I'm not too familiar with the NLX form factor, but as with most things it will depend what you want to do with it. Personally, I think that the Geforce SDR is the best "match" for the processor of those three and will outperform the Voodoo3 by quite a bit most of the time... but if you have a Voodoo3 on hand and want to play Glide games, you might as well give that a shot.

If the FX 5200 has standard clocks and is actually 128bit it has twice the pixel and texel throughput of the Geforce SDR and about 2.5x the memory bandwidth. So, if it was an AGP card that would certainly be the fastest card, but being PCI I feel like it would beat the other cards soundly most of the time and yet have massive dips in performance when the PCI bottleneck came into play.

Anecdote: Back when this stuff was new, I used a Slot A Athlon 750 with a Voodoo3 2000 PCI for a while and eventually upgraded to a Geforce2 GTS 32MB (DDR). The difference was massive, even on the Athlon 750. Obviously the GTS was quite a bit faster than the Geforce SDR, but when thinking about processors in that performance range, I picture them working the best with a Geforce or Geforce 2. 😀

Have you considered the PCI version of Nvidia's GeForce 6200 card?

I used to use one, I may still have it too.

It worked for DOS 6.22 and Windows 98SE, even had drivers and support for 1920x1080 resolution in the latter OS.

Lylat1an wrote on 2024-05-10, 02:43:

Have you considered the PCI version of Nvidia's GeForce 6200 card?

I used to use one, I may still have it too.

It worked for DOS 6.22 and Windows 98SE, even had drivers and support for 1920x1080 resolution in the latter OS.

I thought the Geforce 6 had issues with windows 9x drivers? AKA the last Geforce with proper 9x support was the FX series?

aspiringnobody wrote on 2024-05-10, 03:02:

Lylat1an wrote on 2024-05-10, 02:43:

Have you considered the PCI version of Nvidia's GeForce 6200 card?

I used to use one, I may still have it too.

It worked for DOS 6.22 and Windows 98SE, even had drivers and support for 1920x1080 resolution in the latter OS.

I thought the Geforce 6 had issues with windows 9x drivers? AKA the last Geforce with proper 9x support was the FX series?

Back then my research went as far as "Which was the latest card with Windows 98 support?"

It worked, but I don't recall ever testing how well it worked.

Perhaps it depends on which driver one uses? I recall reading more recently that the final driver release isn't the most ideal.

i'd lean hard into that geforce sdr. That + P3 1GHz = spoiled ass-2000 person.

But yeah stay clear from the later forcewares

Geforce SDR gets my vote. If the 5200 was AGP I'd considering going with that, but since it's PCI that's gonna hold it back by a lot.

Another vote for the GeForce SDR. The Voodoo3 3000 wouldn't be bad either, if you wanted native Glide support.

Are there any NLX Radeons?

I think those early GeForce cards are so overrated but they do have great game support. As long as you aren't picking a game built for Glide. Hopefully that particular 256 SDR is not one of the models with blurry VGA output.

FX 5200 128-bit should be much faster than 256 SDR and has a number of image quality improvements, but PCI is probably a bottleneck, and it would have the most driver overhead.

swaaye wrote on 2024-05-10, 18:41:

Are there any NLX Radeons?

I think those early GeForce cards are so overrated but they do have great game support. As long as you aren't picking a game built for Glide. Hopefully that particular 256 SDR is not one of the models with blurry VGA output.

FX 5200 128-bit should be much faster than 256 SDR and has a number of image quality improvements, but PCI is probably a bottleneck, and it would have the most driver overhead.

I've not come across any. It's possible they exist -- some manufacturers made a little breakaway portion of the PCB in the bottom left of the GPU so you could modify it for NLX use. The bigger issue is the second video output would probably conflict with the case ... it might need desoldered.

I'd imagine if you desoldered the parallel port from the motherboard and the second video output from the GPU any card that would physically fit the case would "work" -- e.g. there aren't any electrical limitations. You could probably rig up something with an agp riser cable as well -- but that's going to require some way to mount the GPU.

I've got the FX5200 in it right now -- but I'm going to throw the GeForce SDR in it when the bracket arrives from eBay. My GeForce SDR has the cutout on the PCB but a regular ATX bracket. I'd prefer a Radeon 9100 (PCI) I think -- but I've never been able to find one of those for any amount of money.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-05-10, 02:37:

I'm not too familiar with the NLX form factor, but as with most things it will depend what you want to do with it. Personally, I think that the Geforce SDR is the best "match" for the processor of those three and will outperform the Voodoo3 by quite a bit most of the time... but if you have a Voodoo3 on hand and want to play Glide games, you might as well give that a shot.

If the FX 5200 has standard clocks and is actually 128bit it has twice the pixel and texel throughput of the Geforce SDR and about 2.5x the memory bandwidth. So, if it was an AGP card that would certainly be the fastest card, but being PCI I feel like it would beat the other cards soundly most of the time and yet have massive dips in performance when the PCI bottleneck came into play.

Anecdote: Back when this stuff was new, I used a Slot A Athlon 750 with a Voodoo3 2000 PCI for a while and eventually upgraded to a Geforce2 GTS 32MB (DDR). The difference was massive, even on the Athlon 750. Obviously the GTS was quite a bit faster than the Geforce SDR, but when thinking about processors in that performance range, I picture them working the best with a Geforce or Geforce 2. 😀

My FX card is actually slightly overclocked from stock. Its 128-bit which means it's 256mb -- and that just doesn't sit right. This box is going to have 9x on it -- so 512mb of ram. I have a 128-bit/128MB FX 5200 -- with all 8 chips -- but sadly PNY underclocked the ram on it.