Geforce FX 5500

I guess it would depend what you're trying to do with it. Specific games, or other tasks?

Probably the most common and decent PCI card you'll find that would be fast enough to be useful for anything a PIII-S can handle, would be a Geforce 6200. If you want something slightly older that is a bit more unusual, a Radeon 9100 is a nifty card and was made in PCI. I managed to snag a 64MB 9100 a few years ago for cheap. It has a 128bit memory bus and is basically identical to an 8500LE which is way way faster than any of the other 9000 or 92x0 cards. I can't find any evidence but the specs on paper tell me that there may be situations where it could outperform a 6200... maybe in older games, especially those that don't need lots of VRAM.

The FX 5200 is also very common but is much slower than the 6200 or 9100. The FX 5500 has less than 10% higher clocks than the 5200 and it was a later lower budget card so they are more likely to be made with junk components (in the middle of the cap plague era...). The much higher number is purely marketing. You should consider the 5500 and 5200 basically identical. Probably fine for pre-2000 stuff, but possibly slower than you'd expect in some games.

I thought the Nvida Quadro FX600 was the fastest native PCI graphics card? I have three dual Tualatin III-S systems and one of them is PCI/PCI-X only, that is, no AGP slot. I went with a FX600 in that system. Unfortunately, the Matrox Parhelia 256 PCI-X card did not work in that system, but you can generally use a Parhelia 256 in regular PCI slots.

If your system has PCI-X slots, there are several PCI graphic cards which will work in a PCI-X slot at 66 MHz. The GF6200 is one of them.

Here is a write-up on the FX600, https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/1352/quadro-fx-600-pci

The FX600 is pretty difficult to find, but there was a lot of 17 of them which sold for $115 on ebay. http://www.ebay.ie/itm/Lot-Of-17-Nvidia-Quadr … 00/351377880043

Pci voodoo 5

I figured a selection of the lower end Geforce 4/FX/6 series or equivilent Radeon's would be my option.

ODwilly wrote:

Pci voodoo 5

This would surely be what I would use if I could find one for a decent price.

I bought mine for $80 awhile back. Still need to actually use it in something

Good question and I haven't got around to extensive testing yet, I have a pci 9100,5500 & 6200.

In my underpowered Pentium pro system I found the ATI significantly slower in DOS quake 1 timedemo, in windows it would be a different story but I suspect the best card will be the FX5500 if you wish to play dos games and it would be more compatible with games of the late 90s/early 2000s compared to the 6200.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Probably the most common and decent PCI card you'll find that would be fast enough to be useful for anything a PIII-S can handle, would be a Geforce 6200.

Wouldn't a GeForce FX 5500 PCI be better in this regard? Any GeForce newer than 5xxx has problem with certain games that use 8bpp textures like European Air War or Jane's World War II Fighters.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Probably the most common and decent PCI card you'll find that would be fast enough to be useful for anything a PIII-S can handle, would be a Geforce 6200.

Wouldn't a GeForce FX 5500 PCI be better in this regard? Any GeForce newer than 5xxx has problem with certain games that use 8bpp textures like European Air War or Jane's World War II Fighters.

I didn't know about those games having problems honestly.

Without knowing what the OP is looking for its hard to say.

An FX 5500 is certainly not a terrible card for running pre-2000 games, and if compatibility is better, it'd probably be a good choice. I was just going by speed and overall quality. It would be surprisingly easy to make a 5200\5500 slow down in old games because they can potentially be totally crippled by 64bit memory, and their fill rate is quite low.

+1 on the fx5200/5500. Cheap good cards that wouldnt bottleneck the P3 really.

Honestly, I am not looking for anything in particular. Just looking for something to use these boards for. I would probably run Windows98SE or ME on it and use it for DX5-DX8 games. For DX9 and later I'd XP or later..

Its hard to look past the FX5200/5500 as they're cheap & plentiful, the problem is you don't have another suitable solution for a DX8 hardware card apart from the 9100 which is comparable to a Geforce 3(In AGP form).

AS above the 6200 cards have compatibility issues in windows 98SE I couldn't get Delta Force to run for example but runs fine on the 5500, if you were trying to run XP era games on a faster cpu the 6200 might make more sense but its highly unlikely that any DX9 game will work well on the PCI bus anyway so the 5500/6200 could be considered equals for any practical purpose.

As far as I know, Geforce2 / Geforce4 are generally regarded by many people as the most fitting cards for a Tualatin rig, when it comes to AGP.

I'm not well versed in PCI cards later than S3 / Matrox era, but if PCI versions of the GF2/GF4 cards are available for reasonable prices, they could be a nice choice, too.

My only "modernish" PCI card on hand is a Radeon 9250, and some reviews I found places it alongside a FX5200. It might also be an option.

The only GF2 and 4 PCI cards are the MX ones. And they arent good for high end gaming.

So are the Nvidia FX600 and Matrox Parhelia 256 non-contenders? I recall the FX600 doing pretty well in benchmarks.

The FX600 appears to be similar to an FX 5200 Ultra which would make it a fair bit faster than the 5200 or 5500, probably much higher build quality too. Never really paid much attention to them myself but they look like a good option for a PCI card for old games.

Yeah never heard of the FX600 before and I read quite a few forums to find out the fastest PCI card for windows 98se!

The other extremely rare PCI card is the FX5600 but I've never seen one, that should be the fastest PCI card followed by the Quadro fx600.

In saying that, according to wikipedia the FX600 is pretty much the same as a 5200/5500 but with a higher memory clock.

5200 = 250/400
5500 = 270/400
FX600 =270/480
FX5600=325/500 (Inno3D Tornado)

Im digging out my 965BE system and going to install windows XP to benchmark the PC cards I have available, im thinking along these lines.

Quake 3
3DMark 2001
Doom3
Max Payne
Far Cry
3Dmark 99

Any other suggestions? I'll try and overclock my 5200/5500 cards to try and replicate the specs of the higher end cards so we can settle this PCI mystery once and for all!

Are the 5200/5500 cards with 128-bit memory common? I have a PCI 5500 and a PCI FX600, but I beleive the 5500 is 64-bit for memory.

128 bit cards should'nt be hard to find, in saying that, I dont know how to identify the cards from one to the next next.

some preliminary results.....

3Dmark 2001SE

6200 (64 bit)- 7,295
9100 (128bit) - 6,485

3Dmark 2003

6200 - 2,457
GT1 - 70.0fps
GT2 - 12.9fps
GT3 - 11.6fps

9100 - 1,947

GT1 - 89.0fps
GT2 - 4.3fps
GT3 - 24.2fps

I did'nt get the fx5200 running yet.

Interestingly and anecdotally, IMO the minimum fps for the 9100 in the 2001SE benchmark were much higher than the 6200 but this doesn't show up in the bechmark scores.......