Cobra42898 wrote:Well, I suppose the responses make me wonder what the heck the donor PC was supposed to be. In a p3 system, the agp i740 wouldn't be much of an improvement over the onboard video, would it?
You should distinguish between onboard video (discrete chip with its own memory) and integrated video (video core integrated into chipset or more recently CPU, sharing memory bandwidth). Onboard video can theoretically be just as good as on a separate card (I have a few boards here with a Voodoo3-2000 onboard 😀 ), integrated video sucks, partly because the video cores are crap but mainly because the shared memory castrates the CPU. This is only an issue when CPU and video are both being used heavily - but that describes just about every game more complex than Minesweeper.
That said, Intel stopped discrete GPUs after they introduced their first integrated attempts (i810, i815), which were shipped with late PPGA (and very rarely late Slot 1) and FC-PGA P3 and Celeron CPUs. So that immediately explains this card and the system: mid to low end P3, before i810. So it probably had a P3 Katmai between 450 and 550MHz. That would have been a bad deal at the time for most applications, because if you didn't need good video you probably also didn't need the hefty FPU in the P3, so an AMD K6-2 or K6-3 would have performed at least as well for far less, and if you did need the FPU you would have wanted a better video card.
But then even more than now, big numbers sold big boxes, so a fast P3 and a video card with 8MB of RAM!!! would have been the selling points here for the poor ignorant buyers.
Looks like the pci rage pro was the better deal for me personally. I have a p100 system and a P1 200/mmx system. I'd think it would work well enough in either of those.
Yep. I ran one with a K6-2 back in the day. Was a good match.
Still, in a p3 system, neither of these cards makes sense. Why in the world would someone install them both in it? Left overs from an older PC?
Once again, early P3 in a system designed to deliver the maximum number of P3 MHz while scrimping on everything else. Typical marketing-driven design.
Edit:
Re i810 vs i740 - the two had almost exactly the same core. The difference was the memory. i740 had its own, i810 shared system memory. Depending on exact load, the system performance of a Celeron/P3 CPU with i810 could be half that of the same CPU with an i440BX-type chipset and an i740. Remarkably, I can't find any benchmarks of i740 vs i810 from 1999 when the i810 came out, but I can give you a subjective experience: in 2000/2001 I worked at Packard Bell and at the office had an early 1998 vintage system with MU440EX motherboard with onboard AGP ATi Rage Pro. It had a Celeron 366, 32MB of RAM and ran Windows 98. By no means a speed demon, but it got the job done. Then half the office computers were upgraded to new iConnect systems with GA-6WMM7 motherboard with i810 chipset and a Celeron 766, with 64MB RAM. Should be faster, right? Wrong. Just about everything was slower. At the time we mainly blamed the WinME they were shipped with, but after enough complaints someone installed Win98 with the exact same loadout as the old 1998 systems on them. It was better than with WinME, but the old C366 with dedicated video and RAM still felt more responsive. It was *BAD*. i740 isn't fast by anybody's standards (unless you happen to be running a period-correct system and benchmarking in Turok, which seemed uniquely optimized for the i740), but it's not in the same category of crap as i810, even though it's a slower core.