VOGONS


First post, by i486_inside

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Card Specs:
Nvidia Geforce 9500GT Chipset
1GB DDR2 RAM
1x DMS-59 Connector
1x AV Multi-Out Port
PCI 2.1 Interface
Model Number:VIDEO-498PCI-DLP

Box Contents:
1x DMS-59 to Dual DVI-I Cable
1x AV Break-Out Cable
Driver Disk
Manual

Box Pictures:
pZB3ZLcl.jpg?1
3fg87AMl.jpg?1
qJIzEuQl.jpg?1
0DtJYbAl.jpg?1

Package Contents:
FcMIGhLl.jpg?1

The Card:
WexXYucl.jpg?1
4faHMV7l.jpg?1

PLX PCIe to PCI Bridge Chip:
I06BeUel.jpg?1

Testing Setup
Compaq SR2032X
A64 3500+ "Orleans @ 2750MHZ
250MHZ Ref. Clock
1250Mhz HT Link
4GB NANYA DDR2 800 @ DDR2 916 6-6-6-18-2T
Asus A8M2N-LA(Naos-GL6) cross-flashed with A8M2N-LA(Nodus) Bios V3.10
250W HiPro PSU
500GB OEM Momentus Thin HDD
Windows XP Pro SP3
GPU: Jaton 9500GT PCI 1GB and Gigabyte GT240 512MB GDDR5

Benchmark Method.
The 9500GT was bench marked 3 times in 5 version of 3DMark then averaged, the GT240 was benchmarked once on the same tests to provide a general baseline score. The benchmarks were ran at the default graphical settings the only change I made was enabling extra tests that weren't enabled by default.

Benchmark Results

3DMark 2000
9500GT:~2941
GT240: 23586
2vXSfSBh.png

3DMark 2001
9500GT;~12488
GT240:28004
u4UVbI5h.png

3DMark 2003
9500GT:~7772
GT240: 23985*
11gM3KQh.png

3DMark 2005
9500GT:~2884
GT240: 12540*
CwkFr9Y.png

3DMark 2006
9500GT:~1711
GT240: 6705*
hodlwzEh.png

Conclusion: The 9500GT PCI appears to be absolutely choked for bandwidth as other benchmarks online put PCIe versions of the 9500GT at about 2-3 times slower than the GT240 and the 9500GT PCI is much much slower than the GT240 in this testing. During my testing of the card it seemed at times stuttery and there seemed to be screen tearing, It could have been my HP w17e, but given the poor performance of this card I would hypothesize that the card being choked for bandwidth is the culprit rather than the poor quality scaling and ADC equipment in the monitor. If you were thinking about getting one of these I recommend against it they are pretty hard to find, they are generally expensive, and it appears they are choked by the PCI bus , if you need a more "modern" PCI video card I would look towards an FX5200, FX5500, or Geforce 6200 as they are more common and generally less expensive and probably perform similarly since it appears that PCI reduces the performance enough that a newer and/or higher end GPU id pointless on PCI.

*GT240 benchmarks were only ran once, 9500GT benchmarks were ran 3 times and averaged.

Reply 2 of 17, by i486_inside

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I did an unboxing video that I forgot to include in the original post
(loud annoying ringing/hum warning)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z6F5JA5Yvs&l … dbpb3uags1uhzjc

I am trying to get a PCIe 9500GT or GT120 off ebay to do an apples to apples test, but me being me I have to put in a bunch of low ball best offers and try to get it for the absolute cheapest price, after all my strategy does work pretty well since I got this card for $30 vs the $70-90 that seems to be the going rate.

Reply 3 of 17, by ODwilly

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I put a GeForce 8400gs in a 3.06/512/533 HT P4 machine and was super disappointed with the results. At least under Vista it is almost useless for HD video.

Main pc: Asus ROG 17. R9 5900HX, RTX 3070m, 16gb ddr4 3200, 1tb NVME.
Retro PC: Soyo P4S Dragon, 3gb ddr 266, 120gb Maxtor, Geforce Fx 5950 Ultra, SB Live! 5.1

Reply 4 of 17, by i486_inside

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I tried this card in my ECS 845GV-M3 based box and playing an HD video from youtube in VLC seemed more jumpy than the internal video with the bus overclocked to 180mhz with my celeron D 2.13 running at 2.88ghz with the ram at DDR 370 2-2-2-5 , even installing an 128MB 64-bit FX5500 in the AGP Express slot seemed worse than the internal video as well, PCI is just way too choked for bandwidth there is very good reason why AGP was developed and why manufacturers embraced it so quickly. I tried running the cards at the stock FSB and changed around the PCI clock speed and then overclocked it again to a played around with the PCI dividers and the cards were pretty jumpy in all configurations , at 1152 x 864 The Simpsons Hit & Run was really laggy and had screen tearing, when I tried the GPU in the test computer with the same game it wasn't as bad but there was still a lot of moments were you could tell that the GPU just couldn't get data fast enough and the game was stuttery where the GT240 it is rather smooth and really only has slow downs if a background process does anything CPU intensive, I also tried to play a youtube video on the test system and it was really laggy whereas the gt240 could play it rather flawlessly.

Reply 5 of 17, by Standard Def Steve

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This shouldn't be a surprise. PCI can only do 133 MB/s, and it's shared. Mechanical hard drives can sustain a higher sequential transfer rate than that.

Even integrated graphics from the Core2 era have much better 2D speed than PCI video cards. Running any version of Windows newer than XP on a PCI video card is torture.

P6 chip. Triple the speed of the Pentium.
Tualatin: PIII-S @ 1628MHz | QDI Advance 12T | 2GB DDR-310 | 6800GT | X-Fi | 500GB HDD | 3DMark01: 14,059
Dothan: PM @ 2.9GHz | MSI Speedster FA4 | 2GB DDR2-580 | GTX 750Ti | X-Fi | 500GB SSD | 3DMark01: 43,190

Reply 6 of 17, by gandhig

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Newer non-native PCI graphics cards are real slow most probably due to the overhead created on account of PCIe to PCI Bridges for data transfers. My first post in this forum was made for such similar issue, some 3 years back.

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Reply 7 of 17, by zstandig

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Dang, this post brings back all sorts of odd experiences for me.

The model of PC looks like the second PC I owned (same case, different specs)... but since it's the first PC I owned that had 'modern features' like USB 2.0 on the front, broadband internet, and NT based windows I kind of think of it as my second first PC... if that makes any sense. (It was a big leap from USB 1.1, Dial up, and a 450MHz Pentium III)

I still have the 9500GT and for a while I used it in a Dell L800r. It was a tiny computer without AGP (despite being made in 2000). I was in my "max it all out just because" phase (which I'm still in to some extent) and got that card. I thought it was hilarious because the card had more RAM than the computer. (1GB to 512MB). Just to be extra crazy I had a modified 1.4 GHz Pentium III-S in the box with it.

I wanted to get crazier with it and bought a Zotac GT 430 (PCI), but for some reason it didn't display video so I still have it unused.

I wasn't expecting great results but on such a limited computer from the year 2000 it was pretty usable with windows xp up to about 2011 or so. I was playing games made as late as 2004 or so on it.

Reply 8 of 17, by nforce4max

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I had this card in my collection at one point in a northwood P4 system and even then it felt like the card was a bottleneck, I agree with the comment of sticking with older native cards and the pci bus is just way way too slow for anything remotely modern.

On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.

Reply 9 of 17, by i486_inside

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nforce4max wrote:

I agree with the comment of sticking with older native cards and the pci bus is just way way too slow for anything remotely modern.

Not only that, they are expensive, I got lucky to get this thing for $30, brand new, there was another one listed in "new pull" condition that I offered on and they declined my offer, it sold a couple days after I bought this one for the full asking price of $75+shipping, for comparison when I bought my 4x FX5500 PCI cards back in 2013 I got them for like ~$22/shipped($2/piece + $13 and some change in shipping) on a best offer

I'm going to be moving out of my Mom's house soon and moving in to a house I bought, when I do that,I will finally have enough space for this hobby(or did I misspell hoarding), I will be able retrieve my old computer crap from my dad's basement and test an FX5500 PCI on this machine for comparison, just for s&g I might also track down a PCX5300 to compare the FX5500 PCI to it.

Reply 10 of 17, by dirkmirk

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Those 3Dmark 2003 results look very impressive to me....

I tested some PCI cards recently ie the FX5500/ATI 9100 they can't come close to your results, much older technology but it still implies your card can get big improvements on the PCI bus.

It would be great if you can test Half Life 2/Doom3/Farcry and see if those games play at an acceptable level, even if anecdotally

Reply 11 of 17, by i486_inside

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An anecdotal thing I will mention is that games seemed to have ocassional jumpy frame rates it's like the card can process data faster than it receives it and it lags while waiting for addtional data.

I dug around on HWBOT and found where the same guy used the virtually the same test setup to run 3DMark 03 on a mildly overclocked 9400GT PCI (18% core OC) and a slightly overclocked 9500gt( 13% core 17% mem) and the score improvement was not much difference the 9500GT was 10% faster despite the GPU core itself being twice as fast. Not to mention my results we're done on a pretty fast A64 machine, and the HWBOT results were from a machine running an a64 x2 4800 that was overclocked, most systems where you are stuck with PCI as the only upgrade option are lower end P4-era or older machines that are significantly slower than these A64 machines, my guess is that the P4/Netburst Celeron systems would probably at most be able to utilize may be able to fully utilize the 8400GS PCI model which I guess is still a decent improvement over a fx5500/fx5200 and is a more common and less expensive that these 9400 gt and 9500 gt cards. I don't think a P3 or Athlon system could fully utilize an 8 series card plus on those systems you are probably running a windows 9x anyways where there aren't any drivers for geforce 8000 series cards

9400GT:http://hwbot.org/submission/992425_jogibaer_3 … _pci_7424_marks
9500GT:http://hwbot.org/submission/2468378_jogibaer_ … _pci_8190_marks

I would love to test this card on a system that is able to stably run the PCI bus at 66mhz to see how that would improve performance since the bridge chip on the card can support 66mhz operation.

Reply 12 of 17, by gandhig

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In most cases the PCI 66 MHz slots are found only in server motherboards which will only add to the cost from your economical point of view. If you are able to grab Serverboards with 66 MHz PCI slots for cheap for investigation purpose, yeah, something may come out of it.

There is also the case that these graphics cards with PCI-E to PCI Bridge may not work properly in a PCI-X slot as feipoa found out in his case. So don't keep your hopes high 😈, which was my case too, back then.

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Reply 13 of 17, by Bobolaf

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I had a Zotac GT 430 PCI that worked ok but also appeared to be swamped in some situations. I was always tempted to give a PCI-X to PCIe bridge a try with s newer card but those bridges cost quite a lot so could never justify it.

Reply 14 of 17, by i486_inside

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If you could get a PCIe to PCI-x Bridge and put it in a PCI-X slot running at 133mhz it would be a major improvement over a 33mhz 32bit slot , you would have similar bandwidth to an AGP 4x slot, and I would think you would give the card more than 8 times mores available bandwidth compared to a 33mhz 32bit slot since a 133mhz PCI-X bus has 8 times the bandwidth but since you have 8times the bandwidth other devices on the bus(network cards, ide/sata controllers, sound cards, etc.) should bring it down as much compared to the 32bit 33mhz PCI bus.

Reply 15 of 17, by i486_inside

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I Played around with this card more tonight(this morning) in my 845GV box, I discovered that disabling the page file greatly reduces stutter and tearing, although some occasional stutter does occur and when the HDD is accessed the game lags. I still only used Simpson's Hit & Run because it was the only game I had installed, and it is the most convenient game for me to install currently since I have the ISOs saved on my network share , I need to find the box that has my older PC games in it.
I still stand by my recommendation against these very fast PCI GPUs even though they seemingly offer decent performance with PCI bandwidth because the major problem is that almost all of the systems you would use a PCI GPU share the PCI bus among all of the major I/O devices and when ever those devices are accessed they kill the GPU performance which cause major frame drops which kind of ruins a gaming experience.

Reply 16 of 17, by dirkmirk

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Did you get a chance to run Doom3 or Farcry?

I ran into performance issues with the 6200 PCI in the doom3 benchmark hitting about 17fps @ 1024x768, I get a feeling PCI cards can be useful for games up to 2003/2004.

Reply 17 of 17, by i486_inside

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I just downloaded the Doom 3 Demo, and used it on my 845GV/ CEL D 2.13ghz(oc'd 2.88ghz) I messed with it for a few minutes, the frame rate seemed good anywhere from 40-60 FPS at 1152x864 and 1280x1024 on with it set to Ultra quality , but it seemed to have lots of screen tearing, I turned down the details, I disabled my overclock, and tested it with and without V-sync enabled and still had screen tearing, it seems to me that the screen tearing is probably caused by the GPU, just not being able to get information fast enough from slow and crowded PCI bus.