Voodoo 3 because it lets you use glide and it's a good match with good compatibility 😀

imi wrote on 2021-02-03, 00:37:

Voodoo 3 because it lets you use glide and it's a good match with good compatibility 😀

Thanks for the suggestion. Yes some of it is coming back to me now - wasn't glide a proprietary API that 3dfx developed before D3D?
I remember running glquake back in the day on a 3dfx card but something in the back of my mind says that it had a tendency to overheat - or am I thinking of something else?

deanodley wrote on 2021-02-03, 00:33:

Hello all, […]
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Hello all,

New sign-up here!
I've refurbished an old P2-400 system I had in storage for the purposes of playing some old games again.
I have installed the system maximum of 384MB of PC100 RAM, a DVD-RW and a SD to IDE adapter to replace the noisy HDD.
I am ready to install Windows 98 for a dual boot config with DOS 7.1 etc - so nothing really new there.

My question is this - I have a choice of video cards which I collected during the 90's when I was an avid PC gamer before I moved off to consoles. Luckily I kept almost all the hardware I had from that time! Looking at the motherboard, the AGP slot is the AGP 2x 3.3v type, so I've listed the cards that only fit into that slot. There are some with universal keying but they appear to from a later time than this PC. Honestly I've forgotten what separates these cards from one other so hopefully an expert here could suggest which is the most suitable card for that P2 400 system from circa 1998 and most compatible with the games of the era.

The choices are:
ATI Rage Pro Turbo AGP
Diamond Viper TNT AGP 16MB
GeForce 5200 AGP 128MB
Velocity 4400 NVTNT 16MB AGP
3dfx Voodoo 3 2000

Thanks in advance 😀

All of them are good to try, except maybe the ATI Rage Pro Turbo AGP , which is a a few notches below the others in terms of both performance and 3D image quality . the others will likely be bottlenecked by a P2 400 . If the Voodoo 3 is PCI you could combine it with one of your TNT cards and choose which one you want to use in your BIOS (if the board's BIOS allow for this) . Otherwise, your primary choice, IMHO, is between a TNT and the Voodoo 3 . The choice would boil down to how many of the games you wish to play are Glide enabled and/or exclusive .

deanodley wrote on 2021-02-03, 00:42:

imi wrote on 2021-02-03, 00:37:

Voodoo 3 because it lets you use glide and it's a good match with good compatibility 😀

Thanks for the suggestion. Yes some of it is coming back to me now - wasn't glide a proprietary API that 3dfx developed before D3D?
I remember running glquake back in the day on a 3dfx card but something in the back of my mind says that it had a tendency to overheat - or am I thinking of something else?

Voodoo 3 cards are fanless, but do tend tend to heat up (both the GPU chip and the voltage regulator), so a bit of active cooling in the form of, for example, a case fan oriented towards the hot spots would be recommended .

Very interesting. When I bought the machine in 97/98 it was one of the fastest available but obviously the P3 followed soon after. So now I'm thinking that another machine might be a better choice to cover everything up to XP games. Would a P3 be more suitable - what's the best balance between processor and video card from that era 95-2000?
I also have an Athlon 2000, Athlon 2200 XP and Sempron 3000+ available and finally a P4 2.8 GHz.

the voodoo 3 very much likes airflow yes, for the sake of longevity I would put a fan on it 😀

deanodley wrote on 2021-02-03, 00:54:

Very interesting. When I bought the machine in 97/98 it was one of the fastest available but obviously the P3 followed soon after. So now I'm thinking that another machine might be a better choice to cover everything up to XP games. Would a P3 be more suitable - what's the best balance between processor and video card from that era 95-2000?
I also have an Athlon 2000, Athlon 2200 XP and Sempron 3000+ available and finally a P4 2.8 GHz.

If you want a dedicated XP machine, I think it's not absolutely necessary to max out your W98 machine. I think you can get by with the Pentium 2 in most pre-2000 titles and you can play the rest on the XP machine. If those are your options for CPUs it will be an early XP build anyway with good Windows 98 compatibility, so it's up to you if you choose a graphics card that supports that (Radeon R300/R400 or Geforce FX/Geforce 6) and dual boot XP with Win98 or don't care.