Generally nvidia cards have better dos compatibility than ATI cards. If you get FX5600, you most likely won't lose any compatibility, but you will probably lose some upper memory area to load dos drivers into because newer cards generally have bigger video bios rom. If you just use pure dos though you should probably stay with TNT2 M64, but if you use windows on same PC you can get advantage from having bit newer card.

Baoran wrote:

Generally nvidia cards have better dos compatibility than ATI cards. If you get FX5600, you most likely won't lose any compatibility, but you will probably lose some upper memory area to load dos drivers into because newer cards generally have bigger video bios rom. If you just use pure dos though you should probably stay with TNT2 M64, but if you use windows on same PC you can get advantage from having bit newer card.

Thanks for the response. I think I'll go with the FX5600. This 'should' work on a socket 7 mobo with Award BIOS, right?

Above sums it up perfectly.
Voodoo come into their own for 3d games that support 3dfx glide (Quake & Tomb Raider to name 2 of the big ones)
But if your not playing games that require Glide they don't offer any benefit then the TNT2 (In a pure dos PC)

Synaps3 wrote:

Thanks for the response. I think I'll go with the FX5600. This 'should' work on a socket 7 mobo with Award BIOS, right?

Socket 7 and AGP is troublesome. Socket 7 has the earliest and most limited AGP implementation. You are lucky if the Nvidia TNT2 64 works without problems. I expect the FX5600 to cause trouble either with power draw or windows instability.

gerwin wrote:

Synaps3 wrote:

Thanks for the response. I think I'll go with the FX5600. This 'should' work on a socket 7 mobo with Award BIOS, right?

Socket 7 and AGP is troublesome. Socket 7 has the earliest and most limited AGP implementation. You are lucky if the Nvidia TNT2 64 works without problems. I expect the FX5600 to cause trouble either with power draw or windows instability.

You are right, I wasn't thinking of super socket 7 motherboard and agp. I didn't notice any problems in my soyo motherboard though, so I think if you have problems depends on the motherboard and luck a bit.

I don't think there'd be any point in going with anything faster than the TNT2 M64 for a Socket 7 system. In fact, that'd be a great match... great compatibility for DOS games and plenty of speed for early 3D accelerated games. If you were going to torture your Socket 7 system (and yourself) with games made after 1998, then a faster card would help you increase resolutions in 3d accelerated titles, but any CPU you could put in there will hold back performance considerably. To put it in perspective, the FX5600 was from the time of Athlon XPs CPUs which ran in the 1.5Ghz+ range. A 200Mhz Pentium or 500Mhz K6-2 might eek out a quarter of that performance in games, at best.