Well the i740 is an interesting piece of history in my opinion. It was the first 3D card designed specifically for the AGP bus and it had a large amount of hype prior to launch due to the partnership of the CPU behemoth with Real3D, which was a spin-off division of Lockheed Martin intending to bring their military-grade 3D technology to the masses, and was already being used in Sega's then-incredible Model 3 arcade machines. All that hype shattered when the Voodoo2 released and outperformed it by a large margin despite using the "outdated" PCI bus.

A variant of the i740 was eventually integrated into Intel's i810 chipset and formed the basis of Intel's integrated graphics line which would go on to be a huge success in the lowend to mainstream PC market.

The i740 chip was at the heart of the very first video card I ever purchased back in 1999, the Diamond Stealth II G460 8MB AGP card. Believe it or not, it was a good card for me for the time because it let me play Final Fantasy 7 and 8 at 640 x 480 fluidly, let me play Half-Life at 800 x 600 at playable framerates with only a bit of stuttering in heavy loading (between zones). It was on my ASUS P2B with a 350MHz Pentium II and 128MB of RAM and I used that all the way up to building a new system in 2002 around the Athlon XP 1800+ and a Radeon 7500 64MB card. I almost wish I still had it for my Windows 98 rebuild of that system, because I would have gladly used it as a 2D card paired with the dual Voodoo2 cards I have in there now, but oh well. Now that system has a Diamond Viper V770 TNT2 32MB card which is about on-par with the SLI Voodoo2 pair.

I think a lot of people hate on stuff if they don't have it themselves. It really made good use of the AGP bus before anyone else did, but no - it wasn't an ultra-performance 3D card. Those titles go do 3dfx in 1998/99.

FFXIhealer wrote:

The i740 chip was at the heart of the very first video card I ever purchased back in 1999, the Diamond Stealth II G460 8MB AGP card. Believe it or not, it was a good card for me for the time because it let me play Final Fantasy 7 and 8 at 640 x 480 fluidly, let me play Half-Life at 800 x 600 at playable framerates with only a bit of stuttering in heavy loading (between zones). It was on my ASUS P2B with a 350MHz Pentium II and 128MB of RAM and I used that all the way up to building a new system in 2002 around the Athlon XP 1800+ and a Radeon 7500 64MB card. I almost wish I still had it for my Windows 98 rebuild of that system, because I would have gladly used it as a 2D card paired with the dual Voodoo2 cards I have in there now, but oh well. Now that system has a Diamond Viper V770 TNT2 32MB card which is about on-par with the SLI Voodoo2 pair.

I think a lot of people hate on stuff if they don't have it themselves. It really made good use of the AGP bus before anyone else did, but no - it wasn't an ultra-performance 3D card. Those titles go do 3dfx in 1998/99.

I did a system upgrade in 1999 and purchased an i740 video card whose manufacturer I can't recall. In terms of 3D performance it blasted away the S3 Trio64V2 it replaced, but I can't remember much joy it brought me before its heatsink broke off a few months later. All I can remember is how poorly it was made; I can clearly remember it had a non-flashable PROM on it. It was then replaced by an ATi Rage 128GL with 16MB VRAM and its fate after the replacement remained unknown.
Had I got this card today I would still sell it. For 2D performance I would prolly go for a Matrox, ATi, or S3 made by Diamond or STB.

Tetrium wrote:

I think they went roughly the same way as Verité 2100. There used to be quite a lot of them but more of them went into the bin. For Rendition this probably had to do with not having drivers for XP (not sure about i740).

They aren't very common these days anymore. I think more of the i740's were tossed as not many people wanted to keep these and most weren't PCI (PCI was much more sought after back in the early 2000s)

i740 is recorgnized on Windows XP without issues, Windows XP has drivers for that GPU out of the box

Intel 740 is not common, but the PCI version of it is very rare

Also AGP cards with less than 8 MB are rare. I would really love to have one.

Carlos S. M. wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

I think they went roughly the same way as Verité 2100. There used to be quite a lot of them but more of them went into the bin. For Rendition this probably had to do with not having drivers for XP (not sure about i740).

They aren't very common these days anymore. I think more of the i740's were tossed as not many people wanted to keep these and most weren't PCI (PCI was much more sought after back in the early 2000s)

i740 is recorgnized on Windows XP without issues, Windows XP has drivers for that GPU out of the box

Yes but the Rendition 2100 did not have drivers for XP and that's why my boss threw all of them in the bin and it's how I got most of mine (because I was allowed to take them).

The i740 was never one of the more interesting graphics cards when looking at the second hand market and it may be that that's one of the main reasons why these were thrown away more often. That and because there always seemed to be better graphics cards available so the i740s were never preferred (unless we almost literally had nothing else to put into those AGP slots, only then would we actually use an i740).

OK, OK, the card has had a last minute reprieve and has been resurrected from the garbage! 🤣

If it would have been the PCI variant, I'd have been more than willing to take it from you. The only reason I'd want the PCI variant is because I like testing these early 3D cards in PCI 486 systems. For AGP, I think you should still keep it. In 10 years you'll realise how short-sighted you were. These cards weren't very common and, as others have said, constitute an interesting part of GPU history.

What are some games that would run reasonably well on this Intel card?

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

What are some games that would run reasonably well on this Intel card?

Plenty of early 3D games. Something like Unreal is giving it hard time at 640x480, but less demanding ones are just fine.

Nice. I really got to check out these slower cards one day. Get some older games together as well. Turok should run well on this card.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Nice. I really got to check out these slower cards one day. Get some older games together as well. Turok should run well on this card.

Would be especially interesting to see all those different Ati Rage cards, there's sooo many variants of those out there...

On my old system with the Diamond Stealth II G460 (Intel i740) 8MB AGP, I played the following stuff just fine:

Final Fantasy 7
Final Fantasy 8
Half-Life
Diablo
Diablo II (with 3D drawing environment effects on)
Baldur's Gate II
Rainbow Six - Rogue Spear
Rainbow Six - Covert Ops

Well, that's about it because that's what I had at the time. I didn't have a lot of money to spend on games. But I'm pretty sure it would have run Quake I & II just fine.

By fine, I mean at least 640 x 480 and around 40 FPS or slightly better.

It does actually sound like it will be useful sometime. Glad you guys persuaded me to keep it!

Thanks. It is now on it's way to silicon heaven.

🙁 don't trash it, send it to me.

The i810 is the Same Core and on many P3 Mainboards.
I have this Chip on my IPAQ Desktop PC with 4Mb Cache.
Even Quake 3 works with it.

Funny to see this thread up this week. I literally just bought one of these on eBay, with the intention of putting it into my Win98 build. I've been running a somewhat anachronistic Riva TNT2, but wanted to scale back to a more apt 1998-specific build. I'm now running a Stealth II G460 alongisde my V2s.

Over the weekend I'll be playing some games and running some benchmarks (if the card turns up today). @philscomputerlab I'll let you know how I get on.

I got a big bunch of cards recently and there was a i740 in the bundle. It is an agp version. I'll keep it but i may never use it.

My brother had one back in the day and as far as i remember we both had a p1- 233mmx. I had a s3 trio 4mb with voodoo1 and he had the intel. We played the same games and it wasn't bad for the money. The voodoo1 was a lot older ofcourse and the Intel could use higher res. Games like nfs III comes to mind.

I am thinking more and more about using it in a new build. I already have 2 486's and a Pentium 2 build. Would this card fit a Pentium one better?

matze79 wrote:

:( don't trash it, send it to me. […]
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Thanks. It is now on it's way to silicon heaven.

🙁 don't trash it, send it to me.

The i810 is the Same Core and on many P3 Mainboards.
I have this Chip on my IPAQ Desktop PC with 4Mb Cache.
Even Quake 3 works with it.

I have to admit that I got a bit of a soft spot for 810 era boards even though the vast majority are oem junk, someday boards with it will be sought after once supplies of better boards dries up and the prices become absurd for most. They make decent matx builds with voodoo 1/2 along with either the IGP or something like a TNT2 or a Matrox ect.