The Geforce4 mx would be a fantastic choice and should only pull around 20ish watts under full load. Honestly that would be my suggestion for compatibility, performance and cost. They are seriously a dime a dozen (ok more like $5)

That's great! How well would my 64MB Geforce4 MX 420 do in games with my 1300MHz Duron? I'm thinking on games like Fable, The Movies Game, and Empire Earth II. By the way ODwilly, you have the exact same Asrock mobo in your signature that i'm using for my modern pc build! 😀 I have an FX-8370 with mine.

I have no idea honestly, it should be far faster than your current integrated graphics at the least, I would say that there is nothing to it but to try and see how they run! 😁 My experience with socket A is really limited. Ha, that is awesome on the Asrock mobo! I love my board, built the system in late 2011. The 8350 was a recent addition, this thing started life with an Athlon II 250 and a 120gb IDE hard drive (which is why I chose this board)

I once had a system with an Athlon II 270 cpu. Mobo was an ECS A880GM-M6. Really loved that computer... But I sold it to buy parts for my current rig I'm still building.

Nice! They are really good little processors. I still have my 250 sitting on a shelf begging for a motherboard. Someday. . .

I think even with an equal number of chips, a DDR card would use slightly less power than an SDRAM version, but I could be wrong about that. It should definitely be lower power if the DDR version has fewer chips. I don't know much about what configurations were offered on the 4MX series though.

computergeek92 wrote:

Anyways, the best card I'm thinking about using is a Geforce4 MX 420 which uses SDRAM instead of DDR. I read this would be less on bottlenecks because my mobo is limited to only PC133.

Nonsense, bandwidth of local graphics memory cannot be bottlenecked by system memory.
730S integrated SiS 305, so even slowest GeForce should perform 3d better.

You mean slow as in Geforce1 slow and a low end Geforce2 MX with 32MB VRAM?

What about benchmark scores?

Much slower, it's very handicapped by low memory bandwith of the 64bit SDRAM it have to share with the CPU.

Geforce2 MX 200 is at least three times faster than a tweaked SiS 630 (same graphic core as 730) in 3DMark2001 with a Pentium III 866. I guess a faster CPU makes an even bigger difference.

GeForce2 MX 200 result: My 3DMark01 Mega Thread
SiS 630 result: My 3DMark01 Mega Thread

For benchmarks see http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sis-back- … age,278-10.html and the following page.
Q3 is unplayable at any resolution on the SiS730.
A Geforce2 is several times(!) faster, even a GF2 MX should be much faster. GF2 MX uses very little power so that might be an option if you are really concerned.
Of course GF4 MX is still quite low power (lower than GF2) and faster than a GF2 MX.
About your games: I don't know any of them, tried to look them up.
Is that Fable from 1996? No 3D acceleration, the system would be totally overkill. Or is a later game?
Empire Earth II and The Movies are both from 2005, EE2 states 64MB video RAM and pixel shaders minimum while TM states 32MB VRAM. I don't know how good they would run even with a GF4 MX.

i don't think there is any geforce equal to the SiS

To which Nvidia card it would be comparable? TNT, Riva 128?

I'd say even 128 is stretching it

I am not sure about integrated one, but discrete 305 is a lot better than Riva 128.

First of all, don't worry about power. You cannot saturate a 200W power supply with any of the Nvidia boards up to and including GeForce4, even in a system with a several HDD's and other staff installed.

Second, I'm not sure if you will find the experience of playing Empire Earth II with such a configuration completely enjoyable (it's from 2005, requires DirectX 9, P4 level CPU, etc.)

Get a Geforce 4 Ti and be happy. But not for Empire Earth 2 🤣

I've experimented with some SiS onboard stuff. Once tried Morrowind on their SiS 760 with Mirage graphics that is DirectX8 compliant. It does indeed do pixel shading. But performance was just abysmal and yea a Geforce 256 might be faster. It was also poor at even doing the XP GUI and would flicker and tear, apparently because SiS had done a very poor job with the Athlon 64 Hypertransport to RAM interface. That's what the Linux driver developer said anyway.

SiS discrete cards are better because they have a lot more memory bandwidth. 315 is comparable to Geforce2, I think. The problem is I'm sure driver support isn't super great.

I agree on EE2 and Fable and such being far beyond this system's abilities - you really need a faster P4, AthlonXP, or Athlon64 and comparable graphics card (GeForce 6600 sounds good; if you're going PCIe (I would) I'd just kick that up to an 8500 or 8600 and be happy).

That "PSU calculator" is also always a nice laugh when posted - I completely agree with tayyare on the power thing. My Dual NetBurst Xeon, with a 6800 Ultra, secondary PCI GeForce FX, Audigy 2 ZS Platinum (it has the front bay that requires power), many fans, etc peaks in 3DMark at around 225W at the wall (which means the actual DC draw is around 80% of that). There's no way a P3, Athlon, etc with a GF2 are going to hold a candle to that machine in terms of power consumption. However, something that calculator isn't taking into account at all is rail supply - my NetBurst system draws most of its power over the 12V rail, but your Duron is probably drawing most of its power over the 5V rail, so your PSU needs to be able to accommodate that.

obobskivich wrote:

I agree on EE2 and Fable and such being far beyond this system's abilities - you really need a faster P4, AthlonXP, or Athlon64 and comparable graphics card (GeForce 6600 sounds good; if you're going PCIe (I would) I'd just kick that up to an 8500 or 8600 and be happy).

That "PSU calculator" is also always a nice laugh when posted - I completely agree with tayyare on the power thing. My Dual NetBurst Xeon, with a 6800 Ultra, secondary PCI GeForce FX, Audigy 2 ZS Platinum (it has the front bay that requires power), many fans, etc peaks in 3DMark at around 225W at the wall (which means the actual DC draw is around 80% of that). There's no way a P3, Athlon, etc with a GF2 are going to hold a candle to that machine in terms of power consumption. However, something that calculator isn't taking into account at all is rail supply - my NetBurst system draws most of its power over the 12V rail, but your Duron is probably drawing most of its power over the 5V rail, so your PSU needs to be able to accommodate that.

I compare AMD K7 clock speeds to the equivalent Pentium 4 cpu, so the 1.3GHz Duron is actually as fast as a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 based on benchmarks I believe.

With the PSU calculator not focusing on rail supply, how does that affect the accuracy of the combined wattage of each part of my system? Am I still at 185W as I said earlier?