Something like an HD3650 should beat a 6800 hands down, but because it wasn’t the crème de la crème of the generation, it should be relatively cheap.

For cheap early 2000's gaming a Radeon 9600 (Id avoid the 9800's they seem to want to die) GeForce 4 ti 4200, Radeon x850, or GeForce 6600 would be a good pick. Your P4 will be pretty memory bandwidth starved being PC 133 anyways so something like a HD 3850 or GeForce 7000 series card would break game compatibility + be pretty bottlenecked and AMD cards after the X850 lack Windows 9X drivers. If your focus is on XP then not really an issue tho.

The X600 is a Radeon 9600 iirc.

X1950 Pro

2600pro\XT AGP or 3650 AGP.
But cards with RIALTO bridge very sensitive to quality of AGP powering.
ATI dx9 cards is more compatible with old games(Win 9x era).
HIS RADEON X850 XT Platinum AGP IceQ II 256MB - unattainable dream.

I've a 6800 Ultra paired up with a Pentium M 780 overclocked to 2.6 GHz, typical 3D 01 score is 27,000, and Half-Life 2 set to 1280x1024 (with all of the settings to high but no anti aliasing) still gets choppy in a few spots. My Win98 P4 system has a 2.8/512/533 with DDR and a Radeon 9800 SE unclocked with Omega drivers and that system scores just under 13,000 in 3d 01 - I wouldn't even try to play HL-2 with that system. In a Socket 754 system all else equal, that Radeon 9800 scores 16,000 in 3d 01 so it isn't too limited by the P4 system.

HL2 is not a early 2000s game. It is a mid-2000s game. And you are vastly better off going forward a generation with a s775/PCIe build. For actual early 2000s games that are pre-DX9 the best GPU is probably the FX5900U, I have a 5950U in a P4 and it is very good for those kind of games.

Do you really have P4 2.8 GHz with SDRAM? It is possible but very unusual configuration.
In case you really have SDRAM, the performance of such PC will be much lower compared to regular DDR memory.

havli wrote on 2023-06-02, 08:51:

Do you really have P4 2.8 GHz with SDRAM? It is possible but very unusual configuration.
In case you really have SDRAM, the performance of such PC will be much lower compared to regular DDR memory.

Im thinking they meant DDR which would make sense or some weird 478 board that has RDRAM, but at 2Gb .. DDR would be most likely here. (At a glance DDR without a heat spreader could be mistaken for PC133)

Not necessarily, though 1.5GB would be the maximum attainable through normal SDR sticks, unless registered modules are used (which I very much doubt would work, unless the mainboard specifically supports ECC).

I have both a Socket 423 and a 478 mobo that can run standard PC133. Former is a MSI 845 Pro, the latter is a AOpen AX4BS.

There is an RV410 based X1050. It's basically a rebranded Radeon X700. Since it's bottom of the barrel, it should be cheap, but with very decent early XP performance, around Radeon 9800 Pro level and passive cooling. But you have to pay attention and avoid the RV370 based 64bit variant. Those are abysmal.

Geforce 7600GT/GS is also fairly common and not too expensive. Should be around X800 performance level.

PcBytes wrote on 2023-06-02, 09:58:

Not necessarily, though 1.5GB would be the maximum attainable through normal SDR sticks, unless registered modules are used (which I very much doubt would work, unless the mainboard specifically supports ECC).

I have both a Socket 423 and a 478 mobo that can run standard PC133. Former is a MSI 845 Pro, the latter is a AOpen AX4BS.

I wonder what the performance hit would be using PC133 SDR with a 478 board, Im guessing quite a bit, I know that 423 took quite a hit using PC133 so much so that a good Tualatin 1.4 could run rings around it.

The motherboard I have is a Asus P4B-LX. In the manual it states

```
The motherboard comes with two Single Data Rate (SDR) Dual InlineMemory Module (DIMM) sockets. These sockets support up to 2GBsystem memory using unbuffered ECC or non-ECC PC100/133 DIMMs.
```