I think there is a voltage difference in the PCI versions and the bandwidths are different as well. I may be wrong as this is off the top of my head and not looked up online, yet.

I think there is a thread around here that details attempts to get modern PCI graphics cards working on old 486 mobos...

EDIT: Found it! Modern graphics on a 486 Again, it's for 486 boards. There's probably a thread or two talking about getting modern PCI graphics cards working on socket 7 boards like yours as well.

Bullmecha wrote:

I think there is a voltage difference in the PCI versions and the bandwidths are different as well. I may be wrong as this is off the top of my head and not looked up online, yet.

The two notches on the pictured card indicate that it is able to run at either voltage (5V or 3.3) - is that what you meant or was there *another* voltage change in the spec?

As for the voltage, the PCI card should be universal, as 3 notches (in AGP too, for example) always indicate. But maybe it will not like 33MHz PCI bus instead of 66...?

Sutekh94 - thanks for the thread, but there are discussing cards from the TNT era. I talking about X1300 Radeon, witch is years away from such oldschool stuff 😀 That is the reall challenge. I seen on back of Radeon 9250 the similar chips, that are on my GF 2 MX400 and that card refuse to work... 🙁

There was a guy using a pci Geforce 8400gs on a Socket 370 motherboard a while back if I remember correctly.

The 3.3v/5v issue and bus speed shouldn't be a problem. 5V 33MHz PCI slots were always standard for consumer motherboards. 3.3v slots and those that supported 66MHz and faster were never common. A card like this was targeting basic P4 machines with nothing but PCI slots in them, and those would have been 5v 33MHz slots.
I don't know the details of the changes in the PCI spec, but that's certainly a concern. The card probably officially asks for a later PCI revision than an old motherboard would comply with.
The only change I know about is an extra voltage line that was optional in older PCI slots but became mandatory later. I have no idea if it's relevant here. I don't remember if it was a standby voltage, or an aux/extra power supply line.

I have run into some compatibility issues with wireless network cards and USB 2.0 cards on old machines, but in both cases working cards did exist.
I haven't tried any late video cards on a socket-7. If there are some that are electrically compatible, they might also have driver problems. The drivers might require later instructions like SSE. But I haven't tried it. You've got me curious now. 😀

Well, if this is about adding voltage on the PCI slot, then that mod is possible 😀

As for drivers - hopefully they manage with MMX and 3DNow(+) my K6-III+ offer: http://hwbot.org/submission/2991586_

But certainly I wonder, what could be possible there. I see a guy with AMD K6-III+ and GeForce 2ti. To beat him, a better GFX card is need in the PCI slots 😀

Just beware the driver overhead. Even if the card itself is way more powerful than a Geforce2, the driver's CPU overhead might make it stutter and get worse FPS. GeForce FX cards are usually a good bet, being both decently compatible with older stuff and offering decent DX7/8 performance.

Actually I remember Feipoa posting about running some tests on one of his slower machines and the FX series had more overhead than older GeForce cards. The only reason I would consider a non-contemporary card for a Pentium system would be for a DVI port. GF4MX is typically suggested.

I'd ditch that motherboard and go with an AGP one. Opens up so many more options. K6-III+ with GeForce4? No problem if that's what you're after.

Thanks Swaaye; I had forgotten about that [recent] work already. In short, the graphics card performance depended on the resolution, game, driver revision, and OS.

The FX5500 outperformed the GF2MX400 in 3DMark2000 at higher resolutions (1152x864), but not at lower resolutions (800x600). In Final Reality (DX5), the FX5500 was horifically slow. In GLQuake, the GF2MX400 had the same performance as the FX5500 (at higher and lower resolutions). The FX5500 was a tad slower than GF2MX400 in Quake II. In Quake III, the FX5500 was a fair amount faster than the GF2MX400. The charts can be located here: Topic 35051

These results are somewhat inconclusive as to how much additional CPU overhead was needed by the FX5500 compared to the GF2. There was a lot of speed variance depending on which driver version was utilised.

Recently got my Nvidia FX5500 256MB 128Bit Made by AXLE - it has two notches for 3.3 & 5V but it dosent even do POST. The Fan of the card is running when i turn the PC on so what is the problem? I don´t get it 😒