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First post, by feipoa

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Has anyone performed a comparison of graphics cards on single or dual PIII-S Tualatin 1.4 GHz? I was wondering how far upwards you can squeeze more performance out of the Tualatin.

Would a GeForce 6800 GT show any improvement on this platform compared to a 6600 GT? What about GF4 TI 4600. My attempt at sourcing a 6800 GT failed. Troubleshooting dead MSI-branded GeForce 6800GT

I was thinking about taking the 6600 GT out of my P4 Prescott and putting it into this new build, which will be a dual Tualatin 1.4 GHz with dual-channel PC133 SDRAM. I'm not sure about AGP 4x support on this board. THe board is a Tyan Thunder HEsl S2567. The manual mentions 2x Pro slot, yet the BIOS contains options for AGP at 1x, 2x, 4x.

I'd give the Prescott an AGP 8x GF 7900GS. If my memory serves me, the GF 7900GS doesn't have Win9x drivers? I could also put the GF 7900GS in the Tualatin because don't think I can install Win98SE as I do not believe the SCSI ultra 320 cards have Win9x drivers. I have Adaptec 39320A, LSI 53C1030 RAID w/256 MB, and Adaptec 2200S RAID w/128 MB.

The purpose of this thread is to see if anyone has compared these higher end graphic cards in a Tualatin system and what were the results in various games? How far up can you graphics-wise on a Tualatin before the frame rate caps?

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 1 of 25, by The Serpent Rider

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Pentium III + GeForce 6 of higher = all sorts of problems. For some reason newer Nvidia drivers will cause blue screens, hangups, visual glitches, etc. I can't even boot up with 6600GT on a 440BX system when drivers are installed.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 2 of 25, by Standard Def Steve

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I haven't had any luck getting a 7800GS to work properly in a PIII system. However the 6800 GT/Ultra, X800XT, and X1950 Pro work fine. Here are some benchmark results I've posted before. All of these are from the following system:

PIII-S at 1575, 150MHz FSB
2GB DDR memory at 300MHz, 2-2-2-6 timings
QDI Advance 12T motherboard w/ Apollo Pro 266T chipset
EVGA 6800GT, fully stable at 4x AGP.
XP Pro SP3

Sorry about some of the larger images. Could only upload 5 to Vogons.

Quake III Arena demo001, 1024x768, all settings maxed:

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Doom III v1.0 timedemo1, 1024x768, Ultra preset:

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Crysis demo 800x600, DX9, lowest settings:

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3DMark2001SE, default settings:

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3DMark2003, default settings:

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3DMark2005, default settings:
tnNy1l3.png

3DMark2000, default settings:
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3DMark99, default settings:
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6800GT vs Radeon 9800 Pro: Pretty much a tie at 1024x768 in most games. In a few newer games, the 6800GT managed to pull ahead by around 10-15%. At 1600x1200, the 6800GT was sometimes much faster with these newer games. For example, the 6800GT, completely processor bottlenecked, maintained ~47 FPS in Doom 3, while the 9800 Pro dropped to around 21 fps.

6800GT vs Radeon X1950 Pro: Even though the 6800GT is a much slower card than the x1950 Pro, it outperformed the Radeon by around 5-7% in most games and benchmarks, even at 1600x1200! However, the Radeon easily outperformed the GeForce when tested with an Athlon 64 @ 2.75GHz. The Radeon driver just seems to need a faster CPU.

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 3 of 25, by feipoa

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Thanks for the results. Are you able to compile a chart for easy viewing? Do you know how the 6600GT compared with the 6800GT on the PIII-S Tualatin? And how it compared against, say, a GF4 ti 4600, FX5900, etc?

What issues did you encounter with the 7800GS?

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 4 of 25, by Standard Def Steve

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I don't have any of those other cards.

The 7800GS would only work in 2D mode. Any 3D-accelerated game or benchmark would cause massive display corruption. The card worked just fine on my Athlon XP and A64 boards, so definitely a compatibility issue between the 7800GS and the two PIII boards.

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 25, by The Serpent Rider

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so definitely a compatibility issue between the 7800GS and the two PIII boards.

Not boards - CPU. There's no problem with Athlons on simiilar VIA boards.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 7 of 25, by SPBHM

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well, the 6800GT is a lot faster at higher res or more demanding games, but 6600GT is still a lot of GPU for a Tualatin I think... you are looking at a 2002 CPU (and not really the best) with a 2004 graphics card that can beat the best graphics cards from 2002-2003, so it kind of makes sense.

Reply 8 of 25, by feipoa

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As this is more of a workstation configuration that I'm working on - dual Tualatin, U320 SCSI, PCI-X - I'll probably go with a Quadro card given the 6800 uncertainty. Perhaps a Quadro4 900XGL (period correct to within 1 month), Quadro FX 1100, or Quadro FX 3000. I'll try to perform some kind of graphics comparison with this configuration. I can't use Win9x due to SCSI drivers. Is W2K SP3, W2k3, or XP Pro SP3 preferred for this? All those OS's will be installed.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 10 of 25, by feipoa

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Probably not, but depends on how the tests go. Would be fun to compare/contrast with different firmwares.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 11 of 25, by feipoa

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Interesting. I have that motherboard, but will be retiring it in favour of a dual channel SDRAM Tyan Thunder HEsl S2567.

I noticed that the youtube poster is running the ram async at 132 MHz instead of 133 MHz. This is also a problem I noticed on this motherboard if you try using 4 GB. The solution is to use 3 GB. Even better stability was using 3 GB registered/ECC sticks. However, the MB was still particular about which graphic card could be used to maintain stable memory. This board also doesn't overclock well and some trick was needed to get the board to work with a 1 Gbit PCI ethernet adapter. I forgot the trick and now have to use the onboard 10/100 NIC. For overclocking, there are better boards.

I'd like to know if this guy could run GPU-accelerated youtube videos in a browser with that HD4670 in Win7. If so, my lowly HD4350 will probably work as well. If we can get modern browsers working fully accelerated, the Tualatin may come back to life.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 12 of 25, by Standard Def Steve

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So I ripped the GF4 TI4400 out of my K6-2 machine and benchmarked it with the overclocked PIII-S. It's no Ti4800, but I believe all members of the GF4 Ti family were similar in performance.
I also included 6800GT results from my Athlon 64, just to show how much of a bottleneck the PIII can be in some of the games. All games and benchmarks were run using the settings described in my post above.

gkPWFfi.png

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 13 of 25, by feipoa

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Wow, look at difference the 6800GT makes in Doom 3 compared to the Ti4400. What happened there? So was Crysis enjoyable at 21.3 fps?

Why doesn't Crysis run with the Ti4400?

The difference in Doom 3 between 6800GT and Ti4400 make me wonder if perhaps you aren't using the most optimal driver. When using underpowered CPUs for overpowered graphics cards, I often have to hunt around for the fastest driver revision. Did you try something with revision 56.x and older?

K6-2-500 scores seem about right. In Quake III at 1152x864x32 w/K6-III-500 I get 31 fps w/GeForce4 MX440 (pci).

It would be interesting to see how an FX 5900, or there'bouts, compares with the Ti4400 and 6800GT.

So the 6800GT is stable with your Tualatin? Is the Via 266Pro chipset to thank? I've had pretty good luck with this chipset, surprisingly.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 14 of 25, by Garrett W

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It's not really surprising, Doom 3 is very demanding and it hits gpu bottlenecks before cpu ones.

Crysis requires Shader Model 2, so GF4 is out of the question here. Fun fact, while R300 cards (Radeon 9700 etc) run the game, GeForce FX cards do not, probably because CryTek put a check in the game. FX would have been dogslow.

Reply 15 of 25, by SPBHM

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Doom 3 was notoriously good with the Geforce 6 series, and they were released at around the same time,

Crysis... you really don't want to be playing it with this sort of hardware!
still fairly impressed with the gap from one CPU to the other, considering the 6800GT was not a great card for this game (still the settings must be pretty low for it to reach 60) 1/3 is impressive.

Reply 16 of 25, by The Serpent Rider

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The difference in Doom 3 between 6800GT and Ti4400 make me wonder if perhaps you aren't using the most optimal driver.

This cards can't be compared directly in Doom 3 due to different render paths.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 17 of 25, by Standard Def Steve

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feipoa wrote:
Wow, look at difference the 6800GT makes in Doom 3 compared to the Ti4400. What happened there? So was Crysis enjoyable at 21. […]
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Wow, look at difference the 6800GT makes in Doom 3 compared to the Ti4400. What happened there? So was Crysis enjoyable at 21.3 fps?

Why doesn't Crysis run with the Ti4400?

The difference in Doom 3 between 6800GT and Ti4400 make me wonder if perhaps you aren't using the most optimal driver. When using underpowered CPUs for overpowered graphics cards, I often have to hunt around for the fastest driver revision. Did you try something with revision 56.x and older?

K6-2-500 scores seem about right. In Quake III at 1152x864x32 w/K6-III-500 I get 31 fps w/GeForce4 MX440 (pci).

It would be interesting to see how an FX 5900, or there'bouts, compares with the Ti4400 and 6800GT.

So the 6800GT is stable with your Tualatin? Is the Via 266Pro chipset to thank? I've had pretty good luck with this chipset, surprisingly.

Crysis was not enjoyable. It's pretty ugly at 800x600 and low details.

For most of the tests, I used 81.98 on both video cards. I also used 307.83 on the 6800GT for Crysis, 3DMark03, and 3DMark05.

I believe the Ti4400 did so poorly in Doom 3 because it was running out of video memory. I chose the Ultra graphics quality preset, which seems to run best on cards with at least 256MB of VRAM.

All native AGP cards--6800GT included--are stable on this motherboard. It even lets me run them at 4x AGP, which is something my old 694T-based motherboard couldn't do.

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 18 of 25, by shamino

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Standard Def Steve wrote:

The 7800GS would only work in 2D mode. Any 3D-accelerated game or benchmark would cause massive display corruption. The card worked just fine on my Athlon XP and A64 boards, so definitely a compatibility issue between the 7800GS and the two PIII boards.

All native AGP cards--6800GT included--are stable on this motherboard. It even lets me run them at 4x AGP, which is something my old 694T-based motherboard couldn't do.

Sounds like the same problem I had with a 7600GS on a VIA 694X board. I wish I could remember if I ever tried the 6600GT (which is the 6-generation, but bridged unlike the 6800GT).
In my case, I noticed that the corruption only appeared in certain scenes. Some stuff rendered fine, and the behavior was repeatable.
But it definitely does seem like an issue with VIA chipsets not liking bridged cards.
I wonder which (if any) VIA chipsets start to be compatible with bridged Express->AGP cards.

Reply 19 of 25, by rod

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feipoa wrote:

I'd like to know if this guy could run GPU-accelerated youtube videos in a browser with that HD4670 in Win7. If so, my lowly HD4350 will probably work as well. If we can get modern browsers working fully accelerated, the Tualatin may come back to life.

Theoretically, latest High End Single and Dual Tualatin systems should run video encoding via hardware acceleration. The problems are that most modern video codecs have dropped support for SSE instructions and latest drivers for ATI AGP graphics cards that enabled hardware acceleration (HD2000 to HD4000 series) rely heavy on CPU utilization. NVIDIA incorporated video acceleration on GeForce 8000 series, so there's no AGP but PCI hardware enabled cards that could run on a Tualatin based system, also with the same problems when watching video on modern browsers.

Flash player, that is barely used nowadays as for watching online video, dropped support for SSE instructions starting version 11.
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linu … pus-4175420481/

Definitely it would be great to have the Tualatin back for browsing and watching HD video, but dropping support for High End Pentium III and even Socket 478 systems, in my opinion, was a strategy of planned obsolescence.