Geforce4MX or Radeon9200

They're not super easy to find (for a good price, anyway), but the Geforce 6200 PCI is pretty decent.

Or try a Voodoo 4 or 5 PCI ;D

Voodoo 3, GeForce 4MX 440, Radeon 9100 (must be Visiontek Xtasy. It's the only card I've found that runs the memory at the full 250mhz. Others clock the memory slower)

Read here

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=1043810

In 3dMark01, the Visiontek 9100 seriously spanks the GF4MX and FX5200. In 3dMark03, it wrecked the FX5200 except in tests where DX9 specific features were required to run the test. The GF4MX, being a DX7 card, couldn't compete in 3dMark03 which is geared towards DX8/9 performance.

If you don't need DX9 or higher in a vintage gaming rig and can only buy one card, then I think the Visiontek 9100 is worth seeking out.

I'd buy a new motherboard. 😀

An old micro ATX mobo w/ AGP running 845PE or 865PE should be pretty cheap now. Just swap that annoying thing out of there. Make sure you get a backplate with the new one though and make sure your current case has a removable backplate. You can run your current CPU and RAM. 865PE would get you a nice speed boost courtesy of dual channel too.

The Asus P4P800SE was a nice socket 478 motherboard.

Here's a review at xbitlabs:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/d … sus-p4p800.html

I would rather buy Sparkle NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT with passive cooling.
http://www.sparkle.com.tw/product_detail.asp? … d=69&sub_id=160

MURLON wrote:

I would rather buy Sparkle NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT with passive cooling.
http://www.sparkle.com.tw/product_detail.asp? … d=69&sub_id=160

Holy shit! Wouldn't that be overkill for a system like that?
(Me wants to have that card! 😁 )

MURLON wrote:

I would rather buy Sparkle NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT with passive cooling.
http://www.sparkle.com.tw/product_detail.asp? … d=69&sub_id=160

Beyond a certain point it gets ridiculous to keep upgrading to newer PCI video cards. Sparkle also makes a 1gb 9500GT but do you really need it in a retro rig? Once your video card saturates the PCI bus, making it faster doesn't do much since you're bottlenecked by the bus and adding new features also doesn't accomplish much if the rest of your system is too slow to use them effectively. You may also need a BIOS update to use the newer video card which may not be available if you're using a really old motherboard and your PSU may not be up to powering the new video card making the upgrade even more expensive when you factor in a PSU upgrade. Most games that you'll be running on a retro system under DOS or Win3.1/9x probably won't utilize any DX version later than 8.1 anyway so a DX9/10 capable card is really overkill and there also may not be drivers for DOS or early Windows versions.

8500GT is a really low end card and on PCI it's going to be even worse. I wouldn't be surprised to see a GF 6600 GT challenge this card. The considerably faster 8600GT (I have one) can barely keep up with a 7900 GT.

It also is guaranteed to be trouble with some old 3D games because all of the DX10 and newer cards have various problems with them. When NV and ATI moved to unified shader designs a lot changed and they didn't bother to make sure ancient D3D5-era games still worked and looked right.

Another issue with the PCI and AGP DX10 cards is that they tend to be priced well beyond their real value.

I still say replace the mobo with something that has AGP and get an appropriate video card for the retro games you want to play.

swaaye wrote:

8500GT is a really low end card and on PCI it's going to be even worse. I wouldn't be surprised to see a GF 6600 GT challenge this card. The considerably faster 8600GT (I have one) can barely keep up with a 7900 GT.

I personally think the only decent "budget" card to come from Nvidia was the Geforce 7600GT... that card was fantastic at the time! (for price/performance 😀).

Yeah 7600GT was a beast. One of their midrange cards that made ATI's midrange look ridiculous.

X1600XT = 🤣