For late 1990s and early 2000s stuff I'd probably upgrade the graphics card from a Rage or TNT - any GeForce should be acceptable, as they all support TnL; GF3 and above will get you PS support; it just depends how much overlap you need/want with an XP machine at that point. Radeon will be pretty similar (they support DX7+). The AIW may be just the ticket, since you already have it. I'd say give it a shot, and if it's not cutting it (I don't know what kind of performance hit to expect due to the PCI interface on that card and I don't know if it's clock/memory crippled as an AIW), throw caution to the wind and spend $10-$20 to get something like an MX 440, FX 5200, R9200, etc unless you have some era-appropriate card on a wish list.

GeForce MX 440 looks like a decent upgrade choice. I'll try the AiW and see if it sucks too hard. I'm not averse to spending what looks like ~$14 avg. for an MX440, I was just trying to avoid shelling out "big" money like I had to for the PowerVR card in my PII.

Swapped the Slot 1 board out of the case, and stuck in the FIC AZ11 w/ Athlon 900. It originally had a Duron 700ish with a failing heatsink and fan, so instead of reusing that I picked up a new Rosewill Socket A cooler on Newegg. That might have been dumb; it's huge.

Installing the Socket A coolers is my kryptonite, so I'm sure I cracked the CPU die and shattered the motherboard. I'll know for sure when I test it. 😉 The more obvious issue i noticed is that the sideways mounted PSU is now VERY close to, and obstructing about 45% of the CPU fan. Is that the sort of thing that might cause trouble in the long term?

AidanExamineer wrote:

GeForce MX 440 looks like a decent upgrade choice. I'll try the AiW and see if it sucks too hard. I'm not averse to spending what looks like ~$14 avg. for an MX440, I was just trying to avoid shelling out "big" money like I had to for the PowerVR card in my PII.

Swapped the Slot 1 board out of the case, and stuck in the FIC AZ11 w/ Athlon 900. It originally had a Duron 700ish with a failing heatsink and fan, so instead of reusing that I picked up a new Rosewill Socket A cooler on Newegg. That might have been dumb; it's huge.

Installing the Socket A coolers is my kryptonite, so I'm sure I cracked the CPU die and shattered the motherboard. I'll know for sure when I test it. 😉 The more obvious issue i noticed is that the sideways mounted PSU is now VERY close to, and obstructing about 45% of the CPU fan. Is that the sort of thing that might cause trouble in the long term?

Got a picture (or crude MS paint drawing) of this obstruction? Which heatsink did you buy? I've had systems in the past where the HSF and PSU are almost touching and nothing has ever gone wrong, but if the HSF can't get any airflow that might be an issue.

MX 440 isn't bad at all - it won't do DX8 (it doesn't have PS support), but it will do TnL, has LMA and other advantages over GF2 (and older), and most of them are passively cooled. Mine (which has mysteriously vanished) did an okay job with WarCraft 3, Halo, Hitman 1-2, etc with an AthlonXP. Most of those were probably running 800x600 but it was playable. Older/lighter games than that will be even less of a problem. Just depends on what you need it to do ofc.

If having a fan doesn't bother you, if your PSU can handle it, and/or if you want DX8 support I would consider:

- Lower-half of the GeForce FX range (FX 5200-5700U)
- GeForce 3
- R200 Radeons (8500, 9000, 9200)
- Lower-half of the R300 Radeon range (9250-9600)

You can probably find examples of each for under $30 if you dig around, and they should all be faster than the MX 440 in at least most events (I think technically the Radeon 9000 and FX 5200 are "equals" to the MX 440). If you need support for lots of OpenGL games, I'd probably lean towards nVidia.

The narrow vent above the HSF is a small PSU intake. So it could be worse.

And, uh, that capacitor was bent before I got here.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … 0-017-_-Product
That's the HSF assembly I ordered.

I wouldn't expect that to cause trouble - keep an eye on temps during initial benchmarking/testing just to be on the safe side though.