Found another Dell Dimension 2400 in the alley today. I was about to pass it up, as these low end PCI-only P4 machines are about as boring as they get. However I noticed a DVI port on this one. I cracked it open to check out what video card the poor schmuck who owned this thing installed back in 2004 to get it to run Halo at more than 2 fps.
I found an ATI-built card with a fan on it; a feature I don't believe I've seen on a PCI Radeon before today. Anyway, the ATI-built cards usually have 128-bit memory interfaces, so I went home, grabbed a screwdriver, and pulled the card out. Left the rest of the machine in the alley.
At home, I installed the card in my Athlon XP 2800+ based test machine. The dinky little fan certainly sounded rough, but I have a few identical spares that I can easily swap in. The card turned out to be a Radeon 9100, which is kinda weird. I always thought that was an IGP!
Model number aside, the benchmark results confirmed that I had indeed found another 128-bit PCI card. Surprisingly, it's the fastest PCI card in my collection. This unassuming little monster spit out 8100 points in 3DMark01, which absolutely puts to shame my 128-bit GeForce FX 5500, 6200, and Radeon 9250! Huzzah!
"A little sign-in here, a touch of WiFi there..."