I bought this Dell only a couple of weeks back. Some of my fondest memories are building PCs with my father in the late nineties. It's just been great messing around with this era of tech again 😁 Brought back some memories and also made me realise how much I've forgotten 😂

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-08-25, 15:44:

I recommend agonizing over whether it would be worth spending the money to upgrade or not. Ultimately decided it wasn't worth it just for a single game, but in hindsight I've always wondered what could have been.

I've been meaning to recreate my old build from that era and stick a GeForce 3 in it just to see what it would have been like if I'd sprung the cash at the time. 😁

Heh, I didn't regret going from a GeForce 2 MX400 to a used GeForce 3 Ti200 at that time. Morrowind ran ok at 800x600 usually reaching 20+ FPS, which was considered playable for that game back then. I was also able to run the original Splinter Cell with all the graphical settings maxed out and Shadow Buffers enabled, albeit at 640x480 and with 25-30 FPS.

That card served me well until mid-late 2003 when I replaced it with this GeForce 3 Ti500 which I also bought second hand and kept using until early 2005 or so. I do remember 2004 games like Thief: Deadly Shadows and VTM: Bloodlines struggling on it even at the lowest resolutions, but I still managed to complete them somehow. It's about that time that I realized that I need a brand new PC. 😁

Joseph_Joestar wrote:

I was also able to run the original Splinter Cell with all the graphical settings maxed out and Shadow Buffers enabled, albeit at 640x480 and with 25-30 FPS.

Well, more or less Xbox Original experience, all things considered.

That being said, GeForce 3 was a modern equivalent of RTX - yes, it could do fancy shaders, but at what cost?

Based on the advice given here, I've placed a bid on a 9200 64mb. Some of the other cards recommended, were just waaay to expensive 😂

Hiddenevil wrote on 2023-08-25, 17:12:

Based on the advice given here, I've placed a bid on a 9200 64mb. Some of the other cards recommended, were just waaay to expensive 😂

I think the GeForce 4200 Ti should still not cost too much?

I don't know what prices are like right now, but just to give another option:

Quadro FX 500 is a good quality 128-bit FX5200/FX5500.
Not sure how it's performance stacks up against a Ti4200 or Geforce 3. Maybe somewhere in between them.
The reason FX5200/FX5500 is generally discouraged is because so many of them are 64-bit, but the Quadro version (FX500) doesn't have that problem.
Quadro cards sometimes have better prices than an equivalent "Geforce".

FX5200/5500 is discouraged because it's a 4 pixel/4 TMU card with low clocks and gutted features. It sucks so much, that it fails to outperform GeForce 4 MX 440, even with 128-bit bus.

shamino wrote on 2023-08-25, 23:24:

I don't know what prices are like right now, but just to give another option: […]
Show full quote

I don't know what prices are like right now, but just to give another option:

Quadro FX 500 is a good quality 128-bit FX5200/FX5500.
Not sure how it's performance stacks up against a Ti4200 or Geforce 3. Maybe somewhere in between them.
The reason FX5200/FX5500 is generally discouraged is because so many of them are 64-bit, but the Quadro version (FX500) doesn't have that problem.
Quadro cards sometimes have better prices than an equivalent "Geforce".

FX500 vs. GF3 On a PIII 866:

Those results seem to reinforce what has been said, that it's a decent middle of the road card. I might look in to this.

I DID buy a 9200 for £10, however that doesn't mean I can't look around at alternatives that might be A. More correct for the era of the system B. Even better than the 9200

Hiddenevil wrote on 2023-08-27, 17:04:

Those results seem to reinforce what has been said, that it's a decent middle of the road card. I might look in to this.

Well, no. Keep in mind that 3DMark2000, by default, use 16-bit color.

I was going by the top value 6100 / 6800, I assumed 6800 is the better score or does it work in reverse?

*update*
Going over the figures again, the FPS is lower, but I'm not sure how big a difference that would be in practicality.

Also just spent some time looking at GPU's and made a concerning discovery, the ATI 9200 I bought is an AGP x8 card, but the mobo in the Dell 4300 is AGP x4. While it "should" still work with reduced bandwidth, I'm wondering if I might have been better off with something like an ATI 9000Pro, which is AGP x4.

There's not much difference simply because it's 16-bit color on a fairly slow system (sub-1ghz CPU). But FX 500 has steep performance penalty in 32-bit color.

Hiddenevil wrote on 2023-08-27, 17:04:

Those results seem to reinforce what has been said

those results are meaningless, 3dmark2000 uses directx 7 thus zero shaders. 3dmark2001 is directx 8 and finally uses vertex/pixel shaders, but in a limited capacity.

Hiddenevil wrote on 2023-08-27, 17:04:

, that it's a decent middle of the road card. I might look in to this.

its BAD. Its nv34 = FX 5200. Nvidia decided to be creative when implementing shaders https://www.anandtech.com/show/1144/4

Hiddenevil wrote on 2023-08-27, 17:04:

I DID buy a 9200 for £10, however that doesn't mean I can't look around at alternatives that might be A. More correct for the era of the system B. Even better than the 9200

https://web.archive.org/web/20101015012756/ht … com/show/1144/8 2x slower than already outdated 9200

Hiddenevil wrote on 2023-08-27, 17:58:

Also just spent some time looking at GPU's and made a concerning discovery, the ATI 9200 I bought is an AGP x8 card, but the mobo in the Dell 4300 is AGP x4. While it "should" still work with reduced bandwidth, I'm wondering if I might have been better off with something like an ATI 9000Pro, which is AGP x4.

How would that make any sense? This is like switching to a slower car because your original ones speedometer goes up to 200kph and highways are limited to 130 🤣
with AGP the rule is if it fits it sits

My thought was, appropriate speed GPU for the right AGP slot

I wasn’t sure how the bottleneck would play out in practical use..Morrowind 3 is thus far the most taxing game I’m running.

AGP usually does not play significant role past AGP 2x, unless you're specifically hammering VRAM limit and need to swap textures into RAM.

I suspect Morrowind will push it, but not to that extent. I'm certainly seeing some indication that resources are being eaten up. But I don't think that's CPU related, as it's a 1.6Ghz P4, more than ample for the game surely.

Hiddenevil wrote on 2023-08-28, 00:55:

I suspect Morrowind will push it, but not to that extent. I'm certainly seeing some indication that resources are being eaten up. But I don't think that's CPU related, as it's a 1.6Ghz P4, more than ample for the game surely.

Some day I'd love to do some serious benchmarking of Morrowind, but it's been my understanding that it's a very CPU dependent game. I don't know if it prefers P4s or Athlons. There's a lot going on in the game world that the CPU is keeping up with, plus the whole scripting system that it uses. It might respond well to DDR/Rambus vs SDRAM but I've never seen anybody actually quantify that.

Morrowind was a hardware torture test at the time of it's release. It was also an obsession for a sizable niche of players, and it's a very different game from most, so I think it really needed some attention from the hardware review sites but it didn't get it. Review sites prefer to test games that have a built in benchmark. This is unfortunate because it's hard to infer how Morrowind will perform based on generic FPS benchmarks from Quake 3 or whatever.
It's easy to find lots of anecdotes from players, but those stories are all over the place.

I think your CPU is reasonable but it's not overwhelming for this game.
I would upgrade the RAM. I never played with only 256MB but I'd expect to see a lot of stutters from disk activity, and it might crash a lot. Morrowind has a memory leak so having more memory alleviates that.
When I was playing this game, I had a good experience with 1GB but when I tried running it with ~500GB occupied by a background process, it crashed like crazy. I had some mods though.
A reliable trigger for the memory leak seems to be reloading. If you reload a few times, it will crash.

Doesn't Windows98 have a memory ceiling? I'm sure I read some place 512mb? Or is that negated once SE is installed?

I probably have a 256mb stick hanging around, my father and I had a habit of never getting rid of old tech. So I have a lot of old 939, AM2.AM3 boards, old ram etc. Sadly no AGP cards, so I've been having to reacquaint myself with the tech.

OH btw, regarding the memory leak. THIS might explain an odd behaviour I've noticed..After a few hrs gaming, when I come to quit, the computer will take a time to exit and the screens will literally peel up the green as it exists back to desktop. Almost like the CPU is throttling, but if the ram is full, well that would also do it.

Hiddenevil wrote on 2023-08-28, 08:35:

Doesn't Windows98 have a memory ceiling? I'm sure I read some place 512mb? Or is that negated once SE is installed?

Yes I think that's true. I've never dealt with that issue myself but I've seen a lot of posts on here about it. I was playing the game on Win2k and later on XP, I never played it on Win98SE.