and getting a Zalman VF-700 (if you can still find one) if you need to upgrade the cooling.

If DX9 gaming is your goal, something like the 7900GTX or 8800GTX is a fine place to be - it won't run the final-era DX9 games with all the settings on, but it should run them, and it'll tear through the earlier games quite easily.

Oh, and regarding AIW - have you looked into the AIW X800 series cards?

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

On Swedish "Ebay" cards like the 7600 GT and 7800 GTX still sell for $7.50 - $15.

And isn't that a bargain for cards that cost several hundred dollars back in the day?

I'd say yes. For my P4/3.6 rig I got a 7900GTX 512mb for $20, but I was impatient and I wanted a specific version. That's still a great buy for a card that retailed for 400-500 12 years ago.

Even so, eBay BIN are going for more and I think this generation of cards is creeping up.

EDIT: 7900GTX came out about 9 years ago!

tincup wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

On Swedish "Ebay" cards like the 7600 GT and 7800 GTX still sell for $7.50 - $15.

And isn't that a bargain for cards that cost several hundred dollars back in the day?

I'd say yes. For my P4/3.6 rig I got a 7900GTX 512mb for $20, but I was impatient and I wanted a specific version. That's still a great buy for a card that retailed for 400-500 12 years ago.

Even so, eBay BIN are going for more and I think this generation of cards is creeping up.

12 years? I thought it was more like 6... 😊

obobskivich wrote:

The G92 appeared as: - 8800GS - 8800GT - 8800GTS 512MB - 9600GSO - 9800GT - 9800GT "Green Edition" - 9800GTX - 9800GTX+ - 9800GX […]
Show full quote

The G92 appeared as:
- 8800GS
- 8800GT
- 8800GTS 512MB
- 9600GSO
- 9800GT
- 9800GT "Green Edition"
- 9800GTX
- 9800GTX+
- 9800GX2
- GTS 150
- GT 230
- GTS 240
- GTS 250
- GTS 250 "Green Edition"

🤣 What a mess. The GTS 250 1GB is what I'm chasing.

Great info there!

I got some cheap coolers from eBay asia. No name stuff. Will test them. What's an old card that has built-in temperature sensors to compare?

Also I would like to properly clean them. Wash them with water and dry in the sun (it's very hot and dry here?

I basically look out for cards, not really searching for models, but what's currently available and interesting cards pop up all the time. The AIW9700pro really annoys me because it went for $2 and just forgot to bid. I really need to get some bidding software to help me with this 🤣

X800 series is also interesting, although I was back in the Nvidia camp with the Geforce 6 and 7 series.

I did have a HD4850 and that card was such good value. Beat the 8800GT easily and single slot. The last decent single slot card I believe...
Oh, and regarding AIW - have you looked into the AIW X800 series cards?[/quote]

obobskivich wrote:

I've also had no issues with getting those cards to work on XP, but the biggest "gotcha" will be the memory address limit - a lot of cards from the GeForce 9 and higher will come with at least 512MB (and more often 1GB) of memory, which will chew into the address space pretty seriously.

Actually I recently read an interesting article.
http://geoffchappell.com/notes/windows/license/memory.htm
The article is mainly about how Windows Vista 32-bit can be patched to be able to use more than 4GB of RAM, but as a side-note the author claims that Windows XP without service pack or with SP1 at most can use more than 4GB.
(I was originally researching the options for a current 4GB notebook running Windows 7 64-bit to access a printer/scanner for which only a Vista 32-bit driver is available.)

Here is a relevant snippet:

Note that for nearly 5 years, i.e., from Windows 2000 up to but not including Windows XP SP2, Microsoft did not actually prohibit the use of memory above 4GB by any editions of its current Windows product, whether for servers or clients.
...
Special mention must be made of Windows XP SP2 and SP3. If you were fortunate enough to have 4GB in a machine for running a client version of Windows up to and including Windows XP SP1, and your hardware had memory remapping so that some of your 4GB was above the 4GB address, and your third-party drivers worked correctly with memory above 4GB, then you will have faced an unfortunate side-effect when upgrading to Windows XP SP2: you will have bought a downgrade of how much RAM Microsoft permits you to use.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

🤣 What a mess.

If I remember right it was quite a scandal in its day too - I remember people were up in arms about the GTS 150/250 designators putting the cards in the same "family" as the GTX 280.

The GTS 250 1GB is what I'm chasing.

250 is a good card. I think the "Green" card may be potentially better - its a dieshrink, so it means lower power draw, but I don't know if that also means "better overclocking."

I got some cheap coolers from eBay asia. No name stuff. Will test them. What's an old card that has built-in temperature sensors to compare?

I know there have been no-name knock-offs of both the Zalman VF700 and one of the earlier ZeroTHERM heatpipe models - honestly I'm guessing they perform pretty similarly; how much can you really screw up with a block of aluminum? 🤣

Older cards with temp sensors, hrm. I'm pretty sure my GeForce FX 5900XT has a die temp sensor, and I would assume the FX 5800 cards do as well; I know my FX 5200 did NOT though. GeForce 6800s also have sensors. Any of those GeForce 7 boards should have sensors as well - the 7600GT is probably a good choice for that, because it doesn't draw a ton of power (and therefore shouldn't get very hot/have very intense cooling demands), and will have sensors (at least, mine did back in the day).

Also I would like to properly clean them. Wash them with water and dry in the sun

I always just submerge mine in dish water (sometimes with the dishes, ha! 🤣), and let them sit out to dry inside or outside. Once (and this was a one-time thing) I needed the heatsink very quickly, so I turned on the stove (I have an electric one) and dropped it on the burner - burned all the water right off of it. I probably wouldn't do it again, but it did dry it very quickly! 😁

I basically look out for cards, not really searching for models, but what's currently available and interesting cards pop up all the time. The AIW9700pro really annoys me because it went for $2 and just forgot to bid. I really need to get some bidding software to help me with this 🤣

X800 series is also interesting, although I was back in the Nvidia camp with the Geforce 6 and 7 series.

I think the AIW X800 is the final generation of ATi making high-performance AIW cards; after that I think they dropped down to entry and mid-range cards before discontinuing the entire thing (which I think was primarily because of the rise of digital television and online streaming).

I know nVidia made competitive cards with the GeForce FX lineup, called the "Personal Cinema FX" - there's at least an FX 5700 and FX 5900 in that line-up. I don't know a whole lot about them though (from what I understand they're relatively rare/obscure). There might be a GeForce 6 variant, I don't know.

idspispopd wrote:

Actually I recently read an interesting article. http://geoffchappell.com/notes/windows/license/memory.htm The article is mainly […]
Show full quote

Actually I recently read an interesting article.
http://geoffchappell.com/notes/windows/license/memory.htm
The article is mainly about how Windows Vista 32-bit can be patched to be able to use more than 4GB of RAM, but as a side-note the author claims that Windows XP without service pack or with SP1 at most can use more than 4GB.
(I was originally researching the options for a current 4GB notebook running Windows 7 64-bit to access a printer/scanner for which only a Vista 32-bit driver is available.)

Here is a relevant snippet:

Note that for nearly 5 years, i.e., from Windows 2000 up to but not including Windows XP SP2, Microsoft did not actually prohibit the use of memory above 4GB by any editions of its current Windows product, whether for servers or clients.
...
Special mention must be made of Windows XP SP2 and SP3. If you were fortunate enough to have 4GB in a machine for running a client version of Windows up to and including Windows XP SP1, and your hardware had memory remapping so that some of your 4GB was above the 4GB address, and your third-party drivers worked correctly with memory above 4GB, then you will have faced an unfortunate side-effect when upgrading to Windows XP SP2: you will have bought a downgrade of how much RAM Microsoft permits you to use.

Going over 4GB of address space within 32-bit Windows has been possible for a long time - Windows 2000 can address up to something like 32GB depending on version (but it should be noted that machines that run these higher-spec versions of Windows aren't just dragged in off the street - they're usually high end servers). It's handled via PAE extensions, which the CPU and OS must support. However the memory beyond the 4GB marker has to be mapped by a given application/driver, and you still will not exceed the 2 GB (or 3GB with large_address_aware and 4GT) per-process limit for Win32 applications, so while it works on paper, in practice it does very little (and consumer releases of Windows tend to not enable this functionality as "perfectly" as the server releases, because they aren't shipped to do it). Especially from a gamer's perspective - most games are 32-bit and don't eat up gobs of memory (even Skyrim only uses around 1GB).

As far as why Microsoft imposes these limits - who can say. I do know that some older versions of Windows have a heart attack if booted up with relatively a lot of RAM (e.g. Windows ME). So it may be a technical limit (in that they picked a value that will be generally stable on the widest array of hardware). It certainly isn't cash motivated - all of the more recent Windows releases include both 32-bit and 64-bit versions on the same licence (at the same price), so there is no "upsell" going on for 64-bit support. I'm also not aware of Microsoft ever charging for Service Pack 2 or 3, but I do know that Service Pack 2 was/is kind of a contentious release among Windows users; personally I never had any issues with it, but I know people who did. Fortunately downgrade rights are included with most all Microsoft software, and I don't think SP2 is any exception. 😊 Given that Windows XP is ending interactive support in a few months, I'd honestly say pull the machine off the 'net and run whatever Service Pack/update cocktail works the best for your specific hardware (remember that XP has had to support an extremely wide range of hardware through its 13 year lifecycle). Put something more secure and updated online. 😀

Also not surprising at all that your issues with the operating system change-over are printer-related. I'd swear for a while there half of the Windows 7 FAQs were clogged up with "my printer doesn't work!" - blame the greedy cheapskates behind the cheap printers and their terribad drivers.

obobskivich wrote:

12 years? I thought it was more like 6... 😊

Oops... I was wrong - 7900GTX was more like only 9 years ago. They say memory is the first thing to go 😀

Wow it's been 9 years? 😒

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Wow it's been 9 years? 😒

Yeah that was my thought too. 😒

12 isn't that far off...I seriously didn't think it was that long though. 😵

obobskivich wrote:

maximus: I was always partial to the 8800 Ultra myself: […]
Show full quote

maximus: I was always partial to the 8800 Ultra myself:

And you're right about "worthless valley" on these things - I'm surprised how little they go for, and have been trying to come up with a reason to justify owning one (or more) for a few days now... 😵

8800 Ultra's are down to the $75 range for used ones on ebay. It might be a good time to build a quad SLi system with the cards being so cheap. A quad SLi machine centered around these cards could probably still give good framerates to any recent game that still has a DX9 or DX10 renderer.

Holy shit, 9 years since 7800 GTX...
And almost 6 since 4850.

The 4850 was just insane. Sure, the 4870 kicked ass, it had GDDR5 and all that jazz, however the 4850 was insane value. I believe Nvidia had to release the 9800GTX+ to much or even slightly exceed the speed of the 4850. The 8800GT was quite behind
150 Euro made my Core2Duo really shine 😀.
And we all just wanted to play Crysis back then. I played halfway through with my 7800GTX (256MB) and the rest of the game with the 4850. Needless to say, the difference was absolutely phenomenal. Granted, it was summer when I got that card and aside from Crysis and Assassin's Creed (another really beautiful looking game), I didn't really have any other demanding games to play that would really make my purchase justified. But, I don't regret it at all, I pretty much didn't care about getting a new GPU for another 3 years or so. I finally upgraded in 2012!

The only thing that totally pissed me off was the stock cooler. I knew it meant trouble the same evening I bought the card, playing Crysis made that thing quite loud. I remember playing some snow level and hearing that noise. I didn't really care for a few months, until a friend sold me his Scythe Musashi and I could finally let the PC download stuff during bedtime. Not to mention not having to care about temperatures 😀.
I was really impressed with some MSI (I believe) 4850 that had a very smart, single slot cooler, barely made any noise and was very very cool. I built a PC for a friend that used that card and we were both very impressed.

As for the 8800GTX, I always drooled for one of these. The guy that sold me the Musashi gave me a dead one a few months ago and I have it on display. It's really cool to just look at it and remember all those awesome memories.

F2bnp wrote:

I was really impressed with some MSI (I believe) 4850 that had a very smart, single slot cooler, barely made any noise and was very very cool. I built a PC for a friend that used that card and we were both very impressed.

You mean this one?

I have one of those. That was my GPU for Crysis as well 😀

To be honest, though, I always had mixed feelings about the 4850. It struggled a bit with Crysis at max details, even at 1280x1024. And then newer drivers made it essentially useless for older games, even in XP.