I'd go for the FX, mostly because Nvidia generally causes fewer problems with older games.

I'd be more enthusiastic about that prospect if the 5700SE had more memory bandwidth and didn't have a loud heatsink/fan. In the early going the Rage 128 Pro might get the first shot just because I don't think I've ever used one before.

The Rage 128 is an extremely limited card, if memory serves. You might get ZPC running (though why would you want to?), but I wouldn't count on anything else going.

Jorpho wrote:

The Rage 128 is an extremely limited card, if memory serves. You might get ZPC running (though why would you want to?), but I wouldn't count on anything else going.

It's morbid curiosity on my part. But from what I remember the Rage 128 Pro's a generic DirectX 6 card, about on par with a TNT2 but with (at least partial) support for S3TC. Maybe you're thinking of the earlier Rage Pro, or the even earlier Rage cards.

edit: Aaagh, at least a couple of the games I'm looking at require DirectX 7 or better hardware. Looks like the top three are my options, unless I just feel curious.

NOLF 2 would be unplayable with a Rage 128 Pro. If you don't want the noisy fan try finding a cheap Ti 4200, great cards !

I would personally use the 9550 until I could find a geforce 6xxx series to put in there.

F2bnp wrote:

NOLF 2 would be unplayable with a Rage 128 Pro. If you don't want the noisy fan try finding a cheap Ti 4200, great cards !

Sadly it's not just the noisy fan - the 5700SE's a deeply weird card made by Albatron, with the core speed of a 5700 Ultra married to 64-bit DDR with an effective bandwidth of 3.2 GB/second. Nominally it should be capable, but as soon as things get demanding *WHAM* - the slow memory is just killer.

I've always been fond of the NV2x cards. If it weren't for the substantial speed hit that anisotropic filtering incurs, I'd probably have one already. I'll test the existing cards, then see if tracking one down is merited.

An X850 XT PE might be better. It's a little slower than GF6800U with AA/AF turned off but once you turn them on the X850 pulls ahead because there isn't as much of a performance hit.

^^^ Well, sure, but I'm most concerned with the hardware I have, and what will strike the best balance between performance and compatibility with old games. Obviously I can switch cards too, and once the system's been built and all's installed I'll create an appropriate thread over in the System Specs forum.

edit: ...And actually it looks like I can persuade No One Lives Forever 2 to run in Win7! It should look very nice on my Athlon II X2 250 with 6 gigs of DDR2 and a 512 MB 9600GT...

Voodoo3 is definitely best for anything with Glide support and/or older than 1999. Otherwise Geforce FX.

Concupiscence wrote:

...And actually it looks like I can persuade No One Lives Forever 2 to run in Win7!

Really, if that's your concern, Jedi Knight II can almost certainly be persuaded to run under Win7. I'm not sure about Shogo, but it's definitely come up here before.

I've run shogo: MAD in windows xp64 (IIRC) in win98 compat mode.

Jorpho wrote:

Concupiscence wrote:

...And actually it looks like I can persuade No One Lives Forever 2 to run in Win7!

Really, if that's your concern, Jedi Knight II can almost certainly be persuaded to run under Win7. I'm not sure about Shogo, but it's definitely come up here before.

As best I recall JKII's installer wouldn't run in Win7 x64. There was also another deeply irritating issue I found: exiting to the menu and returning to the game didn't seem to properly reset the rendering context, so the screen would be black and the game would continue running. Returning to the menu, alt-tabbing away, and alt-tabbing back would usually reset it, but that's a pretty grotesque hurdle to clear.

make a shortcut to the installer, run the shortcut in win98 compat mode.

jaqie wrote:

make a shortcut to the installer, run the shortcut in win98 compat mode.

I'm pretty sure I tried it, but even after getting it installed the rendering bug didn't go away. Regardless, part of why I'm building this low-spec, low-heat computer is so I won't have to worry about shoehorning old games onto my Windows 7 box. =)

I'm building a p2-450 for a very similar reason 😀

jaqie wrote:

I'm building a p2-450 for a very similar reason 😀

That era of hardware is classic. I'd pursue something similar myself, but with what I've got lying around it just made more sense to snag the Athlon64 for $7 and the motherboard for $25.

unless you dealmonger ebay...
http://www.ebay.com/itm/200716606615
xD

I just hope the guy doesn't flake out on sending it.

<_<; Wowsers. I hope he sends it too. If you need a graphics card, I can probably part with at least one of those I've listed above for the cost of shipping. With any luck I'll be able to get this thing built and tested before the weekend's over.