Full fledged tnt2+voodoo2 or voodoo3 agp would be my choices but those are out of the question.

TNT1 is very comparable to the TNT2 M64 when it comes to performance so that only leaves the geforce2 GTS. And that is a great card as well so it is a good choice.

I wish I could repair the RIVA TNT2 but I don't know what parts broke off of it. All I know is that there were a lot of surface-mount components that were ripped off of the card during shipping. I got it with 7 more AGP cards for a really good deal, so I couldn't complain that one of them was damaged, but it's still a shame.

The TNT2-M64 is slightly faster than the TNT1.

Regarding the benchmarks from 'havli', he had tested with a XP1800+ DDR1 system, the performance differences to "slow" cards like the TNT's should not be quite different.

800x600 - 16bit:
TNT1 [22.5%]
TNT2-M64 [26.8%] - so TNT2-M64 is 19% faster than TNT1

GF2-GTS [89.2%]

800x600 - 32bit:
TNT1 [13.6%]
TNT2-M64 [16.8%] - so TNT2-M64 is 23% faster than TNT1

GF2-GTS [83.8%]

1024x768 - 16bit:
TNT1 [17.8%]
TNT2-M64 [22.1%] - so TNT2-M64 is 24% faster than TNT1

GF2-GTS [85.2%]

1024x768 - 32bit:
TNT1 [11.7%]
TNT2-M64 [13.1%] - so TNT2-M64 is 12% faster than TNT1

GF2-GTS [78.7%]

If you can fix the tnt2 but you need to know what's missing try finding some high res pictures and compare the card.

Otherwise someone here might have the same brand/type and can make pictures. I do have the Asus v770 and v770U, tnt2 and tnt2 ultra.

Regarding TNT vs TNT2 M64, in my benchmarks the TNT is ~25% faster in 24bit 3dmarks, they are about equal in 16bit 3dmarks. They are also nearly equal in Quake 2 and DOS games. This was on a Pentium 933 in Win98SE, with driver 6.31.

So I take it that the RIVA TNT2 would be the best choice for a period-correct machine, but out of all the options I have, the GeForce2 GTS is the best choice. I'm going to try and fix the RIVA TNT2, but I don't even know which parts are broken and which ones to replace them with. I'll probably salvage some parts off of a GeForce4 MX 420 that I don't care much about.

clueless1 wrote:

Regarding TNT vs TNT2 M64, in my benchmarks the TNT is ~25% faster in 24bit 3dmarks, they are about equal in 16bit 3dmarks.

Yes, this is also what you can see on havli's benches with 3dmark:
http://hw-museum.cz/benchmark-2-2.php

The values I've refered is his performance summary with "old games".
http://hw-museum.cz/benchmark-2-16.php

geforce 2 gts is a pretty nice card, perhaps not totally correct for a P3 600, but still pretty much correct for later "p3 era"
other than going for that I would look for 3dfx hardware if you want glide support.

m64/rage is not very appealing
but they can be adequate.

So far I've found a few signs of damage on the TNT2. I'm not seeing much, though.

Front side:

Back side:

Area in question:

In detail:

I'm thinking that's the biggest problem. I've seen a few chips that look exactly like that on a TNT2 M64, so I might desolder one of them off one of my many TNT2 M64s and solder it on this card. If it's not the right component, that's fine, I'll just solder it back onto the card that I took it from.

It's hard trying to find which components are missing on a PCB which has a lot of solder pads that are supposed to be empty.

GeForce 2 hands down. The TNT2 is a nice card, but it runs into limits so easily.

I'll stick with the GeForce2 then, until I can get my hands on a Voodoo2/Voodoo3.

I still feel like bringing this TNT2 back to life though. I compared the PCB of my TNT2 to an image of a very similar model and it seems that the missing RP4 is the only form of damage on the card. It might be easier to revive this than I expected.. 😁

I did the best of both worlds on my 600MHz Pentium 3: A Diamond Viper V770 TNT2 32MB AGP card paired with 2x STB Voodoo2 12MB PCI cards in SLI. The thing is a beast for games from 2000 and before.

....actually, now that I think about it, I haven't installed any games that explicitly rely on the TNT2 card. I've been purposefully installing Glide games to use the V2 SLI setup almost exclusively. Hmmmm. I COULD try installing Morrowind (which would use the TNT2 card), but it's already seeing framerate issues on my Athlon XP build, so I'm sure that'll be a stuttering nightmare...

Ultris wrote:

I 1. nVIDIA RIVA TNT2 M64 (trying to avoid this one) 2. Diamond Viper V550 TNTA 3. ATi Rage Pro Turbo AGP (trying to avoid this […]
Show full quote

I
1. nVIDIA RIVA TNT2 M64 (trying to avoid this one)
2. Diamond Viper V550 TNTA
3. ATi Rage Pro Turbo AGP (trying to avoid this one too)
4. nVIDIA GeForce2 GTS/Pro

Another vote for the GF2.

I had a Diamond Viper V550 TNT back in the day and it was kinda a letdown from the start (you can forget about 32-bit gaming, but otherwise it didn't really seem as impressive as I had hoped).

TNT2 M64 is a nice card for what it is, but I'd personally mostly use it for something like a Celeron 400 or ss7, in addition with Voodoo 2.

Dunno about the Ati card, but they never really seemed very attractive to me. There's tons of these around though.

Go for the GF2. Unless you can get a TNT2-Ultra + V2-SLI setup.

TNT 1/2 for authenticity, Geforce 2 for something somebody would probably upgrade to in 2000/2001 and for pure usability.

id go for the geforce 2 for sure.. im thinking of the gainward gf2 card.. its all nice + shiney red 😁

I'm more of a blue guy myself though, preferring blue over red. Something like this:

I like it green 😀

This is actually my favorite one. Too bad my only matching board is an ECS 😊

It doesn't have any RAM sinks though 😢