Intel i740 8mb
ATI 3D Rage Pro 4mb

Next, did I get a good deal?

Not really, it's just a common junk.

What machine would they most be at home in?

Penium MMX tops. Buy hey, you can install i740 into PII-PIII system if you're masochistic enough.

Yup... Intel740 and Rage.
Good deal. Well... I really do not know. Perhaps a bit too expensive.

What machines are they good for?
The intel card, might be good for early 3d gaming systems. Like Pentium-166 to 266.
My parents used a card much like the ATI in their Pentium-133, back in the mid-90's.

As far as I remember, yet not shure, is that the Intel740 was from the time of Voodoo1.
Possibly somewere in between Voodoo1 and Voodoo2.
Regarding the ATI card, then you can use it for games specifically written for it.
This goes for the Intel as well.

This goes for the Intel as well.

Examples? i740 was released a bit too late for any proprietary API shenanigans.

The i740 isn't that common. Also it is at home in early pentium II systems, preferably with Intel chipsets. The i740 is designed around exploiting the more advanced AGP features and early non intel chipsets have issues in that area

However, even when the stars align, it isn't particularly good. It was a massive disappointment when it released. In fact it killed Intels gaming GPU ambitions for about 20 years. I find it funny that the newly announced gaming GPUs Intel is designing are marketed as intels "first" gaming GPUs. I guess they REALLY want to forget the i740.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

This goes for the Intel as well.

Examples? i740 was released a bit too late for any proprietary API shenanigans.

Well.... I have no example on hand. I remember they did a lot of hyping, so I guess they must have made at least one or two games for it, or done a couple of demo versions of games.

Koltoroc wrote:

The i740 isn't that common. Also it is at home in early pentium II systems, preferably with Intel chipsets. The i740 is designed around exploiting the more advanced AGP features and early non intel chipsets have issues in that area

However, even when the stars align, it isn't particularly good. It was a massive disappointment when it released. In fact it killed Intels gaming GPU ambitions for about 20 years. I find it funny that the newly announced gaming GPUs Intel is designing are marketed as intels "first" gaming GPUs. I guess they REALLY want to forget the i740.

Hehe.... Yeah... You can still find their video on youtube, in were Intel brags about how great a chip they have invented. 🤣

The i740 isn't that common

It's extremely common card. Especially in Asia. It's just nobody cares to actually identify this noname junk.

Found some old benchmarks... As far as I can see, the performance is kind of acceptable.

http://vintage3d.org/i740.php#sthash.XQfH7zxV.dpbs

(scroll down to the performance graph in the bottom)

The i740 was the card I got after the s3 virge. It was still heaps better than the S3 virge.

i740 is around the same performance as the riva 128. Good for a nostalgic lark, but plenty of better cards for cheaper for building a retro rig.

I did get one for my retro rig, but I decided in the end that it was a bit too limited in performance and utility (no 32bit at 1280 x 1024 resolution, making it kinda useless on 4:5 LCD screen)

Well, I suppose the responses make me wonder what the heck the donor PC was supposed to be. In a p3 system, the agp i740 wouldn't be much of an improvement over the onboard video, would it?

Looks like the pci rage pro was the better deal for me personally. I have a p100 system and a P1 200/mmx system. I'd think it would work well enough in either of those.

Still, in a p3 system, neither of these cards makes sense. Why in the world would someone install them both in it? Left overs from an older PC?

Cobra42898 wrote:

Well, I suppose the responses make me wonder what the heck the donor PC was supposed to be. In a p3 system, the agp i740 wouldn't be much of an improvement over the onboard video, would it?

Looks like the pci rage pro was the better deal for me personally. I have a p100 system and a P1 200/mmx system. I'd think it would work well enough in either of those.

Still, in a p3 system, neither of these cards makes sense. Why in the world would someone install them both in it? Left overs from an older PC?

Heh, the Intel 810 integrated graphics is basically an improved version of the i740, no real reason to use one in a P3, especially one that already has integrated graphics. The pci rage pro would be more useful as it is PCI.

Cobra42898 wrote:

Well, I suppose the responses make me wonder what the heck the donor PC was supposed to be. In a p3 system, the agp i740 wouldn't be much of an improvement over the onboard video, would it?

You should distinguish between onboard video (discrete chip with its own memory) and integrated video (video core integrated into chipset or more recently CPU, sharing memory bandwidth). Onboard video can theoretically be just as good as on a separate card (I have a few boards here with a Voodoo3-2000 onboard 😀 ), integrated video sucks, partly because the video cores are crap but mainly because the shared memory castrates the CPU. This is only an issue when CPU and video are both being used heavily - but that describes just about every game more complex than Minesweeper.

That said, Intel stopped discrete GPUs after they introduced their first integrated attempts (i810, i815), which were shipped with late PPGA (and very rarely late Slot 1) and FC-PGA P3 and Celeron CPUs. So that immediately explains this card and the system: mid to low end P3, before i810. So it probably had a P3 Katmai between 450 and 550MHz. That would have been a bad deal at the time for most applications, because if you didn't need good video you probably also didn't need the hefty FPU in the P3, so an AMD K6-2 or K6-3 would have performed at least as well for far less, and if you did need the FPU you would have wanted a better video card.

But then even more than now, big numbers sold big boxes, so a fast P3 and a video card with 8MB of RAM!!! would have been the selling points here for the poor ignorant buyers.

Looks like the pci rage pro was the better deal for me personally. I have a p100 system and a P1 200/mmx system. I'd think it would work well enough in either of those.

Yep. I ran one with a K6-2 back in the day. Was a good match.

Still, in a p3 system, neither of these cards makes sense. Why in the world would someone install them both in it? Left overs from an older PC?

Once again, early P3 in a system designed to deliver the maximum number of P3 MHz while scrimping on everything else. Typical marketing-driven design.

Edit:
Re i810 vs i740 - the two had almost exactly the same core. The difference was the memory. i740 had its own, i810 shared system memory. Depending on exact load, the system performance of a Celeron/P3 CPU with i810 could be half that of the same CPU with an i440BX-type chipset and an i740. Remarkably, I can't find any benchmarks of i740 vs i810 from 1999 when the i810 came out, but I can give you a subjective experience: in 2000/2001 I worked at Packard Bell and at the office had an early 1998 vintage system with MU440EX motherboard with onboard AGP ATi Rage Pro. It had a Celeron 366, 32MB of RAM and ran Windows 98. By no means a speed demon, but it got the job done. Then half the office computers were upgraded to new iConnect systems with GA-6WMM7 motherboard with i810 chipset and a Celeron 766, with 64MB RAM. Should be faster, right? Wrong. Just about everything was slower. At the time we mainly blamed the WinME they were shipped with, but after enough complaints someone installed Win98 with the exact same loadout as the old 1998 systems on them. It was better than with WinME, but the old C366 with dedicated video and RAM still felt more responsive. It was *BAD*. i740 isn't fast by anybody's standards (unless you happen to be running a period-correct system and benchmarking in Turok, which seemed uniquely optimized for the i740), but it's not in the same category of crap as i810, even though it's a slower core.

I've never seen the two separated and not used interchangeably.

Maybe my experience is not as large as compared to others here.

My experience is that video on the motherboard with its own separate (non-borrowed) RAM is probably more rare than a pile of chicken nipples. Id never expect to find one. Even as late as my sister's Gateway/Pentium D had "borrowed" video ram. I could even adjust the allocation on that one. Maybe I just never got a lucky enough to find one. Lol.

You bought the cards without having any idea about what you buy? That's strange, what if they were junk? OK, 25 USD isn't a fortune, but still...
Fortunately, the cards are decent (in my opinion, anyway), but this shouldn't matter too much, if you like them it's great, if not... I mean, for a person a certain item might be *precious*, for another person the same item might be junk, as long as you like them it shoudn't matter too much what others say.

From my experience: i740 isn't uncommon, but also isn't something you find everyday, anywhere. It might not be a legend (like a V5 5500, for example), but it was a nice card, a bit too late to the party, but with decent performance and good image quality. I wouldn't compare it to the Riva 128, but rather to the Voodoo Graphics, it was faster and with the same image quality (or better). Riva 128 was also faster than V1, but the image quality was quite bad.

Rage Pro is a common card (the AGP versions), but this is PCI, I'd say it's not that common, it might be very useful in a socket 7 build.

So maybe the i740 is a bust. That's okay. I consider the bundle still okay for what it is. I dont come across much of this stuff anymore so I take what I can get.

So I have a p100 with a cheap cirrus logic on the motherboard, and a P1 200mhz/mmx with a rage ii on the motherboard. I wonder what's the best application for the rage pro? Is rage ii so close I won't be able to tell the difference? Is a P100 so slow I'd never get anything worthwhile from it?

I wouldn't call i740 a bust. Like I said, it's not a rare card, but it's not a bad card either.

For 3D (read games) Rage Pro is *much* better than Rage II. Rage II is similar with S3 Virge, it's a "decelerator". On the other hand Rage Pro is a bit faster than Voodoo 1. P200 MMX with Rage Pro would be a great machine for early 3d games (Quake, Forsaken, Motoracer, Turok, etc). P100 + Rage Pro would be slower, but far for unusable, you can try it.

I would keep P100 with cirrus logic and use it for older DOS games that don't require 3D (Doom, etc).