If you are a long-time lurker you should know the answer is: it depends.
Check for voltage compatibility before sticking AGP 8x card in.

For that CPU, if you want to play Glide games, get a Voodoo 3, 4, or 5 card.

The best 3DMark scores with SS7 are GeForce 2 And 3 cards.

If you wanna play period D3D games at period resolutions for cheap, stick a TNT2 in it. Though GF2 MX400 are pretty cheap and it's not gonna get too much more out of a GTS.

Though a translation table from 90s gamer speak to 2000s gamer speak
90s: 7-10 fps: Just about playable. / 2000s: "It's so bad it gave me cancer"
90s: 15fps: playable / 2000s: "slide show"
90s: 25-35fps: Full motion video speed, pretty smooth. / 2000s: "not playable"
90s: 35-59fps: whoa, slick, buttery smooth, Ima try 1024x768 / 2000s: "Just about playable, try dropping res or turning off features"
90s: 60+ holy hell, I'm on speed skates here, almost too fast. / 2000s: "playable"

I have a ASUS P5A. Banshee/Voodoo3/4/5 are the way to go. You really want Glide with a Super 7 system because even a K6-III+ @ 600 is slow, Glide is low overhead, and these cards won't have compatibility problems with that Super 7 AGP.

GeForce FX cards will run on it but it is likely you will have freezing or crashes with Radeons and GeForce cards because of AGP power and compatibility problems.

Thanks guys, much appreciated.

I think it'll be he voodoo 5 then if they still run glide that far up in versions.

I thoght the p5a-b models were better for the power on agp but guess not.

jibbinjbo wrote on 2023-03-07, 22:32:

Thanks guys, much appreciated.

I think it'll be he voodoo 5 then if they still run glide that far up in versions.

Have fun with the price 😁

The V5-5500 will also be pretty CPU limited.

I can confirm zero difference between Voodoo 3 and Voodoo 5 on a K6-III+ 550, in relatively normal resolutions such as 800x600 and even 1024x768 for most games.

jibbinjbo wrote on 2023-03-07, 18:56:

So... I've got a P5A board with 768 ram and 500 cpu. Was aiming for win 98 but ideally want xp running. I'm seeing mixed views on the best gpu.

p5a-b here with 768mb and cyrix. i recommend the tnt1 with driver version 2.25... but old drivers might wont run on a k6 based cpu, the chip is buggy.

I'm playing with a P5-A/K2-2+ build now, and haven't had any issues with any of these under either 98SE or XP:

- Matrox G400
- Geforce 2 MX400
- Quadro 2 Pro

They all work fine, but the performance advantage of the Q2Pro over the MX400 is minimal. G400 delivers the best image quality, but is by far the slowest in DirectX. Despite 98SE delivering more performance, I still intend to run XP just because I never liked the 9x OSs, and still don't.

Sweet jesus the v5's are insanely priced!

Interesting on the other recomendations guys....from what i can tell some/most are on par with the voodoos but are lacking full glide for games? Ill mainly be running Windows games i think so maybe voodoo isnt the best option? Im aiming for higher res if poss. 1024x768 at least.

Voodoo is all about Windows games. Voodoo3 can run up to 1600x1200, though 1024x768 is really most appropriate for it.

I love the old Matrox G400 but would not pick one for Super 7 for gaming. It would be fine for just Windows duty, but for games the G400 is CPU heavy. The game compatibility is not at the same level as Nvidia, let alone 3dfx. They are really meant to be used with Pentium 3 or Athlon or later.

I can confirm the G200 performs better in socket7 than the G400.

Geri wrote on 2023-03-08, 21:12:

I can confirm the G200 performs better in socket7 than the G400.

That's not what I saw when I tested with a P233MMX (I know G450 isn't G400, but pretty close):

Windows 98SE, latest ICD:
Quake 2 demo 1, no sound, in FPS:
G200:

640x480x32: 18
800x600x32: 14.5
1024x768x32: 11

640x480x16: 21.5
800x600x16: 19
1024x768x16: 14

G450:
640x480x32: 25
800x600x32: 24.5
1024x768x32: 22.5

640x480x16: 25.3
800x600x16: 25.5
1024x768x16: 25.3
1152x864x16: 24.5

Neither is what I'd pick for high performance gaming, though. IMO they're great for (a) compatibility and (b) image quality. When I'm troubleshooting a build, Matrox is what I throw in to rule out any GPU weirdness.

I would also recommend a Voodoo3. The 3DFX drivers have excellent 3DNow! (Important for K6 CPUs) support (in OGL, D3D, Glide), better than ATI nVidia and Matrox. Also, the driver overhead is very low. Alternatively, a GeForce for DX7 games with T&L support would also work nice, but the K6 is usually too weak for these games. A Voodoo5 is actually underpowered by this CPU even at 1024x768.

Or a Voodoo 4 4500 AGP, I would say the best 3dfx card for a Super Socket 7 system. Better texture Quality (2048x2048) size than a Voodoo 3 (256x256), 16MB more memory and texture compression. OpenGL Games with the Quake 3 engine for example run faster and look better on a Voodoo 4 4500 than on a same clocked Voodoo 3 3000.

NFS Porsche for example is also a game, which looks better on a Voodoo 4/5 card. The Voodoo 2/3 has washed out textures in this game with the highest texture settings, also Mercedes Benz Truck Racing.

Yeah there are lots of examples of games from those times that look best on 3dfx cards. It's mostly a matter of 3dfx having popularity and their cards worked great whereas the competition was largely broken. Of course things begin to change by 1998 but it took awhile to change momentum there.

For compatibility, TNT2 + Voodoo2 is really hard to beat.

lawyerpepper wrote on 2023-03-09, 13:59:

That's not what I saw when I tested with a P233MMX (I know G450 isn't G400, but pretty close):

I have tested them in ~30 games, and in most of them, the g200 outperformed it with a few fps which usually translated into exceeding 24 fps with the g200, meanwhile with the g400/g450 the framerate crawled around 20. One of the notorious game with this is CMR2. My cpu is a 6x86mx at 2.5x100.