Anything up to GeForce FX 5950 Ultra or Radeon 9800 Pro. But the most powerful card that can work with AGP 3.3.v Slot 1 system is Galaxy GeForce 7950GT.

The question should be what's the most powerful CPU you can use in a Slot 1 system. The fastest graphics card won't yield much if the CPU can't keep up. After you know what CPU to use, you can choose a matching graphics card. Also, keep compatibility in mind. "Newer" cards are rather bad for low resolution, VESA support, etc.

To put that in context: If you had a P2 450 MHz with a Voodoo3 back then, you already ran into that situation. Even a Voodoo2 will not reach it's full potential with CPUs slower than ~1 GHz, let alone the Voodoo3.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Anything up to GeForce FX 5950 Ultra or Radeon 9800 Pro. But the most powerful card that can work with AGP 3.3.v Slot 1 system is Galaxy GeForce 7950GT.

Of course you could go for a Slot 1 system with AGP 4x, allowing lower voltage options. You could do that with either an Intel i815 chipset (slot 1 i815 was very rare, but IIRC Abit had at least one board), for highest performance, but the usual i815 limitations (512MB RAM...), or the slightly slower but far more versatile Via ApolloPro 133A (694X) chipset.

Abit's SH-6 would be the obvious i815 choice, for Via 694X there's much more choice, things like the Asus P3V4X, Abit VT6X4 or Soltek SL-67KV. Iirc the Asus board offered the best (non-overclocked) performance.

A P3V4X with Tualatin slotket and Radeon 9800Pro would easily beat any BX with the same CPU and a 7950GT, assuming at least that the CPU wouldn't be the bottleneck in both cases.

I was able to get a new old stock Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard. I also picked up a 1ghz P3.
I guess I should include I want to play dos win98 and win xp games.

Pentium 3 1ghz can handle well only early XP games, so GeForce 5900XT would be good option.

dionb wrote on 2018-01-29, 13:53:

Of course you could go for a Slot 1 system with AGP 4x, allowing lower voltage options. You could do that with either an Intel i […]
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The Serpent Rider wrote:

Anything up to GeForce FX 5950 Ultra or Radeon 9800 Pro. But the most powerful card that can work with AGP 3.3.v Slot 1 system is Galaxy GeForce 7950GT.

Of course you could go for a Slot 1 system with AGP 4x, allowing lower voltage options. You could do that with either an Intel i815 chipset (slot 1 i815 was very rare, but IIRC Abit had at least one board), for highest performance, but the usual i815 limitations (512MB RAM...), or the slightly slower but far more versatile Via ApolloPro 133A (694X) chipset.

Abit's SH-6 would be the obvious i815 choice, for Via 694X there's much more choice, things like the Asus P3V4X, Abit VT6X4 or Soltek SL-67KV. Iirc the Asus board offered the best (non-overclocked) performance.

A P3V4X with Tualatin slotket and Radeon 9800Pro would easily beat any BX with the same CPU and a 7950GT, assuming at least that the CPU wouldn't be the bottleneck in both cases.

Hi,

could you explain your last sentence please?
Afaik VIA does not even make it to the podium for pentium III performance with SiS635T taking the crown, after that BX and maybe i815 or DDR-VIA (266 something), but I never heard somebody say that the Apollo Pro 133A is anywhere fast.
From everything I heard and thought I knew your comparison would be a clear win for the BX in every case.

M4cke

You dont need newer cards than Nvidia FX5200/FX500 for your old Slot1 or what is the point to have ATi 9800Pro or Nvidia 7950GT there?

M4cke wrote on 2026-05-27, 10:23:

[...]

Hi,

could you explain your last sentence please?

That's a sentence I wrote over 8 years ago...

I'm not completely sure of the point I was trying to make.

Afaik VIA does not even make it to the podium for pentium III performance with SiS635T taking the crown, after that BX and maybe i815 or DDR-VIA (266 something), but I never heard somebody say that the Apollo Pro 133A is anywhere fast.
From everything I heard and thought I knew your comparison would be a clear win for the BX in every case.

All other things being the same, i440BX scores better than 694T due to it's more efficient memory controller. Exactly how much better and how it ranks vs other chipsets depends on the exact benchmark you're doing (SIS 635T often beats it, as do i840, i815 and sometimes i820, ApolloPro266 and Serverworks IIIHE too). But all other things are not always the same.

I was probably referring to the lack of AGP 2.0 / 4X speed being more relevant than the difference in memory controller performance with cards new and powerful enough to actually use that additional AGP bandwidth. I am not now so sure that is the case. But note the last part of my sentence: "assuming at least that the CPU wouldn't be the bottleneck in both cases.". That assumption will almost never be true with such a huge mismatch between CPU and GPU - it's pretty safe to assume any P3 will at almost all times be the bottleneck when paired with a 9800Pro let alone a 7950GT.

One of the factors that starts to matter when your GPU and CPU are completely mismatched like when combining 2006 GPUs with 2000 CPUs is driver overhead. Newer drivers are bigger and eat more CPU cycles than older drivers, which was particularly an issue with nVidia. So to get optimal performance with a card, you want to use the oldest drivers that support your card and (the DirectX/OpenGL version of) the games you want to run. So if your system is completely CPU-bottlenecked anyway, CPU overhead on the drivers begins to matter significantly in performance - quite possibly a lot more than differences between chipsets. And a 2007 GPU requiring at least 2007 drivers will have a lot more overhead than a 2003 GPU with 2003 drivers - plus that ATi cards were generally considered the better choice on low-end CPUs vs nVidia cards.

So yes, I think a 694T-based system with 9800Pro would beat an i440BX system with same RAM and CPU with a 7950GT. It would however get beaten by the same system running a 9800Pro as in that case everything except the chipset would be the same.