I would go with the fx5500. I have a fx5200 in a pentium 3 and its as smooth as can be. I would go with the fx5500 because it is alot faster. If we were comparing it to a radeon 9800, then it would be a closer match.

Is this really PCI only? That really sucks, my brother's PC used to be one of these in tower format (same CPU and chipset too 😀) back in 2000. He eventually upgraded to a GeForce2 MX AGP.

If so, both choices are honestly kind of lame, but I guess okay since you have a relatively slow CPU (even if you do install a 1GHz counterpart later on, may I also suggest a modded Tualatin 1.4 which will work just fine). The FX5500 is essentially an FX5200 with a slightly higher core clock (25MHz). In any case, it will be faster than the Radeon 9000 and certainly more compatible.

I'd go for it and never look back.

Dropcik wrote:

I would go with the fx5500. I have a fx5200 in a pentium 3 and its as smooth as can be. I would go with the fx5500 because it is alot faster. If we were comparing it to a radeon 9800, then it would be a closer match.

The FX5500 isn't a lot faster than an FX5200, unless it is a gimped 5200 with 64bit bus and such. It should be a little faster than the 9000 but not very much if I'm thinking things straight.

FX5500 is a bit faster than an MX 440, which in turn is faster than a GeForce2.
The 9000 is slower than a 8500, which is usually on par with a GeForce3, depending on the occasion.

A 9800 will destroy an FX5500. Even the 5950 will have a hard time against it on a lot of games (especially DX9).

Some of those P3 deskpros have an ESS onboard though, enough to make up for the lack of ISA (though some of them have ISA as part of their risers as well)

Personally? I would stick a Voodoo3 3000 PCI in there 😀 I never think about any shader model 1 or 2 hardware to mix with a retro P3 machine. The V3 3000 has TV out, though dual monitors are a no.

F2bnp wrote:

Is this really PCI only?

Yes unfourtanely. And that's with a PCI riser board so 3 PCI slots comming from one PCI slot, and when i think about it i'm already using a PCI-SATA card and a USB2.0 pci card. Performance won't be great i understand, but for my needs (dual monitor) and playing old games like unreal\ut\quake3 it should be fine i believe.

Oh and you can mod a Pentium 3 tualatin to work on a motherboard that don't support tualatins? I have a Pentium 3 Tualatin 1.4Ghz somewhere, i guess i should google how to mod it then!

The riser shouldn't affect performance. In normal motherboards all PCI connectors share the bus anyway.

alexanrs wrote:

The riser shouldn't affect performance. In normal motherboards all PCI connectors share the bus anyway.

That's good news!
By the way i've searched how to mod a Pentium Tualatin and i found something for a BX440 motherboard, i need to make sure if the mod works the same for a i815 board which is what i have. Anyway i believe i may havekilled my tualatin cpu because if i remember correctly in the past i've tried this Tualatin cpu on non-tualatin boards (of course no boot up) and according to a few google searches i'm doing now seems that the Tualatins have lower voltage requirements when compared to coppermine Pentium 3 cpus, so i may have killed the cpu 🙁

Can someone say if this is a sure killer? I remember i didn't left it long enough since there was no boot.

I would think the potential of frying the proprietary PSU is a bigger concern.

You can mod a tualatin yourself, but there are a ton of guides posted online and you never know which one's the real deal. There's a seller on ebay that mods them on their own and sells them. That's what I was referring to, I'd say it's a better deal if you are looking for an upgrade and don't have one, like the 1GHz model you mentioned.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Tualatin-P-IIIs-1-4 … =item417b1c3fc1

I need to consider that, in case my Tualatin is actually dead or my mod doesn't work. Pentium 3 1ghz coopermine are quite cheap on ebay i might say so i may go with that.
I also don't get the deal with these i815 chipsets and their 512mb ram limit, doesn't make sense even if you consider how old they are.

I'd probably go with the nVidia too - if memory serves their older drivers had better multi-monitor capabilities thru nView than what the R200/300 cards offered with the older Catalyst drivers. Performance-wise they shouldn't be too far apart though - they're both entry-level cards from around the same time. For what it's worth, the FX will support DirectX 9 (but don't expect it to be running Half-Life 2 or FEAR or anything like that), and there are WDDM drivers from nVidia that work with Aero in Vista, but I doubt a P3 is going to be a good candidate for Vista or 7. You might also take a look at used cards (from more mainstream mfgrs like EVGA/PNY/Sapphire/BBA/etc) too - neither of those should require a fan, and I'd skip a little 30-40mm screamer if given the choice.

obobskivich wrote:

You might also take a look at used cards (from more mainstream mfgrs like EVGA/PNY/Sapphire/BBA/etc) too - neither of those should require a fan, and I'd skip a little 30-40mm screamer if given the choice.

Well so would i, i hate those little noisy bastards that fail quite often. On ebay the best options for less than 25€ are the ones given. If i aim at a fanless Geforce 6200 pci i'm going to lose a bit more than that but then it would likely be fanless which is nice. I need to dig this a bit further.

I'm curious about the performance of a Geforce 6200 PCI vs a Geforce FX 5500 PCI , if anyone has ever benched these two please take a step foward 😀

If the 6200 PCI is the full 128bit version, then it should be rather kickass. Quite a bit faster than the 5500, it's usually on par with the Radeon 9600 Pro/X600 Pro. The only drawback I can note is the usage of newer drivers.

The GeForce 6 series also drops support for some legacy stuff.

Also Radeon doesn't do legacy stuff at all. Not even the 7200.

F2bnp wrote:

If the 6200 PCI is the full 128bit version, then it should be rather kickass.

I don't seem to be able to find one 128bit pci version of that card. Probably the best i can find now is this (64 bit version):

http://www.ebay.com/itm/321361125423?_trksid= … K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

To be fair it's a bit too expensive but i really like the fact that it's fanless.

And if you think about it, should 128bit vs 64bit really matter when i plan to install this on a Pentium 733Mhz (to be upgraded later to a Pentium 1Ghz) that only has PCI slots?

I think it may still be faster than an FX5500, even at 64bit.

The card can and will scale even on the PIII 733. There will be a difference between the 64bit and 128bit version. Whether it matters or not, is honestly up to you.

Well when i said if it mattered was when comparing the performance to a Geforce FX 5500 PCI, but if you say that it's likely to be faster than a FX5500 and that it will scale well on this cpu that's even better.

I think it's going to be a nice upgrade from the horrid onboard chipset graphics. Even low resolution videos run bad at full screen.
I'm going to order this Geforce 6200 512mb PCI graphic card, and when i receive it i'll post some 3dmark scores on the 3Dmark2001 thread.

I'm guessing something between 4500 to 5500 3Dmarks 2001 give or take (with the Pentium 3 1ghz coppermine cpu installed).

Oh yes, it will be a huge improvement. I'll try to give you an idea.

The onboard graphics on the i815 chipset is a variant of the Intel i740 graphics card. This card was actually slower than a single Voodoo2. The 6200, even the 64bit variant, should be on par with a GeForce4 Ti 4200, maybe a bit faster depending on the situation. What's really killing it is the lack of bandwidth, due to the 64bit bus, hopefully it has DDR2 memory and not plain DDR.
So, a pretty huge leap in performance 😀.

rick6 wrote:

Well when i said if it mattered was when comparing the performance to a Geforce FX 5500 PCI, but if you say that it's likely to […]
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Well when i said if it mattered was when comparing the performance to a Geforce FX 5500 PCI, but if you say that it's likely to be faster than a FX5500 and that it will scale well on this cpu that's even better.

I think it's going to be a nice upgrade from the horrid onboard chipset graphics. Even low resolution videos run bad at full screen.
I'm going to order this Geforce 6200 512mb PCI graphic card, and when i receive it i'll post some 3dmark scores on the 3Dmark2001 thread.

I'm guessing something between 4500 to 5500 3Dmarks 2001 give or take (with the Pentium 3 1ghz coppermine cpu installed).

I'm not sure on the PCI variant of the 6200, but I know the AGP variants of the GeForce 6 have crippled video acceleration functionality. IME the GeForce FX does not share this problem and PCI variants will enable the same functionality as their AGP cousins. Of course, none of these will help with anything that resembles h.264 or VC-1 (to say nothing of Flash). They'll do MPEG in applications that make use of PureVideo (CyberLink, NV-DVD, etc), and that's pretty much it.