gerwin wrote:

I tried an FX5200 on my 440BX board once, and it gave lockups while running 3dmark2001.

I have a FX 5600 and 5950 and have tried them on my 440BX mobo. The 5600 doesn't work right. I can't get the drivers to install without a BSOD. The 5950, however, works perfectly! It's even rather happy with an 89MHz AGP clock. Very strange.

I've been starting to think that the vid cards that have aux power connections may be the best choices for old mobos. Lots of cards like the GF2/3/4 suck a lot of power thru the AGP socket. When you combine that with the old mobos that have out of spec AGP slots, it becomes a stability nightmare. Of course, old mobos have AGP problems beyond just power issues most of the time.

Maybe.
The later AGP cards, like the My Geforce 6200 (AGP 4x) won't even fit in a 440bx slot (AGP 2x) 🙁 . The connectors ridges and the AGP cards grooves don't match.

EDIT: I found that most other Geforce 6200 Cards are keyed for universal AGP, so they fit in a 440BX mainboard. Example: The MSI NX6200AX fits and works fine.
(Also I found that sawing out an additional slot in the ASUS Geforce 6200 AGP slot effectively killed it. Never liked that card anyways 😉 )

The newest cards that are AGP 2x compatible are Radeon 9700 and GeForce FX 5950. AFAIK. And the 9700s I've used are very unhappy on an overclocked AGP bus. I wish 9700 was happier with high AGP clocks though because they are better cards than the FX series IMO.

I missed the FX5700 now it between a 5600 Ultra and a 5900XT.

This my concern:

Swapped hardwired DirectX 7 T&L Units + DirectX 8 integer pixel shader units for DirectX 9 floating point units.

This is the difference between the old 5600 & 5900 cores. Now having swapped the DX integer for DX float make me wonder if conversions would need to be done for DX 7/8 games with possible degraded quality, this a concern considering <DX8 games are the target.

Opinions appreciated

I did miss my 440MX when I replaced it with an FX5200, but its so long ago I can't remember why.

FX5200 was a mistake for me - I thought "higher number = better". Replaced with the 4800se. I've found a ti4800se to be an awful lot better than fx5200 for games, and i don't seem to get issues in later stuff like dawn of war or WoW - runs fine. 4800 = universal AGP, uses any slot.

With later cards [6x00 series], earlier games like AvP start to have problems [eg. need to run earlier driver versions]. Could something similar happen with earlier card technology changes I wonder? Could a DX7/8 game somehow crash on a DX9 card? Or will it just give gfx corruption?

With later cards [6x00 series], earlier games like AvP start to have problems [eg. need to run earlier driver versions].

Oh, really? Is there a list somewhere of which games this can happen to? I just replaced a Geforce3 with a 6200.

All i know is that a gf6600 or 6800 needs driver version 66.93 [or presumably earlier] for AvP to be playable. Not heard of any other games being similarly affected. With late drivers you get no real display - a few bright patches and that's about it iirc.

MartinC wrote:

This my concern:

Swapped hardwired DirectX 7 T&L Units + DirectX 8 integer pixel shader units for DirectX 9 floating point units.

This is the difference between the old 5600 & 5900 cores. Now having swapped the DX integer for DX float make me wonder if conversions would need to be done for DX 7/8 games with possible degraded quality, this a concern considering <DX8 games are the target.

The FX series was a mismash of older and newer functions. Apparently it had DX7, DX8 and DX9 hardware. What ATI did instead was build a pure DX9 card and translate the older functions into DX9 vertex/pixel shader code. History showed that this was the way to go. There is no tangible loss of speed or quality for older games, and the ATI R300 GPU was way better for new games.

5700/5900 tried to shore things up by swapping some of the retro hardware for more DX9 ALUs. It helped just enough to put 5950 Ultra basically at parity with the Radeon 9800XT. Assuming you could ignore all of NVIDIA's visual quality cheats that the entire FX line shared. The FX 5900 series also had way more memory bandwidth with the then brand new GDDR3, all in an effort to match up.

The FX series is decent for older games. The higher FX cards are very fast and quite compatible with many games. Issues that arise will be caused by driver quirks. Games usually need special attention from driver writers and as a game gets older it doesn't get that attention anymore. Any newer card from any vendor can be troublesome in that way.

A Voodoo5 5500 is probably the best option for old 3D gaming as you get Glide as well as good anti-aliasing, and you are spared from AGP issues for the most part because 3Dfx didn't mess much with AGP features. Super 7 motherboards almost universally have terrible AGP implementations. Even a quality 440BX mobo can be trouble with some cards.

Swaaye did a really good job of summing that up. What this means for you, is if you want an FX go with a 5700 Ultra, 5900 (5900 Ultra = extra 50mhz core clock), or a 5950xt. The 5700 Ultra has almost double the memory bandwidth as regular 5700. The 5950 Xt runs roughly the same clocks as 5700 Ultra but has double the pixel pipelines.The increase in pixel pipes is really noticeable when you start pushing higher resolutions. The memory bandwidth also effects Anti-Aliasing performance. Otherwise you should start looking at Geforce4 4600 Ti or 4800 Ti since those are designed and optimized to do DX 7 and 8. Adding to what Ratfink said earlier, those high spec GF4's actually could out perform the early FX series. The ONLY difference between a 4600 and a 4800 is AGP 8x (a non-issue for you). Don't go with a 4800SE, it is slower. It's true that your drivers will convert legacy code to run through he advanced shader pipelines of a FX, but one most realize that your processor is what handles that task. It won't matter how fast your video card is when your processor is the bottleneck.

Thanks for the input.

Custom made (by me) SLI cable:

@ MartinC: 3 CD drives ... ??? Explain please. 😊

I have never ever used(knowingly, that is) any form of SCSI devices (SCSI newbie), but acquired a BX mobo with several on-board connectors('wide', 'ultra2' and 'fast') this week, so I'm intrigued... 😎

bestemor wrote:

@ MartinC: 3 CD drives ... ??? Explain please. 😊

I have never ever used(knowingly, that is) any form of SCSI devices (SCSI newbie), but acquired a BX mobo with several on-board connectors('wide', 'ultra2' and 'fast') this week, so I'm intrigued... 😎

OK, well many games will require the game CD's to be inserted so the more CD-ROM's the less swapping of CD's.

SCSI Ultra Wide (SCSI-3 SPI) is no more "faster" than ATA/66,
http://www.barefeats.com/hard.html

I chose SCSI over standard ATA because it's more efficient, a device on the SCSI chain does not have to wait for other devices on the same chain, so system slow downs/lock ups are reduced.

The SCSI card does all the work & does not have to go through the CPU for SCSI devices to communicate with each-other, again keeping the system more stable & reducing system work load.
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I like to use CD images. I really don't like dealing with CDROM noise or spin up times. You can do this in DOS with SHSUCDX and its utilities, or in Windows with Daemon Tools virtual drive and IMGBURN to make images.

Redbook audio isn't usable in DOS though because ISOs can't store redbook and I believe that the SHSUCDX drivers only work with ISOs. In Windows though, Daemon Tools can read CUE/BIN and it emulates the analog audio of a CDROM drive. Just make sure that you set the drive you want to use for CD audio. In 9x this is in the control panel under multimedia settings. In XP you have to make sure the virtual drive is the lowest drive letter of all optical drives.

swaaye wrote:

I like to use CD images. I really don't like dealing with CDROM noise or spin up times. You can do this in DOS with SHSUCDX and its utilities, or in Windows with Daemon Tools virtual drive and IMGBURN to make images.

Redbook audio isn't usable in DOS though because ISOs can't store redbook and I believe that the SHSUCDX drivers only work with ISOs. In Windows though, Daemon Tools can read CUE/BIN and it emulates the analog audio of a CDROM drive. Just make sure that you set the drive you want to use for CD audio. In 9x this is in the control panel under multimedia settings. In XP you have to make sure the virtual drive is the lowest drive letter of all optical drives.

I believe in the minimalistic software approach. I have a Core2Duo, 3GB RAM, 8600GT laptop & I bet this 99' Dream Machine will run faster for basic tasks such as Web browsing, Office & Startup.

No matter the hardware you are running the more software installed & running in the background the slower & less stable the system.

swaaye wrote:

I like to use CD images. I really don't like dealing with CDROM noise or spin up times. You can do this in DOS with SHSUCDX and its utilities, or in Windows with Daemon Tools virtual drive and IMGBURN to make images.

Silence your blasphemeous tounge. CD noise is awesome.

*misses his 4X's zipzip zipzip noise, and his 16x's wooshing shopvac sound*

MartinC wrote:

No matter the hardware you are running the more software installed & running in the background the slower & less stable the system.

SHSUCDX replaces your CDROM driver (if you use it to mount ISOs) and MSCDEX. It's almost entirely written in assembly language and uses very little RAM. It is much less of a burden on your sys than MSCDEX and probably your IDE CD driver too. You can also consider that the CPU utilization will be probably be much lower running a HDD ISO image than a PIO mode CDROM, along with the dramatically faster access time and throughput.

As for Daemon Tools, it doesn't slow anything down. Quite the contrary compared to dealing with slow optical drives (they are all slow compared to any HDD made in the past 12 years or so). It's not "resource heavy" at all. I've been using it for like 9 years now on hardware from 486s to quad cores. It's also wonderful for retro rig experimentation since I keep a store of game images I've made on a networked machine.

It's not all that different than using CD images with DOSBOX. There's definitely zero advantage to going with a CDROM over a CUE/BIN or ISO image in that case.

Moogle! wrote:

Silence your blasphemeous tounge. CD noise is awesome.

I do have a Toshiba 12X CLV drive that's silent aside from seeks but it has a very annoying spin up time. It also doesn't always like CDRs which I use to protect my original disks (or had to make because the originals are so scratched). I do usually use this drive for DOS CD games, but lately have started experimenting with SHSUCDX DOS ISO mounting.

I do not want a 48X CDROM ripping away like an airplane just to play CD audio or stream video designed for a 2X CDROM.

Update, bought a GeForce2 Pro 32MB, it's the same as the famous GTS but with slightly better memory bandwidth.

I was looking at a Viper 770 Ultra (TNT Ultra GPU) but because of the lack of T&L unit I decided to go with a GeForce, T&L was essentially the biggest thing Nvidia bought to the table. The GF2 Pro should be perfect for the newer DX7 games 😀 might give Halo a shot, also Soldier of Fortune 😀

I'm close to completing this project just a few thing left but I'm pretty busy ATM so it might be awhile, I'll keep you guy posted!

Awesome choice man. Once you get your card and that 1ghz P3 all put together I'd like to see some 3Dmark and Sandra scores. Just make sure to get the legacy versions.

How happy I was to find my 1GHz Slot-1 came with no cooling....NOT!

It worked out OK, just hope I didn't do any damage to the core when fitting the heatsink 🙁

Should be fine.