BX motherboards work the best with video cards that have an additional power connector. This may be why the 6600 works and not the 6200.

The best card I’ve found for my BX/Celeron 1.4 computer is a nVidia GeForce 5700 Ultra. ATI cards don’t work very well in this computer.

My Pentium III 1.4 on a Gigabyte board is the opposite. It works the best with an ATI card.

Thanks for the tip on 2x keyed 6600’s. I’ll be looking for one.

There are 2x keyed 7950s: cgi.ebay.com/NVIDIA-GeForce-7950GT-512M ... 240%3A1318

There is a PNY GeForce 6600 with an agp 2x slot on Ebay right now.

I’m not going to bid because it’s not that much different than the card I have now.

If any one gets it let me know how it works.

Lol. Even a P3-S 1400 MHz isn't going to feed more than a Radeon 9800 very well... Well, actually, I think a Radeon 8500 / GF3 offers enough oomph for that CPU. 😀

You guys are suffering from an incurable disease that I've discovered all retro-fans suffer from. It's called "endless incremental upgrade fever". Time to step back and ponder whether or not you're actually running retro hardware anymore!!!!!

I’ve tried faster cards and you are right. There’s no gain in performance and with Radeon 9700 and 9800 pros I’ve tried in a BX motherboard the performance decreased.

To me what is “retro” is relative to the leading edge.

"endless incremental upgrade fever" In a way yes, in another way absolutely not. :)

Yesterday I got one of the usual Geforce 6200's. A MSI NX6200AX (64-bit, 256MB) with a red circuit board and a 'gold' heat sink.
Using the latest Windows 98 forceware drivers (v81.98) on a Soyo 440BX mainboard; It worked!. I noticed some small comptibility issues with games, but not many.

Pentium 3 @ 660/110MHz: 3507 3Dmarks 2001
Pentium 3-S @ 1040/110MHz: 4419 3Dmarks 2001

Not impressive... This card is similar in performance to the previous MX440 128-bit. It has more features for newer games, and less features for older games. So it seems the MX440 will be put back in, next week or so.

I always figured that the sweet spot for a really fast P3 would just be a real Geforce4 Ti. That will get you full out DX7 (supports up to DX8) and lots of additional muscle for filtering. I don't know if you could fit it into a BX based board though, as it is supplied power through the AGP connector. It should work in either the Intel 820 or on boards based off of VIA's chipset. It is after all, just a GF3 with a reduced die size and other enhancements.

Upgrade fever, no, hoarding fever yes:) The urge that I suppress is to collect every notable piece of hardware of each generation.

@gerwin, please try running dxdiag, and check to see if the D3D tests work correctly - the bouncing white square test in full screen mode is the best one to observe. Is the movement smooth, or does it flicker? If it doesn't look perfect, roll back those drivers to 30.82, and retry that test. Thanks.

The dx-diag direct-draw test looks OK, smooth as always. Not surprising since all tests of 3D Mark 2001 looked fine too.

Would a Geforce 4400 be faster than a Geforce 6200?

Almost certainly. The 6200s have too little memory bandwidth. There are rare 6200s with 128-bit memory buses, and those would probably be very nice, but they are indeed very rare.

Try this page for comparing video card specs.

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=&card2=

Sorry for the refloat.

Just installed a Geforce 6200 (MSI NX6200AX-TD128LF) ...

... in a 440BX mobo (Tekram P6BX-An) with a Coppermine 1000 @ 1125 MHz.

Amazingly it works like a charm, even at 150MHz FSB. However I got a problem playing AvP1 1999.

With the previous card (Riva TNT2 M64) I could play AvP1 with full quality settings at a decent ~60 FPS without stutterings .

However with the 6200 the game slows to an unbearable slow-mo crawl at certain situations, like when you blew up three bugs at a time with lots of explosions and acidbath. Seems maybe with the 6200 the PIII is overloaded at these situations.

Know any trick to solve this problem?

My thought is there is some incompatibility with the 6200 and that game. You could try different driver versions and see if it improves.

Does the card seem to work OK with other games?

BTW there is a version of this game on Steam that has D3D9 support for far better compatibility with modern cards. It was released when the newest AVP game came out.

If you're going to get an AGP GeForce 6200, then you should try to find one that has the same board layout as a 6600.

Like this

These boards have great success at unlocking almost to a full 6600GT (clocks may be slower depending on quality of the RAM on board).

But then, you can also just get a real 6600 or 6800 as these are getting dirt cheap now.

Thanks Swaaye. I've tried every driver I've been able to found in the web, the one that works best is 175.16 (2008).

I've tried switching off or setting to'performance' everything in the Nvidia panel, no change 😢 .

The only thing that works is setting 'AGP aperture size' to the minimum available (4) in BIOS. This speeds up things to a degree, but the game is still unbearably slow, almost frozing sometimes 😒 .

If the marine I control is say alone inside a closed room, things are up to speed, decent FPS. But as soon as bots approach, the game slows down to a crawl, and whenever there are explosions and bits of bugs and acid flying around, it almost frozes. So it could be that the CPU is being overloaded somehow with the 6200 and bottlenecking.

I'm expecting a Tualatin 1400-S in a couple of days, if I can make it work with this mobo maybe things will improve. Otherwise I'll have to discard the 6200 and search for another video card.

I know about AvP1 Classic, but that's why I'm building a PIII retrocomp, to play the originals 😉 .

A 6800gt agp or better with it's own power connector(s) are a good bet for older BX boards. I learned my lesson early on when I found out that my first BX board barely provided like 25w worth of power to the agp slot. Others are better but don't count on it being any thing much greater. Broke down at one point and splurged on a 7800gs.

TELVM wrote:

So it could be that the CPU is being overloaded somehow with the 6200 and bottlenecking.

I don't think it's CPU related. It's probably something with the video driver, perhaps the game using an old technique that isn't properly supported.

I found a thread mentioning that driver 163.75 is a good choice with GeForce cards and that newer drivers cause extreme slowdown. There seem to be many old forum threads about problems with this game and GeForce 6xxx cards.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search? … lient=firefox-a

swaaye wrote:

... I found a thread mentioning that driver 163.75 is a good choice with GeForce cards and that newer drivers cause extreme slowdown. There seem to be many old forum threads about problems with this game and GeForce 6xxx cards.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search? … lient=firefox-a

That thread was gold man! With those tricks and the 163.75 drivers AvP1 '99 runs now OK with the 6200 😀 .

Thanks a lot Swaaye.