I have a quadro-700 agp in my SK41 shuttle xpc https://www.shuttle.eu/_archive/older/de/sk41g.htm
far cry does work, but frames are rather low do to the slow cpu (geode 1750).
but it's a passive card with 128bit-memory interface (similar to a FX5900). another option for me is a gf3 passive or a 6200 passive.

I support the viewpoint of appiah4.

I have also had very good experience with a Radeon 8500 in a PIII system and can highly recommend this combination. However, the 8500 is not very cheap to get. Now and then the 8500LE cards, which are slightly clocked down, go away at very low prices. From the 9xxx series only the 9100 corresponds to the design of the 8500 and is also not cheap. The 9000/9200/9250s (here absolutely avoid the LE versions) are a substantial downgrade of the 8500 design with partly high speed losses. If DX8 is not important, a card from the 7500 series could be a good choice. These are very cheap to get and comparatively fast.

I would also make sure that the card has a DVI port.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-10-02, 05:40:

Both will be severely bottlenecked by the Tualatin CPU and perform equally, so the 9600xt's only advantage is DX9 compatibility and no DX9 game will run well on a P3 CPU regardless of GPU. It's quite overkill for the Tualatin. It will work, but expect quite a few driver bugs with pre-2000 games. A 9250 (built on a revised and die shrunk 8500 GPU) would have had much better compatibility with pre-2000 games. To each their own.

Severely bottlenecked? Are you sure? A Tualatin 512kB is even faster than the first P4 models at the same clock. Some bottleneck is of course expected, as this GPU is from 2003.
Also the 9250 seems to be heavily downgraded from the 8500.

PC-Engineer Offline: The 8500 is not that cheap on eBay. 😒

EDIT: I think I'll stick to the Radeon 9600 XT when I get it. I might be able to get at least some performance increase out of it versus my FX 5600, despite having SDRAM, AGP 4x and a 140MHz FSB.

8bitbubsy wrote on 2020-10-02, 09:05:

Severely bottlenecked? Are you sure? A Tualatin 512kB is even faster than the first P4 models at the same clock. Some bottleneck is of course expected, as this GPU is from 2003.
Also the 9250 seems to be heavily downgraded from the 8500.

Yes, the 9600XT is a mid-range cards from late 2003 and by then the first Athlon64s were released and Prescott was around the corner - so the Tualatin was almost a 3 generation old CPU at that point. Try and you will see.

The most important thing is that I get at least some better performance than my FX 5600. That card gets quite hot too, I don't really like it.

The 9600XT won't be severely bottlenecked by a Tualatin. In DX8 titles, it's a bit faster than a Ti4600, which is considered by many forum members to be THE card to pair up with a Tualatin system.

At my 1600x1200 resolution of choice, a 9800 Pro is at least twice as fast as a 9250...and that's in DX7 games! However, most of the games I play on this machine are DX8 and 9 games, and the differences there can be even bigger.
In newer (late 2003+) games, even the 6800GT manages to pull ahead of the 9800 Pro.

The 9250 is a slow, slow card. You wouldn't have liked it. 😀

Interesting card for low-profile

So I got my ASUS Radeon 9600 XT today. The fan was grinding, so I disassembled it, cleaned with IPA and reoiled. All good now, though it's insanely loud!
I tried to install the latest Omega drivers, but it wouldn't work at all... I installed the latest ASUS driver and it has a tool for setting the fan to "auto", it's not very loud now. I'm getting better performance in games for sure. I can play Vice City at 1280x1024x32 at full viewing distance, and it runs fine. Morrowind still struggles a lot in some scenes, so that's most likely a CPU intensive game where the Tualatin doesn't cut it.

My only complaint is that the picture quality from the VGA port is not as good as on the Geforce FX 5600 card. I can see noise in the image, and it's not as sharp. 🙁 The card also appears to run fine at a 70MHz AGP clock.

Have you a vga adapter to screw in to the dvi port to try?

texterted wrote on 2020-10-08, 15:42:

Have you a vga adapter to screw in to the dvi port to try?

I tested this now, and the image is more sharp for sure, but I still have that very faint snow effect (noise). It may be slightly better, though. Only visible when there's a lot of black content.
EDIT: Pretty sure it's much better than it was. Thanks for the tip!

Try it at the default clocks, maybe that's having an effect?

Strange about the Omegas, what about the vanilla 6.2's?

8bitbubsy wrote on 2020-10-08, 15:35:

So I got my ASUS Radeon 9600 XT today. The fan was grinding, so I disassembled it, cleaned with IPA and reoiled. All good now. Though it was insanely loud!
I tried to install the latest Omega drivers, but it wouldn't work at all... I installed the latest ASUS driver and it has a tool for setting the fan to "auto", it's not very loud now. I'm getting better performance in games for sure. I can play Vice City at 1280x1024x32 at full viewing distance, and it runs fine. Morrowind still struggles a lot in some scenes, so that's most likely a CPU intensive game where the Tualatin doesn't cut it.

My only complaint is that the picture quality from the VGA port is not as good as on the Geforce FX 5600 card. I can see noise in the image, and it's not as sharp. 🙁 The card also appears to run fine at a 70MHz AGP clock.

ATI VGA output quality was well regarded at the time when ATI still made their own cards. When ATI started having cards made multiple by third parties, that VGA output quality became less of a given since design and manufacturing quality varied between manufacturers . That said, I would have expected good design and manufacturing quality from Asus .

I assume that you are using VGA because you have a CRT monitor. If you have an LCD monitor, you should be using DVI anyway (assuming monitor has DVI/HDMI input), on a Windows machine at least.

texterted wrote on 2020-10-08, 15:55:

Try it at the default clocks, maybe that's having an effect?

Strange about the Omegas, what about the vanilla 6.2's?

I think I'll just live with the noise, it's barely visible and I'm being a bit pedantic.
I'll try another Omega driver and get back to you. The one I tried was cat_7.12_ati_omega_xp2k_48442.exe on Windows 2000.
It would install, but then show several pop-up dialogs with cut off paths in them ("C:\Program Files " etc). After a reboot, it was still running on the default VGA driver.

EDIT: rad_w2kxp_omega_38413_7z.exe worked fine!

darry wrote on 2020-10-08, 15:55:

ATI VGA output quality was well regarded at the time when ATI still made their own cards. When ATI started having cards made multiple by third parties, that VGA output quality became less of a given since design and manufacturing quality varied between manufacturers . That said, I would have expected good design and manufacturing quality from Asus .

I assume that you are using VGA because you have a CRT monitor. If you have an LCD monitor, you should be using DVI anyway (assuming monitor has DVI/HDMI input), on a Windows machine at least.

My only monitor (except my main monitor) is a Samsung SyncMaster 710N, and it only has VGA. So yeah, can't use DVI.

8bitbubsy wrote on 2020-10-08, 16:00:

My only monitor (except my main monitor) is a Samsung SyncMaster 710N, and it only has VGA. So yeah, can't use DVI.

You could try and see if your Ati control panel has sync polarity options, I managed to fix shimmering on a (much older) Ati Rage Pro on a flat panel by switching the hsync polarity.