I hope you're not gonna try running FEAR on that Radeon 7500. FEAR ran absolutely terrible on my FX5900, it really required me to replace it with a GF6800. Please do yourself a favor and keep looking for something better 😀

I don't know about the other games though.

How are the rails of your PSU and how are they distributed?

I fear though that running anything faster than that X850 will really be limited by the board.

I think you've over reaching for the hardware you have for the games you want to play.

Tetrium wrote:

How are the rails of your PSU and how are they distributed?

And I know I'm "overreaching" the current hardware. The Radeon 9550 is a piece of shit. It's an ENTRY LEVEL card! I want an ENTHUSIAST level card, like the X850....but I wanted advice from people who've worked on this level of hardware. The CPU is only 1.53GHz, even though it's a Palomino core with SSE and 3DNOW. And it has 2GB of RAM now.

I just installed Morrowind fully, complete with Tribune and Bloodmoon. And I started it. It was stuttery a bit until I lowered the draw distance and turned off shadows. Then it became smoother - though I haven't gotten the sneak around and steal stuff part down yet.

Downloaded and installed Steam, but it won't start up, so I'll probably uninstall it.

on an XP 1800 forget Fear, that game really needs at least an Athlon 64/Pentium4 HT with 7800GT/x1800 XL to become playable. Also why are you sticking with ATI cards, in this era ATI still had massive driver issues, I'd if i was you would be looking more for a 6800GT. I have an x800XT and i prefer my 6800GT because its more stable

If you don't already have any (more) spare high-end AGP graphics cards, perhaps it would be a good idea to try and be patient while looking for any relatively powerful AGP card, including locally.

I've gotten pretty good graphics cards for hardly anything (like AGP HD3850 for like €10) and Meljor even got stacks of pure visual treasure for mere snippits like even in 2017! (Well done Meljor, you have been approventh 😜).

But to be honest, what are your other options atm? Your motherboard seems also like a limiting factor (though you did well on the RAM department with 2GB). For a game like FEAR I'd use something more along the lines of 3+GHz Northwood or A64.

My now long gone A7V333 Thoroughbred 2000+ rig using a R9600 even had troubles running games like Battlestations Midway and I think Unreal II had a hard time as well (not 100% sure about U2 though, but I definitely remember it running vastly improved on a 2.2GHz A64 with GF7600 I build later).

candle_86 wrote:

on an XP 1800 forget Fear, that game really needs at least an Athlon 64/Pentium4 HT with 7800GT/x1800 XL to become playable. Also why are you sticking with ATI cards, in this era ATI still had massive driver issues, I'd if i was you would be looking more for a 6800GT. I have an x800XT and i prefer my 6800GT because its more stable

For me GF7600GS and GF6800 Vanilla ran FEAR at very playable framerates though. Both rigs using 2.2GHz A64 CPUs.

Don't get hung up on F.E.A.R. I've played it a few times on my laptop at smooth framerates. If it doesn't run on THIS system, oh well. This is more to bridge the gap between my Win98 system and the laptop. A better card will play Morrowind very well with a higher draw distance. I mean hell, I could play Morrowind on the Win98 system with a TNT2 card and 600MHz Pentium III, but plays much better on this system. I just want to push what this system can do without replacing EVERYTHING. If I was really concerned about 400+ FPS, I'd just try to play the game on my i7-6700K 16GB-DDR4 GTX980ti system.

Think of this project as milking the most performance I can get out of this processor, MB, and RAM. The graphics card is my concern right now. The Live! 5.1 sound card is more than capable. I just installed VLC and I'm watching Star Trek Beyond right now and it's smooth. Steam won't run, but that's not exactly a big deal. I understand the CPU will be a bottleneck, but right now this 9550 is the bottleneck to performance. I'd rather the CPU run at full-tilt than wait on some underpowered GPU.

FFXIhealer wrote:

Don't get hung up on F.E.A.R. I've played it a few times on my laptop at smooth framerates. If it doesn't run on THIS system, oh well. This is more to bridge the gap between my Win98 system and the laptop. A better card will play Morrowind very well with a higher draw distance. I mean hell, I could play Morrowind on the Win98 system with a TNT2 card and 600MHz Pentium III, but plays much better on this system. I just want to push what this system can do without replacing EVERYTHING. If I was really concerned about 400+ FPS, I'd just try to play the game on my i7-6700K 16GB-DDR4 GTX980ti system.

Think of this project as milking the most performance I can get out of this processor, MB, and RAM. The graphics card is my concern right now. The Live! 5.1 sound card is more than capable. I just installed VLC and I'm watching Star Trek Beyond right now and it's smooth. Steam won't run, but that's not exactly a big deal. I understand the CPU will be a bottleneck, but right now this 9550 is the bottleneck to performance. I'd rather the CPU run at full-tilt than wait on some underpowered GPU.

I think I can see where you're coming from.

Still, upgrading the graphics card seems like your best bet, but perhaps even something a Radeon 9600XT might already start making the CPU bottleneck.
But if you forget about FEAR, how bout using a more high-end GF FX? Such a graphics card seems to be kinda right for such a CPU.

Thank you Tetrium, i do my best 🤣

If the Athlon xp 1800+ is the max. and the card needs to fit that your best bet is a geforce4Ti, anything higher will be a bottleneck. You can also find these cheap so win win situation, it will be almost 2x as fast as your current setup. The 128mb ti4200 will do the job. An alternative would be a fx5700 card.

Otherwise go for the best thing and grab a x1900pro agp or HD3850 agp somewhere, at least you then have the fastest agp card if you want to build a faster system later.

Other (cheaper) options, with a bit of overkill are geforce 6600/6600gt/7600gs/7600gt or x800 series/hd2600

FFXIhealer wrote:

What I'm looking for is the best I can do for the period of the system...roughly 2003.

Radeon 9500 Pro/9600 XT, Geforce FX 5800/Ultra, Geforce FX 5900 XT/5900/Ultra/5950 Ultra
Radeon 9700/Pro, Radeon 9800/Pro/XT

I see no use in using Morrowind as a reference for this config. You'll never be able to run it properly. Crank up the view distance, install a texture mod but do that on a 2005+ PC. I'd even try running it on my hd6850 if it had an older Windows.
Back in the day I ran it on a Palomino 1700+ and upgraded the graphics card to a GF3Ti200. It worked, but I would not want to repeat the experience today.

Also, no video card of that era is worth $100. The most I payed until now was about $18 for a nice boxed Leadtek Geforce 5700FX. Oh, the Voodoos were a bit more. $35 for a PCI Banshee, $20-25 for V3 2000.

I appreciate the thoughts and opinions here. What I had looked up before showed me the 9800xt as the most powerful card for this system without wasting performance. I also just don't want to pay $100 for it simply because the rarity of the card is allowing people to price-gouge on E-bay. And nobody has stuff like this lying around where I live, so I'm just torn.

elod wrote:

I see no use in using Morrowind as a reference for this config. You'll never be able to run it properly. Crank up the view distance, install a texture mod but do that on a 2005+ PC. I'd even try running it on my hd6850 if it had an older Windows.
Back in the day I ran it on a Palomino 1700+ and upgraded the graphics card to a GF3Ti200. It worked, but I would not want to repeat the experience today.

Also, no video card of that era is worth $100. The most I payed until now was about $18 for a nice boxed Leadtek Geforce 5700FX. Oh, the Voodoos were a bit more. $35 for a PCI Banshee, $20-25 for V3 2000.

Thats not true an FX5800 Ultra is easily worth $100

As for Other cards, if your stuck on ATI look for the Radeon 9700TX, its between a Pro and a non pro and was dell exclusive, it's also cheap when they show up, like dirt cheap

FFXIhealer wrote:

I appreciate the thoughts and opinions here. What I had looked up before showed me the 9800xt as the most powerful card for this system without wasting performance. I also just don't want to pay $100 for it simply because the rarity of the card is allowing people to price-gouge on E-bay. And nobody has stuff like this lying around where I live, so I'm just torn.

Put up a local ad, drop the question on facebook, ask in your family or at work. You never know what people have laying around in old boxes etc.
This stuff keeps popping up online so it is out there. I never use Ebay and my country is rather small, but great deals pop up every now and then. Just keep searching.

Some cards do become pretty rare and as such can demand a high price. Problem with Ebay is that more and more people think that agp equals rare so it should mean moneyyyyyyyy.
You can see the ignorance in the fact that they do not know any details about the card. And tested? ''No, sorry, do not have a system for it...'' But it is AGP so i should still get rich, right?

Thank god there are still deals to be made and some are still sane but the amount of insane Ebay sellers is growing, that's for sure.
When i look at Ebay and see simple pci s3 trio's for 5 dollar...... and 55+ dollar 🤣

Saw a riva tnt2 m64 Asus listed as rare once on ebay and they wanted $70.

candle_86 wrote:

Saw a riva tnt2 m64 Asus listed as rare once on ebay and they wanted $70.

That's pretty bad.

Oh hey, quick note you can usually OC the crap of the 9550's. Depending on the memory specs and cooling you should be able to get it to 9600 clocks.

candle_86 wrote:

Saw a riva tnt2 m64 Asus listed as rare once on ebay and they wanted $70.

Unless it was some Dutch ad, the word "rare" actually means "strange" or "odd" translated to English, so perhaps it was a Dutchy selling some odd ASUS card 😁

Tetrium wrote:

candle_86 wrote:

Saw a riva tnt2 m64 Asus listed as rare once on ebay and they wanted $70.

Unless it was some Dutch ad, the word "rare" actually means "strange" or "odd" translated to English, so perhaps it was a Dutchy selling some odd ASUS card 😁

Doubt it, was shiped and sold in Utah 🤣, I remember that