I would say Voodoo 3. It is the more period correct board, and i had that kind of setup with K6-3 450 (upgrade from previous K6-2 350 oc to 400) at the time (along with a DXR2 board for decoding DVD because the Voodoo 3 was weak at this task - who cares now?).
This setup was later upgraded to Radeon 7500 which was great at reading DVD but by that time the CPU was already obsolete.
Amongst Voodoo 3 boards, get a 3500 for maximal pimp.

Banshee AGP one of the better models with higher clocked SGRAM is the perfect match for MVP3.

Xanxi wrote on 2023-01-20, 23:29:

I would say Voodoo 3. It is the more period correct board, and i had that kind of setup with K6-3 450 (upgrade from previous K6-2 350 oc to 400) at the time (along with a DXR2 board for decoding DVD because the Voodoo 3 was weak at this task - who cares now?).
This setup was later upgraded to Radeon 7500 which was great at reading DVD but by that time the CPU was already obsolete.
Amongst Voodoo 3 boards, get a 3500 for maximal pimp.

I second the voodoo 3 as the best choice for a super-7 build. It would offer the smoothest experience with a k6-2/3 CPU - from my testing at least. 3dfx hardware running glide seems to offload some of the cpu load. Other good choices would be a TNT2 (non-m64) or TNT2 PRO / Ultra or a plain Gefroce 2 MX.

The Geforce 4 MX line are a bit new for the platform and tend to perform a bit slower than older cards, possibly due to the fact that their drivers are optimised for newer platforms and more powerful CPUs. Even newer cards will just lower performance further or introduce stuttering and instability.

beltrixx wrote on 2023-01-20, 23:17:

Recently I acquired two second hand AGP cards (Abit Siluro MX-440 SE and Leadtek Winfast Geforce2 Mx64, both AGPx4) for little money, so I thought at least one of them would run but I had no luck. The first one worked (BIOS and WinXP didn't complained about it) but there was some sort of "blue colouring" since P.O.S.T. I couldn't get rid of... (white BIOS text during POST showed blue, for instance) and the Geforce2 simply didn't work, BIOS complained by beeping right after pressing the power on button.

Maybe I've had bad luck with both cards... Anyone here with a similar set-up that can recommend a fast (and stable) AGP card? Should I stay away from AGPx4 and strictly look for AGPx2 cards?

Have you tested both cards in a different system?

About the blue output, it reminds me of something I read here on Vogons before which ended up being one of the color outputs becoming defective. This was repairable iirc.

The second card, could you tell me the beep code the motherboard gave you? You could try to clean the contacts with rubbing alcohol (don't use anything that can cause static electricity), it's very well possible the AGP contact is just dirty and I have 'revived' cards before by just cleaning the contacts (make sure you let it dry properly before re-inserting the card for another test run).

Also, it's always a good idea to visually inspect hardware you got before trying them out. Not only for dirt and leaky caps, but also for physical damages. Think cut traces, damaged legs on surface mounted chips, warping of the pcb, tampering of a previous owner, burn marks (!!!), etc.

Regarding what graphics card to use, I've never build a full rig around an MVP3 chipsetted board (I always used Ali) but my most used ss7 system had an AGP Vanta (for 2D/desktop use mostly) and a single Voodoo 2.
Recommendations, I'd use either a similar setup again, or go SLI or go Voodoo 3, or perhaps TNT2 (virtually any model because trying out stuff is interesting but the higher end models are usually better if the AGP slot can work with it) or something like MX2 if it works. Faster cards are a bit overkill imo, but if it works then why not 😜

I don't know about the particularities of your specific mobo, but some early AGP slotted boards had issues with power delivery, limiting the owner of such boards to use lower powered AGP cards, or to go for PCI.

3dfx is something of a safe choice as its AGP cards use fewer AGP features, resulting in (as far as I could read from other MVP3 users) better stability.

It's a bit unfortunate some graphics cards are prohibitively expensive these days. I guess the safest option with performance would be to go for something like a Virge or TNT2 M64 in the AGP slot and 1 or 2 Voodoo 2 cards (identical being preferable) in the PCI. Geforce MX would probably be a cheaper option. TNT2 M64 may be a bit bottlenecked in your system but I reckon not by much, but it's relatively cheap and relatively foolproof (and they make for excellent testing cards 😜 ).

I wouldn't get too hung up on the PCI vs AGP Banshee performance. The card you already have should work pretty well with that system. Also note the Banshee didn't have great AGP support anyway.

For example:

While the Banshee does support the AGP specification, its implementation is incredibly poor and only allows for 1X transfers over the AGP bus. At the same time, the Banshee doesn't allow for AGP texture storage, meaning that the textures which would normally be transferred over the AGP bus for storage in system memory must remain in the local memory of the graphics card. This will cause a considerable performance hit once games begin to exceed the available memory for texture storage, however for the present, the Banshee will do just fine.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/197/3

Thanks everybody for your interesting replies. Turns out I did have another agp card in storage, an ATI Radeon 9250 SE (x8) that seems to be universal AGP 3.0 according to this link : http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html

And indeed it has been recognized at first attempt by BIOS (which means it's able to work at 3.3V) and displays well both in bios and Windows XP, which I'm reinstalling cause I also have swapped original hard drives for others (80 Gb + 300 Gb, 7200 rpm) that are far better than previous ones.

Let's see how will it perform once I finish setup...

Regards,

Manel (beltrixx)

Just a short remark:

3D FX‘s were back in the days very well known for CPU offloading. This means with „slower“ CPUs you received better results. But this was more common on the Pentium 60-166ff times. For faster CPUs, nVidia TNTs/GeForces just took the crown.

Regards

beltrixx wrote on 2023-01-20, 23:17:

Hi all, […]
Show full quote

Hi all,

I have an AMD K6-III retro build which runs pretty stable but, when it comes to the graphics card... I've ecountered some issues so I would appreciate a bit of advice.

My system has the following specs :

• Epox MVP3G-M motherboard with 384 Mb RAM (100 Mhz) and a K6-III 400 Mhz processor.
• Soundblaster Live PCI sound card
• Generic realtek RTL3189 PCI Ethernet card
• Promise PCI Ultra133 Tx2 hard drive controller (recently installed & set up)
• ATI 3D Rage IIc AGP card (currently)

System runs just fine but I would like to improve graphics performance; I do have a 3dfx Voodoo Banshee card (PCI) that is actually faster than the ATI AGP card I fitted but I'd rather prefer to use AGP port instead of PCI for graphics...

Months ago I fitted a Leadtek Winfast A250 LE TD (AGPx4) which had been in storage for decades and it ran fairly well but one of the capacitors was clearly worn and I had the bad idea (my fault) to take the card to a mobile phone repairing shop to replace it... the card never ran stable again so I decided to replace it by a similar card. I read some posts here, specifically the ones by PhilsComputerLabs recommending either a TNT2 Ultra or a Voodoo3 (What is the best graphics card for Super Socket 7? My journey :D)

Recently I acquired two second hand AGP cards (Abit Siluro MX-440 SE and Leadtek Winfast Geforce2 Mx64, both AGPx4) for little money, so I thought at least one of them would run but I had no luck. The first one worked (BIOS and WinXP didn't complained about it) but there was some sort of "blue colouring" since P.O.S.T. I couldn't get rid of... (white BIOS text during POST showed blue, for instance) and the Geforce2 simply didn't work, BIOS complained by beeping right after pressing the power on button.

Maybe I've had bad luck with both cards... Anyone here with a similar set-up that can recommend a fast (and stable) AGP card? Should I stay away from AGPx4 and strictly look for AGPx2 cards?

Thanks in advance,

Manel.

Most of the video cards I’ve tried on my ss7 stuff is newer

My best scores and most playable games have been with my radeon 9800 pro

But I think some of the most compatible agp cards to try are probably radeon 9000,92x0,7x00

Seems like my nvidia stuff always gives me issues. But gf2-gf5 might be a good place to try stuff.

Don’t try anything newer than radeon 9000 or geforce 5000 series though or you’ll get driver issues. Radeon x series might work but wrong agp slot.

The 3d mark world records were done with geforce 2/3 cards under windows 9x with a specific early driver. Though I am unsure if these results translate to real world gaming performance.

Here is the 9800 pro in action on halo 1024x1280

With a cyrix MII 😏

https://youtu.be/jx-KE-xlNS0

Socket3 wrote on 2023-01-21, 06:53:

Xanxi wrote on 2023-01-20, 23:29:

I would say Voodoo 3. It is the more period correct board, and i had that kind of setup with K6-3 450 (upgrade from previous K6-2 350 oc to 400) at the time (along with a DXR2 board for decoding DVD because the Voodoo 3 was weak at this task - who cares now?).
This setup was later upgraded to Radeon 7500 which was great at reading DVD but by that time the CPU was already obsolete.
Amongst Voodoo 3 boards, get a 3500 for maximal pimp.

I second the voodoo 3 as the best choice for a super-7 build. It would offer the smoothest experience with a k6-2/3 CPU - from my testing at least. 3dfx hardware running glide seems to offload some of the cpu load. Other good choices would be a TNT2 (non-m64) or TNT2 PRO / Ultra or a plain Gefroce 2 MX.

The Geforce 4 MX line are a bit new for the platform and tend to perform a bit slower than older cards, possibly due to the fact that their drivers are optimised for newer platforms and more powerful CPUs. Even newer cards will just lower performance further or introduce stuttering and instability.

I already tried the ATI R9250/SE. It's an AGPx8 video card which is recognized at boot but is unstable under Windows XP maybe it was designed to work with newer systems as you suggested so I gave up on it, returned both Nvidia cards which didn't work and ordered a more simple Creative 3D Blaster GeForce 2MX 32 Mb which was tested ok by the seller.

I'd like to be lucky this time and hope it works just fine, without issues. Can't wait to try it out 😀

Thanks for the replies!

Socket3 wrote on 2023-01-21, 06:53:

Xanxi wrote on 2023-01-20, 23:29:

I would say Voodoo 3. It is the more period correct board, and i had that kind of setup with K6-3 450 (upgrade from previous K6-2 350 oc to 400) at the time (along with a DXR2 board for decoding DVD because the Voodoo 3 was weak at this task - who cares now?).
This setup was later upgraded to Radeon 7500 which was great at reading DVD but by that time the CPU was already obsolete.
Amongst Voodoo 3 boards, get a 3500 for maximal pimp.

I second the voodoo 3 as the best choice for a super-7 build. It would offer the smoothest experience with a k6-2/3 CPU - from my testing at least. 3dfx hardware running glide seems to offload some of the cpu load. Other good choices would be a TNT2 (non-m64) or TNT2 PRO / Ultra or a plain Gefroce 2 MX.

The Geforce 4 MX line are a bit new for the platform and tend to perform a bit slower than older cards, possibly due to the fact that their drivers are optimised for newer platforms and more powerful CPUs. Even newer cards will just lower performance further or introduce stuttering and instability.

It seems the Geforce2 MX was the way to go. I acquired a Creative 3D Blaster Geforce 2 MX (32 Mb RAM) and it works like a charm.
Card is running at 2x speed without issues (with drivers downloaded from Creative https://support.creative.com/Products/Product … atName=Graphics, as last "official" forceware drivers gave me a BSOD when running direct 3D tests from within dxdiag).
The card has also a nice layout, with solid capacitors and no fan, only a heatsink.

Thanks all for your honest advices 😉

Manel.

http://vgamuseum.info/images/zaatharen/nvidia … reative_fhq.jpg

beltrixx wrote on 2023-01-28, 21:21:

It seems the Geforce2 MX was the way to go. I acquired a Creative 3D Blaster Geforce 2 MX (32 Mb RAM) and it works like a charm. […]
Show full quote

Socket3 wrote on 2023-01-21, 06:53:

Xanxi wrote on 2023-01-20, 23:29:

I would say Voodoo 3. It is the more period correct board, and i had that kind of setup with K6-3 450 (upgrade from previous K6-2 350 oc to 400) at the time (along with a DXR2 board for decoding DVD because the Voodoo 3 was weak at this task - who cares now?).
This setup was later upgraded to Radeon 7500 which was great at reading DVD but by that time the CPU was already obsolete.
Amongst Voodoo 3 boards, get a 3500 for maximal pimp.

I second the voodoo 3 as the best choice for a super-7 build. It would offer the smoothest experience with a k6-2/3 CPU - from my testing at least. 3dfx hardware running glide seems to offload some of the cpu load. Other good choices would be a TNT2 (non-m64) or TNT2 PRO / Ultra or a plain Gefroce 2 MX.

The Geforce 4 MX line are a bit new for the platform and tend to perform a bit slower than older cards, possibly due to the fact that their drivers are optimised for newer platforms and more powerful CPUs. Even newer cards will just lower performance further or introduce stuttering and instability.

It seems the Geforce2 MX was the way to go. I acquired a Creative 3D Blaster Geforce 2 MX (32 Mb RAM) and it works like a charm.
Card is running at 2x speed without issues (with drivers downloaded from Creative https://support.creative.com/Products/Product … atName=Graphics, as last "official" forceware drivers gave me a BSOD when running direct 3D tests from within dxdiag).
The card has also a nice layout, with solid capacitors and no fan, only a heatsink.

Thanks all for your honest advices 😉

Manel.

http://vgamuseum.info/images/zaatharen/nvidia … reative_fhq.jpg

Check out this thread:
AMD K6 3DMARK, aiming for stars.

There is a special driver that gives crazy 3dm scores. 7.?? I forget version it’s discussed here. You may have to use a special version in the thread and force install it.