They are all fine for that era. Which game u got in mind?

No game in particular at the moment. I was just wondering which one has the most power and the best compatibility for the era.

Try 'em and decide yourself.

rick12373 wrote on 2020-05-20, 23:51:

No game in particular at the moment. I was just wondering which one has the most power and the best compatibility for the era.

The TI4800-SE is by far the most powerful (although only equal to a Ti4400 which is not bad). However, the Geforce2 can use earlier drivers - which may result in better performance for some games.

Yeah, I think I'll give the GeForce 2 MX AGP 64MB a go.

Don't expect much from 2 MX much for 3D. Back in the day, I had one due to little money trying to make Myst 3D work acceptably, I had to lower many options just to work acceptable.

Next time look for Geforce2 MX400. Better one and works well with 3D and DOS. Even GTS if you want to move up.

Cheers,

rick12373 wrote on 2020-05-21, 00:09:

Yeah, I think I'll give the GeForce 2 MX AGP 64MB a go.

The Geforce MX200 is worse than the regular Geforce MX, it has half the memory bandwidth, in case you were tempted to try it .

GeForce2MX is a contemporary card for that system and great for everything up until 2000 or so. The GeForce4 will be greatly CPU bottlenecked in that system, it scales very well all the way up to fast AthlonXP systems.

Thanks for the advice everyone!

I've got a Rage 128 Pro in my PIII machine, for that authentically crappy feeling! 😁

Good luck and have fun!

Yeah, this came with a Rage LT Pro. Come to think of it I have some other old Pentium 2 and 3 machines lying around that I think people gave to me. I should see what they have inside as well really.

You may strike gold, good luck!

I hope so. Usually there is nothing too exciting if the computer came from around here. I live in rural south east Idaho. People here have never really been gamers so their old PCs tend to contain run of the mill GPUs...

rick12373 wrote on 2020-05-20, 23:46:

Somebody gave me an old Compaq Presario 5665 Pentium 2 450 Mhz. I forgot how well made these old machines were. It weighs a to […]
Show full quote

Somebody gave me an old Compaq Presario 5665 Pentium 2 450 Mhz. I forgot how well made these old machines were. It weighs a ton! I opened it up to see what is what and found some hardware that is interesting. I can't believe the size of the hard disk. It is an old Quantum Bigfoot 5.25 series. Amazing that it still works actually, it's bloody loud though.

Anyway, I have a box of spare parts and was wondering what GPU I should put in it. I don't have any Voodoo cards so that is not an option. Out of the cards I have available I was wondering which one would have been considered the best back when this was still a relevant machine. The machine already has a an AGP Rage LT Pro. The other cards I have which might be useful are:

GeForce 4 TI4800-SE 128MB ( I would assume this is too new)
GeForce 2 MX200 AGP 32MB
GeForce 2 MX AGP 64MB

Thoughts?

I would use one of the MX cards and save the (vastly more capable) Ti4800-SE for a newer rig 😜
These MX cards should be sufficient for a P2-450. Even the slowest MX2 should at the very least be roughly similar in performance to a TNT2 or so and on top of that, these MX cards consume very little power.

Us the mx and stick to the 8.05 drivers, it should preform in the same ballpark as a GeForce 256SDR which is still overkill for a PII, but you get a TnL which can help in any dx7 games. More era correct would be a TnT/TnT2 or Voodoo 2SLI/Voodoo3

pentiumspeed wrote on 2020-05-21, 01:20:

Don't expect much from 2 MX much for 3D. Back in the day, I had one due to little money trying to make Myst 3D work acceptably, I had to lower many options just to work acceptable.

Next time look for Geforce2 MX400. Better one and works well with 3D and DOS. Even GTS if you want to move up.

Cheers,

Geforce 2 MX was the original MX card with 175 MHz GPU clock and 166 MHz memory clock, using 128-bit SDR memory. It offered performance on-par with the previous gen Geforce 256.

Geforce 2 MX400 came later and upped the GPU clock to 200 MHz, but kept the 166 MHz memory clock (though I think there were also later models that also upped the memory frequency to 183 or 200 MHz). It was also available with either SDR or DDR memory, but DDR models only used a narrower 64-bit bus, so both SDR and DDR models offered the same memory bandwidth. Along with MX400 came also the MX200, a low-end model which used the same 175 MHz GPU/166 MHz memory clocks of the original MX, but halved the memory bus width to 32-bit for DDR and 64-bit for SDR models.

So the original vanilla MX and MX400 are very similar in performance, the only difference usually being the 25 MHz higher GPU frequency on the latter. But the vanilla MX can usually overclock the GPU to MX400 frequencies or beyond anyway, to make up the difference. Not that GPU clocks did much for performance anyway, since the cards were mostly memory bandwidth limited. Which was also why the MX200's crippled memory bus, despite using the same GPU configuration as vanilla MX, limited its performance to about TNT2's level.

So I'm guessing the MX card you used back in the day that gave you such poor performance must have been an MX200.

frudi wrote on 2020-05-28, 07:47:

Geforce 2 MX was the original MX card with 175 MHz GPU clock and 166 MHz memory clock, using 128-bit SDR memory. It offered perf […]
Show full quote

pentiumspeed wrote on 2020-05-21, 01:20:

Don't expect much from 2 MX much for 3D. Back in the day, I had one due to little money trying to make Myst 3D work acceptably, I had to lower many options just to work acceptable.

Next time look for Geforce2 MX400. Better one and works well with 3D and DOS. Even GTS if you want to move up.

Cheers,

Geforce 2 MX was the original MX card with 175 MHz GPU clock and 166 MHz memory clock, using 128-bit SDR memory. It offered performance on-par with the previous gen Geforce 256.

Geforce 2 MX400 came later and upped the GPU clock to 200 MHz, but kept the 166 MHz memory clock (though I think there were also later models that also upped the memory frequency to 183 or 200 MHz). It was also available with either SDR or DDR memory, but DDR models only used a narrower 64-bit bus, so both SDR and DDR models offered the same memory bandwidth. Along with MX400 came also the MX200, a low-end model which used the same 175 MHz GPU/166 MHz memory clocks of the original MX, but halved the memory bus width to 32-bit for DDR and 64-bit for SDR models.

So the original vanilla MX and MX400 are very similar in performance, the only difference usually being the 25 MHz higher GPU frequency on the latter. But the vanilla MX can usually overclock the GPU to MX400 frequencies or beyond anyway, to make up the difference. Not that GPU clocks did much for performance anyway, since the cards were mostly memory bandwidth limited. Which was also why the MX200's crippled memory bus, despite using the same GPU configuration as vanilla MX, limited its performance to about TNT2's level.

So I'm guessing the MX card you used back in the day that gave you such poor performance must have been an MX200.

Back in the day, I bought and quickly returned an MX400 advertised product (I forget the brand) that had terrible VGA output and performance so bad (below TNT), that it felt slow even for an MX200. It was SDRAM based, but I wonder if it was possibly an MX200 variant with 32-bit SDRAM. Did such variants exist ?

EDIT: Maybe a 32-bit SDRAM MX100 ?

darry wrote on 2020-05-28, 11:37:

frudi wrote on 2020-05-28, 07:47:

Geforce 2 MX was the original MX card with 175 MHz GPU clock and 166 MHz memory clock, using 128-bit SDR memory. It offered perf […]
Show full quote

pentiumspeed wrote on 2020-05-21, 01:20:

Don't expect much from 2 MX much for 3D. Back in the day, I had one due to little money trying to make Myst 3D work acceptably, I had to lower many options just to work acceptable.

Next time look for Geforce2 MX400. Better one and works well with 3D and DOS. Even GTS if you want to move up.

Cheers,

Geforce 2 MX was the original MX card with 175 MHz GPU clock and 166 MHz memory clock, using 128-bit SDR memory. It offered performance on-par with the previous gen Geforce 256.

Geforce 2 MX400 came later and upped the GPU clock to 200 MHz, but kept the 166 MHz memory clock (though I think there were also later models that also upped the memory frequency to 183 or 200 MHz). It was also available with either SDR or DDR memory, but DDR models only used a narrower 64-bit bus, so both SDR and DDR models offered the same memory bandwidth. Along with MX400 came also the MX200, a low-end model which used the same 175 MHz GPU/166 MHz memory clocks of the original MX, but halved the memory bus width to 32-bit for DDR and 64-bit for SDR models.

So the original vanilla MX and MX400 are very similar in performance, the only difference usually being the 25 MHz higher GPU frequency on the latter. But the vanilla MX can usually overclock the GPU to MX400 frequencies or beyond anyway, to make up the difference. Not that GPU clocks did much for performance anyway, since the cards were mostly memory bandwidth limited. Which was also why the MX200's crippled memory bus, despite using the same GPU configuration as vanilla MX, limited its performance to about TNT2's level.

So I'm guessing the MX card you used back in the day that gave you such poor performance must have been an MX200.

Back in the day, I bought and quickly returned an MX400 advertised product (I forget the brand) that had terrible VGA output and performance so bad (below TNT), that it felt slow even for an MX200. It was SDRAM based, but I wonder if it was possibly an MX200 variant with 32-bit SDRAM. Did such variants exist ?

EDIT: Maybe a 32-bit SDRAM MX100 ?

Yes they do, I ended up with one about 10 years ago, it was inside an emachine if I remember, thing was absolute garbage.

The only Geforce2 MX card I have, a Hercules, was literally pulled out of the trash.