swaaye wrote:

The AGP card to have is probably Radeon HD 4670. But they are going for about double the price of the PCIe version and that's ridiculous. But one of these would dust any pre DX10 card.

I have one of these and I have to say, they are awesome! though my XP 3200+ can't supply the 4670 with enough data to really make a difference in gaming. At least not the games I tried it with.

I got the 1GB version, with the silent GPU fan 😀
It wasn't -very- cheap though, but imo beats buying a used 2nd hand card or a card that's a LOT slower.

sliderider wrote:

HD2400 Pro. $44.10, free shipping. NEW
http://www.pricefalls.com/products/256MB-Visi … 165/id/14896100

...and if you add benchmarks to it there is no point even mentioning that card:
HD2400pro 3Dmark05 score ~3000:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powercolor … 400_Pro/15.html

X850 3Dmark05 score ~ 6000:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/7679/10

In other words, if you want a 2D AGP video card you may just as well get a good old, reliable GF4 MX440 for a buck over the Ebay 😊

I got the piece of garbage FX 5200 64-bit Edition running 1680x1050 on DVI. 😁

Driver 93.71. Add custom 1680x1050 resolution. Set it to CVT Reduced Blanking. Success.

It works very nicely as a 2D card. The Radeon 7500 was not ideal because those cards don't show anything on DVI until you get into Windows. 7500 and 8500 have some strange DVI issues like that.

How will a 5900XT compare against a 6200 128-bit in dx9 games (preferably dx9c ones) ?

They are both probably going to be quite slow. You don't really want to do DX9 anything on any FX card.

Half Life 2 in DX9 mode is something like 60% slower than DX8.1 mode on my 5900 Ultra. It's slower than a Radeon 9600 Pro.

While the 5900XT is a good bit faster in DX8, the 6200 should pummel the piss out of the 5900XT in DX9. Plus, the 5900 lacks SM3.0, so it simply won't run some DX9 games. (Although, most of the SM3.0 games are a bit too heavy for a 6200 to run acceptably anyhow.)

Ok, let's forget about DX9 games then, or at least forget about the heavy ones...
Then, if we start to add filters like AA in the equation, will they perform close or will the 5900XT win here in this type of scenario thanks to the 256-bit bus ?
Also, I'm right to think that the 5900XT will wipe the floor with a 6200A (64-bit) in any scenario ?

In DirectX 8.1 and older games, a FX 5900 XT should be quite competitive with any 6200 because of its huge bandwidth advantage yes.

Just found this. Maybe it's useful for reference. It's a 6200 review in which it compares it against other cards, including the 5900XT:
http://www.digital-daily.com/video/nvidia_gef … 200/index02.htm
Tested cards are PCI-E.

Seems like the 6200 wins in PS3.0 scenarios whereas the 5900XT wins in PS2.0 probably because, like Old said, it's not a PS3.0 card. In DX8.1, the 5900XT takes the lead.

I almost jumped the gun on a FX 5200 PCI recently (to replace the slow TNT turd that's in my K6-3 box)... but I did a quick check and decided to find a radeon 9250 instead.... now to get one cheap....

FX 5200 PCI. Wow that must be the lowest of the low. I bet it has a 64-bit bus too and maybe like 1GB of PC66 SDRAM that the manufacturer found at some liquidation auction. 😉

TheMAN wrote:

I almost jumped the gun on a FX 5200 PCI recently (to replace the slow TNT turd that's in my K6-3 box)... but I did a quick check and decided to find a radeon 9250 instead.... now to get one cheap....

Should get a 6200. Some can be unlocked to a 6600 with RivaTuner. That would be nice, a PCI 6600 that never existed. That would probably be the fastest PCI card you can get with Windows 98 driver support.

One more thing, if you're going Radeon then it would pay to seek out a Visiontek Xtasy Radeon 9100 128mb PCI. It's actually faster than a 9200 or 9250. Hard as hell to find in PCI these days, though. AGP is almost all you can find anymore. The Visiontek card has faster memory installed than other 9100 cards, even those in AGP, so it's marginally faster than the rest and can take a little more overclocking.

TheMAN wrote:

I almost jumped the gun on a FX 5200 PCI recently (to replace the slow TNT turd that's in my K6-3 box)...

A K6-3 is probably already maxed out with a GeForce 2 MX.

5u3 wrote:

TheMAN wrote:

I almost jumped the gun on a FX 5200 PCI recently (to replace the slow TNT turd that's in my K6-3 box)...

A K6-3 is probably already maxed out with a GeForce 2 MX.

The AMD K6 chips are weak at sending geometry calculations to the video card so they max out sooner than Intel chips in terms of faster video. Gaming rigs from that era are much better off with an Intel CPU than one of the competitors. Not sure where I would put the line, though. GF2MX seems a little low.

sliderider wrote:

5u3 wrote:

TheMAN wrote:

I almost jumped the gun on a FX 5200 PCI recently (to replace the slow TNT turd that's in my K6-3 box)...

A K6-3 is probably already maxed out with a GeForce 2 MX.

The AMD K6 chips are weak at sending geometry calculations to the video card so they max out sooner than Intel chips in terms of faster video. Gaming rigs from that era are much better off with an Intel CPU than one of the competitors. Not sure where I would put the line, though. GF2MX seems a little low.

I'd say a Voodoo 3 is more then enough for K6. Anything faster won't help performance that much. These K6's are roughly similar to P2 or the old Katmai's. Coppermine and Tualatin were much faster then K6.

Years ago I did a side by side comparison of UT99/Voodoo5/Glide on a K6-3+ @ 600 and a P3-450 (Katmai). The P3 was faster overall. That really deflated my K6+ interest.

I think it comes down to 1) K6 FPU sucks 2) K6 has poor memory performance due to the chipsets and Socket 7 interface. Maybe if all games had gone nuts with their 3DNow assembly coding things could have turned out better but that never happened. I think the only game that really pushes 3DNow was Quake 2 and AMD themselves programmed the exe for that.

swaaye wrote:

Years ago I did a side by side comparison of UT99/Voodoo5/Glide on a K6-3+ @ 600 and a P3-450 (Katmai). The P3 was faster overall. That really deflated my K6+ interest.

Ouch.

But otoh, K6 is still the "legendary" Socket 7, which in turn housed the first processor that became known in every household!
To me, in the 486 era computers were very expensive and actually quite useless for the common user. It was vague, you had to type in commands and few people really understood what all the fuzz was all about.
But teh Pentium...Pentium stood for (somewhat) cheaper computers, Windows, real 3D games and teh internet!!1
Socket 7 was teh socket that really started the "multimedia PC" thingy, along with all it's bugs and 9x crashes!
And the K6's are, in a way, the ultimate Pentiums, the fastest of that same old generation.

And slot 1 is great+fast+easy to set up+stable+AGP....and very, very, boooooring! 😁

Socket 7 was also the last type of motherboard that relied significantly on setting jumpers. All the newer stuff started the hardware plu&play stuff, along with having all options in the BIOS.

To me Socket 7 was, in a way, the last generation of the old ways that had been since the first x86. And Pentium 2/Athlon were the 1st of a new generation.

Wow you terrify me Tetrium. That post above delineates your insanity. 😁

Oh and I think that 486s were the heyday of "MULTIMEDIA!!!!!!". Actually MPC Level 1 specified a 386! The power of postage stamp video and 8-bit audio driven by expensive single speed CDROMs with ~1 second access time! Glorious!

My first experience with a "multimedia encyclopedia CDROM" was on an Apple IIGS, btw. 😉

my K6-3 is in a 430TX board... not any fancy super7 board... why is it this way? because I was too pissed off 3 months after I got the board that super 7 came out, and I didn't know it (back when information was harder to get)!

it works fine and is rock solid for what it is... for one thing, there's far less problems on an intel chipset than with via, sis or whatever

anyway, why haven't I ditched that board stilll? money.
I don't want to spend too much money on this obsolete system that I'm only going to spend limited hours messing around with
I only found out about the "super duper fast" PCI cards recently through a search on ebay out of pure boredom... hence whey I came to settle on the radeon 9250

I like ati, its good drivers (no it wasn't this way years ago!), and good video quality... and I rather have a fast GPU that waits on the rest of the system than the rest of the system waiting on the GPU

yes voodoo 3 and others work, but the money spent will be similar

the whole point of me even wanting a new video card is so that I can at least finally play quake2 on that machine... something I was never able to really do... yeah, the TNT is that freaking slow... that fatal flaw alone is enough justification to spend some money to do one final "hurah" upgrade on that K6-3 box.... it'll more than likely be my own "retrobox", it'll take too much effort resurrecting my 386 and getting a 486

Well I still suggest a Voodoo3 over a Radeon 9250.

1) Glide support is extremely useful for the games you'll run on there.
2) The CPU is so slow that even a Voodoo3 will be waiting on it. Heck a Voodoo2 might wait on that CPU.
3) Voodoo3's 2D speed and analog signal quality are excellent.
4) Voodoo3's 16-bit color is enhanced by some tricks in the RAMDAC (again very useful for old games)
5) 3DFX cards will play just about every pre-2000 game perfectly whereas I guarantee a Radeon will have problems with some old games. Fog effects for instance.

Radeon is about the last choice I'd consider. A GeForce is better than a Radeon, but 3dfx is best.