I think the Athlon 64 is potentially the much better platform.

You can start off with the Sempron and get a faster Athlon 64 down the track. They are cheap and easy to find. Same goes for compatible PSU, coolers and so on.

and should i switch to the 7600GS or keep my FX 5900?

Looking at most of my games 90% are DX7 or newer

Major titles not DX7 or newer that I do play are.

SimCopter
Starfleet Academy
Monster Truck Madness 2
Midtown Madness 2
Unreal Gold
Half Life + Opposing Forces + Blue Shift

Is this for Windows XP or 98?

Windows XP, I wont be dual booting to 98, i have everything i like using working on XP

Ok, some of these games I'm not sure how they run on XP and newer graphics cards.

But the 7600 would get my vote regardless 😀

Your trade-off between the 7600gs and the fx5900 only relates to the games you want to play, that don't run on your i7 rig.

So - what do you lose from using the 7600gs? Does anything not run correctly, that you want to play, that would run correctly with the fx5900? And how much does that matter.

And - if you use the fx5900, what doesn't run as well as it would on the 7600gs and how much does that matter to you?

Well some games that run poorly on Windows 10 and my FX 5900 are

Battle for Middle Earth
Battle for Middle Earth II
Medal of Honor Pacific Assault
SimCity 4 (I think it's my i7 causing me the grief)
Roller Coaster Tycoon 3

And no idea what won't run correctly without DX3, DX5, and DX6 feature support lost by going to the 7600GS. I havn't messed with it yet.

Video cards are much easier to store than full systems. So you could keep both cards and try them both out. Later on down the road when you figure out which one you like better toss the loser on Ebay or a new home 😀

Nah the FX has a special place in my heart, as the first video card I bought new with my own money was an FX 5900. So if i don't use it i will hang it on a wall 🤣

Also wrong about the sempron, someone upgraded it from the original information sticker on the case. It has a Sempron 3000 with 128kb L2 and no 64bit support. Go them.

strange problem, I keep getting memory read errors with a blue screen but I ran memtest and I get no errors. Any ideas?

I tried Windows XP Home, XP Pro, Windows 2000, and Vista Home Basic, same issue.

No bloated caps, I'm at a total loss.

exchange every element with a spare in turns, so you could pinpoint the source? and go back to 1 memory module for starters? any o/c needs to be disabled beforehand

Given the issues, and the fact I also have a blown AM2 board with a working X2 chip on it as well. I think I'm just going to wholesale rebuild the rig as the ultimate DX9/DX8/DX7 gaming rig.

My plans

Socket AM2 X2 4000 Brisbane (going to attempt to OC)
4gb DDR2 800
ASUS M2N-SLI
500GB Sata Drive spilt 3 ways
50gb Partition XP Home SP3 (Single Core only through boot.ini)
50gb Partition XP Home SP3
400gb Partition for everything else shared between both

Video card is my only question

I had a pair of 7950GT's back in the day but always wanted 7900GTX SLI.

Should I go for 7900GS, 7900GT, 7950GT, 7900GTX in SLI, or grab a pair of 7950GX2's for Quad SLI.

that and maybe i can take top spots in Doom 3 test for almost correct list.

So doing this for box 3

Sempron 2800 palamino (not 64bit)
1gb DDR 400
BFG FX5900XT
Compaq K8S-LA SIS760/694
400w Logisys PSU
120GB hard drive
DVD-RW
Windows 2000 SP4
Sound Blaster Live 5.1
Acer case (Compaq case is ruined)

Is SIS760/649 Windows 9x compatible?