This isn't really addressing the subject of 3D, but I like the PCI 8400GS(*) because it can be used to accelerate H.264 video playback. It might be the cheapest available PCI card that can do that. Requires using a player that supports the feature though (MPC-BE should work, I tested it under linux in some other player whose name I don't remember).
Regardless of CPU speed, this is mandatory to watch such videos on a PCI system because a standard 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus simply isn't fast enough to stream uncompressed HD video. It needs to be sent to the card as compressed data.
I imagine the 8400GS is also quite decent in games, but not as fast as some of the last PCI cards that were made.

* = NVidia made 2 different GPUs that were both used in "8400GS" cards. The older one doesn't do H.264, the later one does. I think cards with 512MB RAM reliably have the later GPU.

Subjectively speaking, I think the 8400GS might be the last NVidia PCI card that I would call "fairly common" which implies decent pricing and some bang for the buck. Models beyond that get pretty rare. So I would call the PCI 8400GS an underrated card.

Old discussions on here have said the (Zotac?) GT430 is the fastest PCI card. I think it's closest rivals are a 9400GT (maybe a 9500GT). None of those are cheap though unless a seller doesn't know why it's unique and prices them like common cards.
The GT520/610 have a slower memory interface than the 430, but I don't know if they sell any cheaper. All are probably too expensive to bother with.
Such cards might be a nice find for a late P4 which only has PCI slots, but only if you get lucky on the price or you had a good reason for not using a different motherboard.
For a while I thought it would be interesting to use a late PCI card in my Opteron server so that it could double as a usable desktop, but I never actually did it.

Jade Falcon wrote:

Zotac had a PCI 520 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/913/geforce-gt-520-pci […]
Show full quote

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

Anyone remember this card, 8400 GS 512 MB PCI? The last of pci video cards. A lot of proprietary boards had no agp slot so you couldn't upgrade you're existing motherboard.

Zotac had a PCI 520
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/913/geforce-gt-520-pci

Zotac also made a 610 pci
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?I … N82E16814500262

The 610 is a rebranded 520

Zotac also made a GT430

There is also a 210 GT

There is an 8500 GT as well.

In newer ATI PCI cards there are:
x1300
x1550
HD3450
HD4350
HD5450

Also, screw Nvidia for their naming schemes.

GT430 PCI is a GF108 (Fermi) with 96 cores. GT630/620 PCI is the same GF108 core. The GF630 PCI-e has the updated Kepler core.

The GT520/610 have the weaker GF119 (still Fermi) with 48 cores.

dirkmirk wrote:

Just purchased 2 Quadro fx600s so it'll be a couple of weeks and I'll have a good stash of pci cards to test, hopefully the fx600 will overclock to fx5600 speeds and I'll be satisfied I've tested all the relevant high end pci cards for this era (win98-early XP, max directx8).

Where did you find two Quadro FX600 PCI cards? That must have been a tough find. Was the seller thinking it was a 5200 and mislabelled it? That is how I found mine many years back; paid about $15. Use it in a dual Tualatin system which only has PCI-X and PCI slots. What software do you use to overclock the FX600? I may have played with that, but no longer recall the outcome.

One of the most underrated gfx-cards or better "chips" is the internal intel i815-chipset-gfx.
It has a perfect image-quality on lowres under plain dos, the colors are average and outperform most of my matrox-cards!

intel has some win3x!! drivers for this chipset, win95/98/me/2k ++ are available too.
extrem high compatibility under plain dos, mostly centered image on the tft...simply fantastic.

D3D and OpengL-Support is good too. The OpenGL performance is 150% of my Voodoo1 card.

If you put a ESS-Solo1 in the PCI-Slot you get a very good hybrid retro/pc (dos, win3x, win9x, win2k)

feipoa wrote:

dirkmirk wrote:

Just purchased 2 Quadro fx600s so it'll be a couple of weeks and I'll have a good stash of pci cards to test, hopefully the fx600 will overclock to fx5600 speeds and I'll be satisfied I've tested all the relevant high end pci cards for this era (win98-early XP, max directx8).

Where did you find two Quadro FX600 PCI cards? That must have been a tough find. Was the seller thinking it was a 5200 and mislabelled it? That is how I found mine many years back; paid about $15. Use it in a dual Tualatin system which only has PCI-X and PCI slots. What software do you use to overclock the FX600? I may have played with that, but no longer recall the outcome.

I had a saved ebay search for "Nvidia FX600" and this add popped up http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/322592641993?ul_noapp=tru, I didn't hesitate to buy it now for $20USD you dont play silly buggers with make an offer on parts this rare, the postage was good too $23USD to Australia, half the time you have to use a US freight forwarder and pay for postage twice because the seller doesn't offer cheaper postage.

Just looking at the memory chip HY5DU561622CT-36

I presume the "36" refers to 3.6ns memory = 278/555mhz DDR, so theoretically no issues bringing the memory up to 5600 speeds(550mhz), it will be a matter of overclocking the cpu from 275-325mhz, thats only a 15% increase should be doable.

Another thing I'll keep in mind is what impact the memory speed has on performance and the difference from 400ddr->550ddr replicating the fx5200/fx5500 but keeping the cpu overclocked at 325, the point being if you can easily purchase an FX5200/5500 you could probably overclock the cpu to around 300 or 325 if your lucky, might be no need to chase down the Quadro FX600 or INNO3D 5600 PCI.

I think these are going to be the best all round cards if you want to run a bit of dos or windows 98se, for strictly windows XP I presume its going to be a fight between the ATI 9100 & Geforce fx6200 but I believe its going to be largely dependent of how you interpret benchmark performance as I mentioned before, so what if the 6200 is 4 times quicker in Doom3 than a 9100 if its only 17fps? You might as well say both cards are unsuitable.

Pretty sure I've used cool bits, this release says its not fully compatible with windows 98se but is fine for windows xp
https://www.techspot.com/downloads/165-nvidia … bits-tweak.html

ATI Rage Pro PCI.. Basicalky a Voodoo Banshee in terms of performance. Greatly overlooked for some reason.

I don't think it was overlooked if it came onboard for a lot of OEM motherboards in its time. Software-driven alpha blends and no modulation hurt it a lot though

leileilol wrote:

I don't think it was overlooked if it came onboard for a lot of OEM motherboards in its time. Software-driven alpha blends and no modulation hurt it a lot though

You got what you paid for, but when I am building an Pentium or MMX era DOS PC (which I am working on right now) I would rather use this than an S3 Trio/Virge considering how much faster it is in games like Doom, Duke and Quake. I actually immediately swapped out the 1MB S3 the Acer 166MMX I received in the mail the oder day for an 8MB Rage Pro. Not looking back.

dirkmirk wrote:

I think these are going to be the best all round cards if you want to run a bit of dos or windows 98se, for strictly windows XP I presume its going to be a fight between the ATI 9100 & Geforce fx6200 but I believe its going to be largely dependent of how you interpret benchmark performance as I mentioned before, so what if the 6200 is 4 times quicker in Doom3 than a 9100 if its only 17fps? You might as well say both cards are unsuitable.

I personally like to see benchmarks in the 20-45 fps range, because somewhere in this range is, I think, where most people set a limit for what is considered comfortably playable frame rate. My bar is pretty low and I think even 20 fps is acceptable, provided there aren't major slow downs.

I'm looking forward to your analysis.

sorry for mentioning the i810 because it's wired to agp.

feipoa wrote:

I personally like to see benchmarks in the 20-45 fps range, because somewhere in this range is, I think, where most people set a limit for what is considered comfortably playable frame rate. My bar is pretty low and I think even 20 fps is acceptable, provided there aren't major slow downs.

+1

The framerate for 'playability' is an arbitrary and subjective one, but certainly as long as it stay above 30 you can hardly tell. But benchmarks, though, are not necessarily about playability, but simply measuring graphics performance, and for that the slower the framerate the better, as you're less and less affected by other kinds of overhead - unfortunately, the overhead of the OS/drivers is not something you can get away from generally.

And well, if you have a machine that can only take PCI, you're lucky to get Doom 3 playable at all. What settings were being used on Doom 3? I'm suspecting maybe the increased memory on the 6200 made the difference.

Once you've seen 60+ FPS, it's hard to go back, which is why I tend to favor hardware that wasn't even released at the time a given game released.

As for PCI cards, I haven't thought about this too strongly, with one exception: Power Macintoshes.

It wasn't until the G4s that they gained AGP slots (one may wish to use a Blue & White G3 despite the PCI limitation if you need the ADB port for a TM FCS or other peripherals), and even then, I'm experimenting a bit with PCI + AGP graphics in tandem on my MDD G4 so that I can have OS 9 graphics acceleration and Core Image in OS X simultaneously. (No card supports both; generally speaking, if it supports DX9/Shader Model 2.0, it supports Core Image and has no OS 9 drivers whatsoever.)

Since you need AGP for Core Image and even Quartz Extreme, that means any OS 9 stuff will have to make do with a PCI card should one care about a dual-boot OS 9/X setup. It shouldn't be that much of a setback in that any game that really calls for AGP is either going to run better under OS X, or the Windows version is superior anyway (which it usually is for AGP-era games).

The fastest card that could possibly work to my knowledge is a Radeon 9100 PCI, since those have the full-fledged 8500 GPU instead of the cut-down version you find on 9200/9250 cards. However, I never found one, so I settled for a 9250 PCI and did the resistor mod and reduced ROM flash. Works like a treat, save for half the VRAM going unused, but no OS 9 game is really going to benefit from 256 MB of VRAM over 128 MB anyway.

Otherwise, I'm getting flashbacks to my old AMD K6-2 box my father built and the godawful PC-Chips M598 mobo he based it on, which had no AGP slot (the interface was presumably dedicated to the equally godawful SiS 530 integrated graphics from an electrical standpoint). I remember that he bought an AGP card at first, but realized his oversight too late and returned with an ATI Xpert98 PCI card, which made for some significant framerate boosts in some of the games I tried.

But after I had made a big move and he drove down to give me my old computer back (long story there), the ATI card was gone. All I had was crappy integrated graphics that wouldn't even keep DirectDraw acceleration if I updated DirectX to 8 or later, at least until I tracked down a 3dfx Voodoo2 out of sheer curiosity about Glide compatibility. (MechWarrior 2 was a prime motivator, so a Voodoo3 PCI would have been useless.) I'm still wondering to this day why he never bought a 3dfx card, instead picking up crap like the S3 ViRGE-based Diamond Stealth 3D 2000...

Don't buy a 9500gt or faster PCI card, I bought the 9500gt PCI and found that it is absolutely bottlenecked by the PCI bus, I did a little review last month, Jaton 9500GT PCI BENCHMARKS/REVIEW , and founf that the PCI bottleneck often causes dropped frames and screen tearing when trying to use the full potential of the card, I ended finding some benchmarks of that someone submitted to HWBOT of the 9400gt PCI and the 9500GT pci and despite the 9500gt being theoretically twice as fast it only benchmarked about 10% faster, and since most of the systems where you are going to use these cards are older P4 era systems with no AGP or PCI-e , all of the major I/O in the system will be on the PCI bus which means that everytime there is a disk access or network access or anything uses time on the PCI bus your game will lag. Given that the fastest CPU you would pair with a PCI GPU is probably going to be a 533mhz bus P4 or Celeron D i think the commonly available 8400gs is probably the best option because the slow CPU and memory bandwidth will be a bottleneck to faster GPUs. If you want a fast P4 era system it would be cheaper to just buy another motherboard and a cheap AGP card rather than hunting down faster exotic PCI card that will disappoint you anyways.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

As for PCI cards, I haven't thought about this too strongly, with one exception: Power Macintoshes....

I use a GF4-TI4600 AGP in my G4-PPC and also a V2-SLI, so I can have it all. But you are right, this combination does not give you PS2 for the never OSX-games.
I have a G4-Lamp with GF2MX. This works in native OS9 and OSX too, but the GF2MX seems a bit slow to me.
I also have a G3-B&W and I love that machine. I use it for 8.6 only. If I find the PC-Card for it, it would my a really cool machine.
My main PPC/OS9 machine is my 7300. It has a 400Mhz PPC-G3 Upgrade, an IDE Controller, a Voodoo3 PCI and a 166Mhz Apple PC-Card.
For testing purposes I have a G4-PowerBook with Radeon 7500?/9000? which can boot OS9 native as well.

Greetings
Doc

http://m.ebay.com/itm/Dell-NVIDIA-Quadro-FX-6 … 1%257Ciid%253A1

That seller has 2 more fx600s for sale $20USD or make an offer, haven't received my cards yet.

Not any more!

i486_inside wrote:

since most of the systems where you are going to use these cards are older P4 era systems with no AGP or PCI-e , all of the major I/O in the system will be on the PCI bus which means that everytime there is a disk access or network access or anything uses time on the PCI bus your game will lag.

I don't disagree with your overall conclusion, but Intel's better/later P4 chipsets do a good job of staying off the PCI bus, leaving it's limited capacity available for expansion cards. The later southbridges have built-in SATA (and of course IDE predates that). These chipsets have a fast link to the northbridge at 266MB/sec or more, but I'm not sure exactly when that started. This link shares with PCI, but it's fast enough that it shouldn't hinder PCI performance. The i865/875 added a dedicated link from the northbridge to an onboard GbE port (but not all boards have it). So a well configured system can have both disk and GbE running outside of the PCI bus.
An 865/875/915 are bus efficient as long as the user uses the Intel integrated drive controller and GbE - not PCI cards or onboard "added features" that the board manufacturer attached via PCI. Systems like this perform much better in the Intel NASPT benchmark than a system of the same era using PCI cards.

The 845 is more of a borderline case. It still has a fast southbridge->northbridge link, but it doesn't have integrated GbE and the integrated drive controller is IDE only, so if the user wants SATA then the drive will eat up PCI bandwidth as you described.

A common i865 based PCI-only "office" PC (like some of the Dells that are everywhere) will do a pretty good job leaving the PCI bus available for a graphics card, but economically speaking I agree there's rarely any reason to bother when an AGP system will do so much better.

Given that the fastest CPU you would pair with a PCI GPU is probably going to be a 533mhz bus P4 or Celeron D i think the commonly available 8400gs is probably the best option because the slow CPU and memory bandwidth will be a bottleneck to faster GPUs. If you want a fast P4 era system it would be cheaper to just buy another motherboard and a cheap AGP card rather than hunting down faster exotic PCI card that will disappoint you anyways.

I agree, especially for the 845 chipset where you are limited to 533 FSB. I guess the 3.06/533 HT Northwood might be a pretty decent CPU though (never had one).

I like small machines and therefore CPU's that do not draw very much power. There are only a view CPU's that have less the 15Watts TDP.
The 533 celeron S370 is a perfect retro-cpu that draws only 11,2 Watts..fantastic for a compact machine.
The later P4's draw 4-10 times more watts, that's a no go for a small and silent retro-machine.