Can't go wrong with a GeForece 😀

What monitor do you use? For an LCD you want to check out Nvidia Quadro cards as they often have DVI. I have a Quadro2 Pro which is the Quadro version of the GeForce2 Ti and it has DVI which looks very sharp.

Next card up is the GeForce4 which should have DVI on most models.

GeForce4 works in Super socket 7 boards so I wouldn't worry about using such cards in a Pentium III.

Iam using an LG L1710S LCD TN panel display.. With other cards i dont have that pale effect.. Only with that Geforce 3 card installed.

I think a geforce 4 is just to much for this kind of period system. I dont know if that diamond Viper V770 32MB is a better choice after all when it comes to better graphics quality.
I have chosen the geforce 3 because same speed of the Geforce 2 ultra and the NVIDIA nfiniteFX™ Engine that became as extra feature.

"Too much" of what? The CPU will hold things back naturally.

Its fine.
I have a FX5700-Ultra in one PIII 700 machine just for the DVI port.
Geforce3 isn't even overkill for a 550mhz PIII, especially if its the TI-200 and your not overclocking it.

I dont think that the games that will running on this system wouldnt more benefit from extra features over NVIDIA nfiniteFX™ Engine.

@ alphawing, no its just the first plain geforce 3 version (not the TI ones.)

Iam not going to overclock this system, because i like if the system would last longer then this day.

Its fine too.
TI200's often have DVI ports, so assumed it was.
They are clocked 25mhz slower then a stock GF3.

Should it make a differents in speed if i choose the TI200 over the plain geforce 3? Or would both even fast (i dont know if the plain geforce 3 is holding back in speed)

I think I ran this card for a time in a 350 Mhz Pentium II W98 system. I just wanted to be able to run GLQuake properly. The model was ELSA Gladiac 920 IIRC. Highly recommended card.

Wouldn't make a major difference.
People would just buy the TI-200 to save money and OC past GF3 speed.
If you don't OC it, it runs cold enough to run passive with a V3 sized heatsink.

Heat was what killed my GF3. The stock fan wore out after a couple of years but I replaced it with (IIRC) a Vantec Iceberg. However that also failed eventually, and this time I didn't power the computer down in time, so lost the card.

AlphaWing wrote:

Wouldn't make a major difference.
People would just buy the TI-200 to save money and OC past GF3 speed.
If you don't OC it, it runs cold enough to run passive with a V3 sized heatsink.

+1. The Ti cards came out after the "normal" GF3 by a little bit (few months) as nVidia attempted to diversify the range (the Ti 200 is slightly slower, the Ti 500 is slightly faster).

As far as the build at hand - (any) GF3 is a fine choice here; it will offer pixel shaders, MSAA, and LMA over the GF2 (all of which are improvements), and while the P3 may be a bottleneck for some games that the GF3 should run with a newer CPU (in 2001 when GF3 was new, P4 was just starting to come about, and >1GHz P3s and Athlons were available - something like Morrowind, for example, will be supported on GF3, but with the 550MHz P3 will probably not run super-duper), but it doesn't sound like you're running such games. For most of those 2k/XP compatible games that require a 233 MMX or similar I run them without problems on a P4 with an FX 5800 - runs perfectly. A P3 + GF3 should be no problem either (that is, I don't have anything running "too fast" so you shouldn't either), unless you want 8x AA forced on everything. 😊

As far as AGP 2x vs 4x - as time went on 4x became somewhat important for later cards, but if memory serves it wasn't really until the GeForce 4 Ti and GeForce FX era that this started to be relevant. For older games you shouldn't have any issues, and even in somewhat newer titles you shouldn't have issues at lower resolutions (and the P3 will be a bigger bottleneck as you move much newer, I would assume).

Mau1wurf1977: There is also a GeForce 3 Quadro, called Quadro DCC, though afaik they aren't terribly common boards.

Kinda relevant but the original Xbox was a celeron 733+a tweaked Geforce 3 running a lite version of 2k.
It did console games of that era fine 🤣 .
As for the stock TI-200, the OEM DELL versions come with a heatsink that looks just like the one on the Voodoo 3 3000, only black.
They shouldn't burn up passive. The heatsink doesn't even get unbearably hot to the touch.

AlphaWing wrote:

Kinda relevant but the original Xbox was a celeron 733+a tweaked Geforce 3 running a lite version of 2k.
It did console games of that era fine 🤣 .

Aye. But it isn't quite identical to a Celeron 733, GF3, and Win2k in a PC; there's various optimizations that can go into a console game and it generally only has to worry about a relatively low resolution for output. That said, GF3 generally should have very good compatibility with games as a result - just like GF7 from PS3. 😀

As for the stock TI-200, the OEM DELL versions come with a heatsink that looks just like the one on the Voodoo 3 3000, only black.
They shouldn't burn up passive. The heatsink doesn't even get unbearably hot to the touch.

That's how my GF2 and GF4 MX cards were as well - never had issues with them. 😊

You could go for a geforce 4 ti4200, they are very common, very cheap and very fast. Your P3 will be a big bottleneck but it won`t be any slower than with a geforce3.

I think geforce 4 in a system like that means virtually free AA and that is always nice. Geforce 4 is better at AA so that would be my choice.

Agp 2x does not matter, even if your board would support 8x it wouldn`t be fast enough to feed the card with that cpu so no problem.

If you don`t want AA then Geforce2 is more than enough. TnL is a very nice feature and geforce3 does it better but there are very few titles that use it that will run smooth on a 550mhz i guess.

Back in the day when i had a geforce2GTS i had a 800mhz p3 and it was a good balanced system. Now i use a gf2Ti in a k6-3+ and it has some muscle left for AA.

If you look at anandtech reviews and see the used cpu`s: Geforce2 p3-550 and athlon 750, geforce3 p3 1ghz, geforce4 athlon xp 2000+

meljor wrote:

You could go for a geforce 4 ti4200, they are very common, very cheap and very fast. Your P3 will be a big bottleneck but it won […]
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You could go for a geforce 4 ti4200, they are very common, very cheap and very fast. Your P3 will be a big bottleneck but it won`t be any slower than with a geforce3.

I think geforce 4 in a system like that means virtually free AA and that is always nice. Geforce 4 is better at AA so that would be my choice.

Agp 2x does not matter, even if your board would support 8x it wouldn`t be fast enough to feed the card with that cpu so no problem.

If you don`t want AA then Geforce2 is more than enough. TnL is a very nice feature and geforce3 does it better but there are very few titles that use it that will run smooth on a 550mhz i guess.

Back in the day when i had a geforce2GTS i had a 800mhz p3 and it was a good balanced system. Now i use a gf2Ti in a k6-3+ and it has some muscle left for AA.

If you look at anandtech reviews and see the used cpu`s: Geforce2 p3-550 and athlon 750, geforce3 p3 1ghz, geforce4 athlon xp 2000+

Do you have URLS for these reviews, i want to compare, and maybe decide if i will choose a faster processor..

I think it's a bit redundant. Personally think a Geforce 3 would go better with at least a 1GHZ Pentium 3. TBH a Pentium 3 running this slow seems a bit odd 🤣. There really wasn't any slow versions of DirectX 8 cards from Nvidia. Geforce 3 TI200 and the Geforce 4 TI4200 weren't lamed in any way, despite being the slowest versions of their respective architecture. It's a shame there's not more cards like this. Personally think a low-end Geforce 4 MX would be a better balance.

Holering wrote:

I think it's a bit redundant. Personally think a Geforce 3 would go better with at least a 1GHZ Pentium 3. TBH a Pentium 3 running this slow seems a bit odd 🤣. There really wasn't any slow versions of DirectX 8 cards from Nvidia. Geforce 3 TI200 and the Geforce 4 TI4200 weren't lamed in any way, despite being the slowest versions of their respective architecture. It's a shame there's not more cards like this. Personally think a low-end Geforce 4 MX would be a better balance.

WildcatVP is a slower DX8 card, but they're not as common and the drivers aren't as perfect as what you could expect from nVidia (and no 9x support). Silly big framebuffers too. Might at least be worth a look if you're after something quirky/different - mine seems to play AOK with a Voodoo2 under 2k with the reference 3dfx driver. 😀

Never heard of those. Have you tried them in DOS? That's cool you know some of this stuff. Do you have a thread about these? Very interesting.