lazibayer wrote:

I like the idea of having AGP-Pro support! Workstation graphic cards are dirty cheap now and I would love to see how they compete in games.
To eliminate the possible bottleneck from CPU it's better to go high end on CPU and motherboards, but not too high to lose AGP 2x support, and I agree that Intel platforms have less compatibility issues. That leads to a Tualatin + 815 setup. I did a google search and this is an example of such board, TUSL2, but I am not sure about the reputation of this particular board.

Interesting! I looked at a ASUS TUSL2-C but it did not have AGP Pro - however I also found this ASUS CUSL2 which indeed has AGP Pro. Looks good otherwise?

gdjacobs wrote:

Yeah, for sure, although the limitation is in the BIOS, so if there's a firmware revision which is more compatible I'd be very interested to hear about it.

I'll see if I can find it, but I don't want to give false hopes - it's probably just me remembering wrong. I can see my SE440BX-2 is rev. 754558-304 so it should support Coppermine. I'll see if I can fetch a 1Ghz of those 😀

rpz wrote:

Interesting! I looked at a ASUS TUSL2-C but it did not have AGP Pro - however I also found this ASUS CUSL2 which indeed has AGP Pro. Looks good otherwise?

The -C version of both boards chopped off AGP-Pro support. CUSL2 does not officially support Tualatin, but you can make them work with an adapter or pin mod, or just stick with coppermine.

rpz wrote:

Kamerat wrote:

The XP 1800 got an Enlight case, so for the systems listed I would choose that one.

Enlight cases doesn't ring a bell to me - were they popular? It does have the right 90's look though 😀

I think Aopen were more common for self builders back in the late nineties. When I built my first computer in '98 I choose Enlight, still got it, looks like the one at DBA but without the option for a fan in the back.

rpz wrote:

Enlight cases doesn't ring a bell to me - were they popular? It does have the right 90's look though 😀

Mostly an American thing. Not something I have seen at all, before I joined Vogons a couple of years ago.
I mostly remember that we used to have Zitech cases and A-Open cases in the 90's.

lazibayer wrote:

The -C version of both boards chopped off AGP-Pro support. CUSL2 does not officially support Tualatin, but you can make them work with an adapter or pin mod, or just stick with coppermine.

I see. Well, I guess Tualatin is not a must for me - so all good. However, I was just searching for cards using AGP Pro and didn't really find anything. Can you enlighten me? 😁

@brostenen & @Kamerat

Ah, that's why it didn't ring a bell. I primarily remember Aopen and Chieftec (Chieftec was maybe post 2000) cases - and of course all those noname/obscure ones!

Only a very few AGP pro GFX cards were ever produced. Mainly for Mac and so on.
They are however out there, and as far as I remember, they were for industrial use.
You know.. 3D rendering and so on. Why Asus used the slot on motherboards I do not know.
Running both Voodoo3 and GF4-ti4200 on my A7V266-E, is rock solid, so I guess the
slot is a bit more reliable than most other AGP slot's.

Just search "agp pro" on ebay... I found this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ATI-Fire-GL-X1-256MB- … zIAAOSwtnpXoqFp

rpz wrote:

I see. Well, I guess Tualatin is not a must for me - so all good. However, I was just searching for cards using AGP Pro and didn't really find anything. Can you enlighten me? 😁

@brostenen & @Kamerat

Ah, that's why it didn't ring a bell. I primarily remember Aopen and Chieftec (Chieftec was maybe post 2000) cases - and of course all those noname/obscure ones!

Personally I have used a bunch of workstation cards. Some of them are consumer derivatives, like FireGL Z1 - Radeon 9500, X1 - Radeon 9700, X2 - 9800, Gloria II Pro - GeForece 256. You can basically use them as if you are using their consumer counterparts.
It's more interesting to drive pure workstation cards to run PC games. You might run into trouble with D3D games but OpenGL ones should be fine. I made a video about running Quake3 on FireGL2 which is not AGP Pro but whose big brother FireGL4 is. I had also used a Wildcat 6110 under Windows 7 32bit for a while before I had to ditch it for larger RAM and 64bit OS. I paid less than 12 bucks for the giant wildcat and it came in mint condition. I planned to experiment cards from the GVX line, especially GVX210/420, but never had a good chance to. They are AGP Pro 2x cards and I only had 4x boards.

rpz wrote:

I'll see if I can find it, but I don't want to give false hopes - it's probably just me remembering wrong. I can see my SE440BX-2 is rev. 754558-304 so it should support Coppermine. I'll see if I can fetch a 1Ghz of those 😀

Apparently non-Intel CPUs work, which is good for making a versatile DOS machine.
VIA C3 Nehemiah vs. Coppermine(-128) and Tualatin

brostenen wrote:

Only a very few AGP pro GFX cards were ever produced. Mainly for Mac and so on. They are however out there, and as far as I reme […]
Show full quote

Only a very few AGP pro GFX cards were ever produced. Mainly for Mac and so on.
They are however out there, and as far as I remember, they were for industrial use.
You know.. 3D rendering and so on. Why Asus used the slot on motherboards I do not know.
Running both Voodoo3 and GF4-ti4200 on my A7V266-E, is rock solid, so I guess the
slot is a bit more reliable than most other AGP slot's.

Just search "agp pro" on ebay... I found this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ATI-Fire-GL-X1-256MB- … zIAAOSwtnpXoqFp

lazibayer wrote:

Personally I have used a bunch of workstation cards. Some of them are consumer derivatives, like FireGL Z1 - Radeon 9500, X1 - Radeon 9700, X2 - 9800, Gloria II Pro - GeForece 256. You can basically use them as if you are using their consumer counterparts.
It's more interesting to drive pure workstation cards to run PC games. You might run into trouble with D3D games but OpenGL ones should be fine. I made a video about running Quake3 on FireGL2 which is not AGP Pro but whose big brother FireGL4 is. I had also used a Wildcat 6110 under Windows 7 32bit for a while before I had to ditch it for larger RAM and 64bit OS. I paid less than 12 bucks for the giant wildcat and it came in mint condition. I planned to experiment cards from the GVX line, especially GVX210/420, but never had a good chance to. They are AGP Pro 2x cards and I only had 4x boards.

Okay, I see! I have a very ambivalent relationship to Quadro cards. I work with VFX and I've never come across a Quadro (or FireGL for that matter) that justified the insane prices. To sum it up simply - viewport performance in Maya/3dsmax would often be better on a Geforce (and less driver issues). Maybe they are great for CAD and similar work, but for 3D in that sense - nope!
Maybe ASUS decided it would be good marketing. AGP Pro sounds better than just AGP 😉 If it's more reliable, that is of course a plus. However, if it's 'just' for Quadro/FireGL then I'm not so sold on it. Obviously it would be fun to benchmark in games (nice video @lazibayer!), but I will primarily be testing consumer cards - and it will also make the choice of MB a lot easier. It's certainly interesting and something I'd want to dig into later, but for now I think I'll skip the AGP Pro aspect.

@lazibayer
I see unused Quadro cards a lot lying around. I'll keep an eye out for AGP Pro models obviously, but are there any other models you are interested in?

gdjacobs wrote:

Apparently non-Intel CPUs work, which is good for making a versatile DOS machine.
viewtopic.php?f=46&t=52194#p559913

Oh! That's cool! Obviously it would need a Slot 1 > 370 adapter. Is there anything else I need to be concerned about when using an adapter?

brostenen wrote:

If it is a pure Win98 setup, using nothing but Win98 software, then ISA soundcards does not matter at all.
Then I would say that a Socket-A system with something like an AthlonXP 2400+ to 2800+ is a good choice.
Slot 1 systems with ISA slot, are for those systems, were late Dos games and early Win98 games really shine.

I looked into this and I can pick up (instead of buying on Ebay) the following Socket A system:

MS-6380E KT3 Ultra
Athlon XP 2000+ (Palomino)
1GB PC2700

- Supports Win95/98/XP
- AGP Universal (as far as I can see/read)
- No ISA (obviously, but as stated - not really needed for this)
- USB 1.0 (I guess I can live with that - will put drivers for test on my NAS)

Reasonable?

rpz wrote:

I looked into this and I can pick up (instead of buying on Ebay) the following Socket A system: […]
Show full quote

I looked into this and I can pick up (instead of buying on Ebay) the following Socket A system:

MS-6380E KT3 Ultra
Athlon XP 2000+ (Palomino)
1GB PC2700

- Supports Win95/98/XP
- AGP Universal (as far as I can see/read)
- No ISA (obviously, but as stated - not really needed for this)
- USB 1.0 (I guess I can live with that - will put drivers for test on my NAS)

Reasonable?

Dunno nothin' about the board, but it's easy to overcome the USB limit by using a USB 2.0 PCI card.

rpz wrote:

Okay, I see! I have a very ambivalent relationship to Quadro cards. I work with VFX and I've never come across a Quadro (or Fire […]
Show full quote

Okay, I see! I have a very ambivalent relationship to Quadro cards. I work with VFX and I've never come across a Quadro (or FireGL for that matter) that justified the insane prices. To sum it up simply - viewport performance in Maya/3dsmax would often be better on a Geforce (and less driver issues). Maybe they are great for CAD and similar work, but for 3D in that sense - nope!
Maybe ASUS decided it would be good marketing. AGP Pro sounds better than just AGP 😉 If it's more reliable, that is of course a plus. However, if it's 'just' for Quadro/FireGL then I'm not so sold on it. Obviously it would be fun to benchmark in games (nice video @lazibayer!), but I will primarily be testing consumer cards - and it will also make the choice of MB a lot easier. It's certainly interesting and something I'd want to dig into later, but for now I think I'll skip the AGP Pro aspect.

@lazibayer
I see unused Quadro cards a lot lying around. I'll keep an eye out for AGP Pro models obviously, but are there any other models you are interested in?

I am much more interested in the "native" workstation/industry cards like the original FireGL line (except FireGL 1000, which is Permedia2), the GVX line, the Wildcat line, etc.
I don't know the point of AGP Pro, either. It merely supplies more power than AGP, which can be easily done by hooking a molex power connector directly to the card as all modern cards do.
IMHO The branding and price of "quadro" is a transient case in the evolution of computer 3D graphics. 3D designing and 3D gaming used to be in parallel universes with huge price gap in between. When NVidia realized its GPU became fast enough to overthrow the old timers they decided to rebrand their GPUs and sell them in the other universe at "competitive" prices. Now as the two universes merge they moved on to the next universe: GPGPU for super computers.

lazibayer wrote:

Dunno nothin' about the board, but it's easy to overcome the USB limit by using a USB 2.0 PCI card.

True, good point. I'll probably be picking this up. Although I'll wait a bit since I just scored two complete rigs. I don't know the complete specs, but from what I could see made it look like a must-buy for the price:

- Pentium 1 MMX 200 MHz with VA-502 motherboard and 32MB memory. Besides HD, CD-ROM, case etc. - it includes sound, graphics and network card that isn't specified, so it will be interesting to see what it is.
- Pentium 4 1GHz with MS-6309 and 32MB memory. Like the other one I don't the specs of the rest of the machine except I can see the sound card is a SB Live! Now I'm a bit unsure about the P4 aspect since I don't see the MS-6309 support P4. Probably just an error meaning it's a P3.

I'll post photos etc. once I've had a closer look after the delivery.

lazibayer wrote:

I am much more interested in the "native" workstation/industry cards like the original FireGL line (except FireGL 1000, which is Permedia2), the GVX line, the Wildcat line, etc.
I don't know the point of AGP Pro, either. It merely supplies more power than AGP, which can be easily done by hooking a molex power connector directly to the card as all modern cards do.
IMHO The branding and price of "quadro" is a transient case in the evolution of computer 3D graphics. 3D designing and 3D gaming used to be in parallel universes with huge price gap in between. When NVidia realized its GPU became fast enough to overthrow the old timers they decided to rebrand their GPUs and sell them in the other universe at "competitive" prices. Now as the two universes merge they moved on to the next universe: GPGPU for super computers.

Alright, I'll make sure to look for those 😀
Yeah, I think you are pretty spot on with your analysis. No doubt the Quadro in the early days had great OpenGL performance - but as D3D gained (especially from games) is simply got surpassed at some point. I also remember quite clearly how you'd had to get specific certified drivers for specific software (such as Maya or 3dsmax). In all it was just annoying - at least in the VFX industry.