Sounds just right for the time! What case are you using?

Oh, nothing special, just a battered old ATX mid-tower case.

I tried putting a Geforce 2 MX 200 PCI in it and man, it is slow. Better than the terrible on-board SiS but not by much (about 10% in Morrowind, Gothic and Doom 3). I cannot wait to get the Geforce 4 TI 4200.

You can bump up the HDD and still be era friendly. Be sure to post Doom 3 Demo results on this thread...
Doom 3 timedemo shootout with period correct hardware.

Your CPU is pretty much top of the line for the time. There was also the 2.8GHz and 3.06GHz Northwood models if you'd like something a little faster but still period correct.
Not a big fan of the ECS motherboard or the chipset used on it, although by this point ECS had greatly improved since their older boards. I would look into getting a nicer board, ASUS or Abit maybe 😀.

GeForce4 Ti4200 was the go to card for gamers 😁! If you ever want something faster and still period correct, you can go for the Ti 4600 or the Radeon 9700 Pro, both of which kick ass.
Lastly, you could go for the Audigy or even Audigy2 (I think it was out at this point) if you want a better sound card and EAX 3 and 4 (should be handy in Doom 3 😉 ).

How is Morrowind on this system by the way? That game was such a hog 😳!

Subscribing ! When does the Ti arrive ?

I had a good run with SIS based P4 boards. All the drivers are still online, makes it easy. I have three boards, all three from Asus though. Two with the 651 chipset that do 533 MHz FSB, one with the 650 chipset which does only 400 MHz. Universal AGP also, so you can use Diamond TNT and Voodoo cards if you wish.

Good BIOS options also. I don't think I would pick SIS over an Intel chipset, but they work quite well from my experiences.

Yeah, they work fine and performance is probably pretty comparable outside of synthetics. I'm just a little afraid of situations like the GUI performance with VIA chipsets which is something that probably went under the radar at the time of release. Re: VIA vs. 2D speed
I'm probably just fear mongering since nothing like this has ever been found on SiS chipsets 🤣 .

tincup wrote:

You can bump up the HDD and still be era friendly.

It is actually 37Gb, but yes I see your point. It is what the machine came with. What is a good side for that 2001-2003 time?

F2bnp wrote:

Not a big fan of the ECS motherboard or the chipset used on it, although by this point ECS had greatly improved since their older boards. I would look into getting a nicer board, ASUS or Abit maybe 😀.

Yes I totally agree, the motherboard is probably the weakest point. The computer came with it (and the CPU and HDD) from my parents. For now I will keep it and possibly upgrade it later.

AzzKickr wrote:

Subscribing ! When does the Ti arrive ?

Thank you. In 2-3 days. Same with the Live!.

I plan to run initially Morrowind, Gothic II and Doom 3 (I own the original disks for all 3) and incidentally those games also show FPS. I did a run of perf analysis with both the onboard SiS650M and a Geforce2MX200 PCI. So that I have a base of comparison once the Ti4200 comes.
Any other games of that era that contain built in performance display, like a FPS counter?

vladstamate wrote:

I also plan to run Doom 3 on this configuration.

May I ask why you want to do that? Is this solely for benchmarking purposes?

The GeForce 4 is not capable of Shader Model/Pixel Shader 2.0 which is an important tech level for the id Tech 4 engine. I used a GeForce 5900 Ultra when Doom 3 was released, and replayed it shortly afterwards on a 6800 GT. I usually object playing games with anything less than every single setting maxed out for best possible visual experience.

The game was released in late 2004, so the configuration you plan (keeping it 2002 relevant) would definitely be considered outdated in regards to Doom 3. My system back then was still P4 based, too. But that was already the P4 3.4GHz EE on an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe (i875P) with 1GB Corsair DDR400 in Dual-Channel mode (I still have the parts in storage).

This is no criticism for your chosen system specs but merely an inquiry in regards to choosing Doom 3 for that specific system.

Have fun completing and enjoying the build 😀

voodoo5_6k wrote:

The game was released in late 2004, so the configuration you plan (keeping it 2002 relevant) would definitely be considered outdated in regards to Doom 3.

I agree with that. The system will not be able to play Doom 3 at decent levels. I am expecting around 8fps or so. I am just trying it for pure benchmark reasons. The only 2 games I actually want to to play are Morrowind and Gothic II.

Strange; I posted but it doesn't show.

So in short again: no big visual difference between shader model modes in Doom 3. D3 was actually developed on a GF3 and that GF4 will go well beyond 8fps rest assured.
But agree that Doom 3 was released on more modern hw.

That P4 is actually quite TOTL for 2002? A friend of mine had a 2.4 that I drooled over for a short period of time round about then. It ran the E3 D3 demo (3 levels, PoC for the D3 engine) lurvly, and I ran it on XP1600 with a MX440 and FX5200, but yes it worked much better when I upgrade my FX5200 to 4600Ti 😵. Decent FPS although I forget what res at the time. I don't think you'll get 60. but a lot more than 8 imo 😀.

Honestly for Morrowwind I'd go with an Athlon 64 and a Geforce 6 card, the game ran like crap on the hardware of the day

candle_86 wrote:

Honestly for Morrowwind I'd go with an Athlon 64 and a Geforce 6 card, the game ran like crap on the hardware of the day

Agreed, and Gothic II is surprisingly demanding at max settings too. I run both of these games on a 3.4Ghz Cedar Mill + 8800GTX!

Love the idea behind this tho - both classic RPGs. Have fun with your build and if it turns out not to be fast enough, then upgrades for that era machine a still cheap and easy to find.

So the Ti 4200 finally came (the Live! came too but I cannot get it to work for now). I am quite impressed with the results. I'll have some hard perf numbers soon but from a quick play around this is what I see

Morrowind

About 4x faster than Geforce 2 MX200. The interesting thing that I cannot explain is that I get same FPS (around 32-36) on either 640x480 no pixel shaders or 1024x768 with pixel shaders. This would suggest I am CPU bound. I will need to investigate more. However the game is totally playable with >30fps with everything max (well up to 1024x768 res).

Gothic II

Same story. About 30-40 fps @ 640x480 (but will all settings maxed) in the beginning (after you get out of the tower). Feels playable. I will increase resolution and see what happens and how it scales.

Doom 3

At ultra at 1024x768 "timedemo demo1 1" gave me 7.9fps. At lowest settings 30fps. If I play at High settings I get anywhere between 7 and 25 fps. Not really playable at that setting level as it goes down to 10fps pretty often. I will update the Doom 3 thread with my timings.

I'll try to run 3DMark 2001 as well.

Overall I am happy.

Ultra is reserved for 512mb+ videocards 😀 that explains your horroble score. A Ti4200 is a medium card for Doom 3

I tried putting a Geforce 2 MX 200 PCI in it and man, it is slow.

looks like you got one of that shitty 32bit RAM GeForce's...
There are also fast one's.

Uff

Gothic II
Same story. About 30-40 fps @ 640x480 (but will all settings maxed) in the beginning (after you get out of the tower). Feels playable. I will increase resolution and see what happens and how it scales.

Get a 9800 Pro or GeForce 6xxx for this game its highly recommend.
I remember we played the Demo on 9200 Radeon and it was much faster on 1280x1024 then your GeForce Ti in 640x480.
Also P4 CPU.
Something is wrong here!

I also played Morrowind with much more Speed on a P3 CPU.. 😳

matze79 wrote:

Get a 9800 Pro or GeForce 6xxx

Direct x 9.0 came out at the end of 2002