Screen quality depends also on the manufacturer of the graphics card.
Anyway, if you have one, have you tried a Diamond Viper V550 TNT1 card?

I'd go NV out of those. The 4MX.

The S3 is worth keeping around for the ocassional DOS trouble.

The TNT2 Ultra or GeForce2 MX 400 would probably be the closest matches. At the end of '99 these were the typical choices (with the GF2 MX 400's performance being nearly identical to that of a GeForce 256 SDR) for a high-end PIII or Athlon system.

If it's any help, my MX400 runs beautifully alongside my V2's.

If it's one of the cards without a heatsink, I recommend you put a sink on it though. The things can get hot enough to burn you, or in this case, to heat the heck out of the cards next to them.

When you say the screen was murky, did you try running the M64 straight to the monitor (not fed through the V2's)? Sometimes that short VGA cable used to bridge between the main card and the 1st Voodoo2 can be dodgy. If you find that it is, I can recommend the cable I settled on if I can find a link. It's so thick it almost makes the AGP card want to come out of it's slot, but I can jack the resolution all the way up to 1080P via pass through and it still looks clear. No thumbscrews on the video card side though.

I like the TNT2 Ultra. It also has official Win3.x driver support (via TNT1 driver) for higher res. and colours. Runs less hot than a MX400.

Malik wrote:

I like the TNT2 Ultra. It also has official Win3.x driver support (via TNT1 driver) for higher res. and colours. Runs less hot than a MX400.

I would second this, but the OP said the picture was muddy.

My bet is still that it's the pass through cable mucking things up though, unless the TNT2 is dying.

He said his TNT2 M64 was blurry, not the Ultra.

swaaye wrote:

He said his TNT2 M64 was blurry, not the Ultra.

*smacks forehead* He's got two TNT's, I totally didn't catch that.

Then I agree, just ditch the M64, but at least check to make sure the card was bad first. I don't remember a single time when I had bad picture that it wasn't video cable related unless I had a checkerboard pattern and it was clear the card was dying or dead. They always seem to fail spectacularly.

I used a MX440 in my K62-533 machine for years.

I would put either the TNT2 Ultra or the 440MX card, whichever gave me the best image...

I would also go for TNT2 ultra - especially if its from a good manufacturer (Asus for example), or S3 - for compatibility purposes. Even better, I would ask around for a Matrox - its awesome card to have for 2D (you got Voodoo for 3D) 😀

BTW, are you sure the image is muddy because of the AGP card? You do know that any resolution >1024x768 will be muddy when connected through V2 because of the pass-through cable, especially with higher refresh rates! Try connecting the AGP card directly to monitor and see for yourself.