GreenBook wrote on 2024-10-01, 18:09:

Thank you for long and valuable message. Do you want say GF4MX video card is worse even then FX 5200 and FX5500?

To be honest, I can't say with 100% confidence which one would be worse over the other. I think with very late 99 and 2000/2001 games (especially any with DX8 support), their performance will be about equal (and by equal, I mean not very good.) Both will be limited to rather low-ish resolutions to get decent framerates. In older DX7 titles, though, the MX440 and 460 will probably beat the FX5200/5500, though.

GreenBook wrote on 2024-10-01, 18:09:

GF2MX400 64 is cheap 😀

Yeah, probably for a reason. If it was a 64-bit memory bus version (and I think most are), it would be pretty slow.
I remember a high school buddy of mine with a decent-ish P4 PC back in the day with a GF4MX card, and even Counter-Strike 1.5 (later 1.6) didn't get great FPS on that card. And IIRC, NFS Underground didn't want to work at all.
So yeah, probably pass on that MX400... unless it's dirt cheap. Then get it just to keep around as a spare card or to use for comparing with other cards.

GreenBook wrote on 2024-10-01, 18:09:

What do you say about AGP Gainward QUADRO FX5600 256MB DDR 128bit? Does the video card is ok?

You sure that description is right?
If it's an FX5600, it should be a GeForce, not a Quadro. And if that's so, I'd say go for it if the price is decent. GeForce FX5600 will perform quite decently for a late P3 build.
On the other hand, I don't remember what the Quadro-equivalents of the FX line were, and in particular of the FX5600. But if it's the same GPU chip on a Quadro card, that's still a good choice.

GreenBook wrote on 2024-10-01, 18:09:

GF3 Ti200/500 and GF4 Ti 4200/4400/4600 are very expensive. The cost is too high to be profitable. In this situation I should choose Radeons.

Indeed they are.
Even here in Eastern Europe, that's become the situation too.
Well, a few months ago, I saw a TI4600 on the flea market for the equivalent of about $12 (the guy wanted 20 LEV.) And it looked in decent condition too. But knowing these cards, it was probably dead and/or artifacting. Moreover, for $12 I can typically get 2 old desktops or 2-5 motherboards... or 10 IDE HDDs... or 15 optical drives - all untested, of course. So I didn't want to throw all of my money into one item that may turn out to not work. Thus, I skipped that card. In retrospect, I probably should have bought it, knowing what the prices are like in the rest of the world (I can probably sell it for the same money on eBay that I bought it for, even if I explicitly mention it's not working.) Then again, I have 4 of these cards already (2 working, 2 dead), so didn't want to add more to the hoard.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2024-10-01, 07:49:

I don’t think the GF2 line would be out of place in most of the P3 systems. Different variants were mostly released between spring and autumn 2000 and Ti as late as in autumn 2001. Yes, GF2 line doesn’t have the programmable shaders, but something like GF2 Ultra gives GF3 ti200 a good run for the money and can even beat it in many DX7 benchmarks.
...
And from here we get to the GF4MX440/460. These cards can beat the fastest GF2 cards, they have much better image quality and there are even passively cooled cards available. NV17/18 cores are essentially tweaked NV15 cores.

Ah, I see. Thank you for the clarification, I always found older nVidia card line up a little confusing (well, so is ATI's to me if I look further back before Radeon 7000.)

Indeed a DX7 card won't be a bad match for a Pentium 3 PC (not to mention be period correct, too). But if the system is a more late P3 build, then it will be capable of playing some early DX 8 / 8.1 titles as well. So I think it's good to have a DX8+ card in there, just in case. I actually remember when we upgraded my cousin's PC (a 933 MHz P3 with 128 MB of RAM, Radeon 7000 64MB, and Windows XP - a PC that I now have in my possession) for the first time - we put an extra stick of 256 MB of RAM in it, bringing the system total to 384 MB. He was able to play Mafia, GTA VC, and quite a few other games that didn't work prior. The Radeon 7000's performance, of course, was quite underwhelming even in DX7 titles. But many years later when I acquired that PC and upgraded the GPU to a Radeon 7200, then to a 9600, I can tell you how many more games I was able to play and that the FPS and frametimes improved quite a bit. What's funny is we even attempted to run Half-Life 2 on that system back in 2005 before he finally decided to retired it and build a new PC. Watching HL2 slowly chug on that system (and with quite poor graphics) was certainly a memorable experience. For some reason, I have not attempted to put HL2 on it, now many years later with the upgraded hardware. But in a different benchmark from Need For Speed Underground from the system as it was back then and the way it is now, it's a significant improvement difference. With the original config, NFS UG would run mostly around 20-30 FPS with the lowest settings on 640x480. The RAM and GPU upgrade now allows the same game to run mostly around 30 FPS (frame-locked by game) with medium-high settings and 800x600 (or perhaps it was 1024x768, I forget now.)
So my point is, it does pay off to have a better GPU in there for a late P3 build.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2024-10-01, 07:49:

FX5200 has shaders, but it is not a good performer so I would probably go with something else if DX8 or DX9 is a priority.

Well, if DX9 is a priority, I would skip the entire GeForce FX line and go straight for a 6600 or 6800 at the very least (though worth mentioning here is that the 7600 GT may be a more sensible choice in some cases.) Or in case of Radeon cards, go with at least DX9c supporting cards... so probably x1000 series, and nothing less than the x1600 or x1650. But then we wouldn't be talking about a Pentium 3 build here either, as these are much newer cards that will likely get very bottlenecked even by a high-end P3.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2024-10-01, 07:49:

I’d avoid MX420 and cards like MX440LE (latter is practically MX420), which have 64-bit memory bus and are significantly slower compared to regular MX460/440 line.

Interesting you mention this. A few weeks back, I saw an MX420 (or was it an MX400, I can't remember) that specifically had a sticker mentioning a 128-bit memory bus on the back (and the card had 8 memory chips too, so can confirm it was likely a 128-bit card.) Should have bought it to play around with and compare against my two FX5200 cards (one is 128MB 64-bit, and the other is 256MB 128-bit.) Was going for scrap prices ($1-2 if I bargained a little with the seller.)

There's also a MX4000 with 128bit bus. I have one, never got against benching it tho.

nd22 wrote on 2024-09-30, 09:01:

On all of my systems with XP installed I disabled virtual memory so that hard drives are no longer used as replacement for RAM; that forces every single game to load in the RAM so no more stutters because it accesses the drive.
That also means I must have enough RAM for the games I run. For early XP games up to 2001 included this would be fine.
You could use a i815 board with a P3 1000 MHz and 512mb of ram and every single game before 2002 will run flawlessly provide you have a GOOD video card.

That was standard practice even going back to the Windows 2000 days. At least in the circles I moved in. It was pretty much the first thing you did after installing the OS.

momaka wrote on 2024-10-01, 19:03:

Well, if DX9 is a priority, I would skip the entire GeForce FX line and go straight for a 6600 or 6800 at the very least (though worth mentioning here is that the 7600 GT may be a more sensible choice in some cases.) Or in case of Radeon cards, go with at least DX9c supporting cards... so probably x1000 series, and nothing less than the x1600 or x1650. But then we wouldn't be talking about a Pentium 3 build here either, as these are much newer cards that will likely get very bottlenecked even by a high-end P3.

Exactly. If DX9 is a priority, I would skip Pentium 3 alltogether. There is no point in just slapping a as fast as possible GPU on the side of P3 when you can get much better perofrming DX9 platform when it would most likely be even cheaper. Fastest Pentium 3s are fine for late win98 and early XP era and if you want a platform with ISA for better support for DOS, but that’s it. If you want good DX9 performance, it is better to opt something like A64 at least or something like Core2Duo.

Interesting you mention this. A few weeks back, I saw an MX420 (or was it an MX400, I can't remember) that specifically had a sticker mentioning a 128-bit memory bus on the back (and the card had 8 memory chips too, so can confirm it was likely a 128-bit card.) Should have bought it to play around with and compare against my two FX5200 cards (one is 128MB 64-bit, and the other is 256MB 128-bit.) Was going for scrap prices ($1-2 if I bargained a little with the seller.)

It could’ve been MX4000. I can’t see why any manufacturer would’ve released something as MX420, if it is actually a faster model. I guess it is possible that it is some weird model using very slow memory and low clockspeed.

I remembered this wrong, MX420 had 128-bit bus, but used SDR instead of DDR. This of course halves the memory bandwidth, so the effect is pretty much the same.

Edit: when I had 800MHz Coppermine and 440BX in my win98 box, I tried few graphics cards in it and it was quite soon bottlenecked. I at first opted a GF2 GTS and even that was seriously bottlenecked, but had considerably better performance than TNT2 for example. That card gave up the ghost and I used 440MX which performed close to the same level. Also FX5600 was worse than either of those, but in the big picture all three provided a performance that was roughly on the same level on that platform.

I saw Vice City gameplay on Athlon Xp with 256MB of RAM with GF4Mx. The game worked poorly. I remember that a friend of mine played ViceCity on his Celeron1200 with 256MB RAM and GF2 and the game worked fine.

I dream of "having a Pentium3" like my friend did many years ago. I don't want to play newer games on P3. But I know the P3 800 will play many games up to 2005 but on low settings.

I'm interested in how MaxPayne 2001 and Gta3 will work on P3 800-866mhz.

GreenBook wrote on 2024-10-03, 07:26:

I saw Vice City gameplay on Athlon Xp with 256MB of RAM with GF4Mx. The game worked poorly. I remember that a friend of mine played ViceCity on his Celeron1200 with 256MB RAM and GF2 and the game worked fine.

I dream of "having a Pentium3" like my friend did many years ago. I don't want to play newer games on P3. But I know the P3 800 will play many games up to 2005 but on low settings.

I'm interested in how MaxPayne 2001 and Gta3 will work on P3 800-866mhz.

Seen perrormance depends on the GF4MX that was in use. Models are not the same: if it was MX420, the performance is much worse. But MX440/460 are comparable or better to fastest GF2 cards and it is a fact.

Here is a good bunch of benchmarks and comparison of different models:

http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/gf4mx/index.html

The reason why MX440/460 got bad rep back in the day was that they were sold as GF4 cards, although they represented legacy technology, that is they were tweaked GF2s instead of something that was based on GF4 4xxxxti series or even GF3.

From retro hobbyist perspective they are very good if you need something that provides GF2 top end model performance as they are much cheaper nowadays compared to fatsest GF2s and they have better IQ. Only reason to go with GF2 Ultra or ti is if you already got one or you want to build somethint that is period correct.

Edit: Max Payne 1 runs just fine on fast P3 with decent graphics card. It isn’t heavy and doesn’t support or require shaders, only TnL.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2024-10-03, 07:48:

Edit: Max Payne 1 runs just fine on fast P3 with decent graphics card. It isn’t heavy and doesn’t support or require shaders, only TnL.

At what settings MaxPayne 2001 run well on PC Pentium3 800mhz?

I understand the bad reputation of GF4Mx comes from 2 reasons:

first) GF4mx was not a weaker version of GF4ti, but GF4mx was based on GF2

second) GF4mx 420 was a terrible graphics card, but 440 and 460 were ok.

Does GF4mx440/460 has similar performence to Radeon9000?

GreenBook wrote on 2024-10-03, 08:17:

At what settings MaxPayne 2001 run well on PC Pentium3 800mhz? […]
Show full quote

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2024-10-03, 07:48:

Edit: Max Payne 1 runs just fine on fast P3 with decent graphics card. It isn’t heavy and doesn’t support or require shaders, only TnL.

At what settings MaxPayne 2001 run well on PC Pentium3 800mhz?

I understand the bad reputation of GF4Mx comes from 2 reasons:

first) GF4mx was not a weaker version of GF4ti, but GF4mx was based on GF2

second) GF4mx 420 was a terrible graphics card, but 440 and 460 were ok.

Does GF4mx440/460 has similar performence to Radeon9000?

Depends on the graphics card, but I’d say it runs pretty much maxed out at 1024x768 or 800x600. I played it back in the day with P2 400 with GF2MX400 and although it wasn’t optimal, it was playable. A friend had 900MHz Duron and if I remember correctly, TNT2 and it ran very well. Again, it isn’t especially demanding game and you can most likely find some old benchmarks with it from the webs.

You can also google old GPU reviews yourself instead asking people to provide everything for you. Here is a comparison of Radeon 9000 Pro and it is quite comparable with MX440 and MX460:

http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/radeon/r9000-3.html

Difference is of course that Radeon supports shaders being based on a newer architecture, but how much that matters with such low end card and games that should be playable, is up to the user.

For a quick comparison of video card performace you could check for example this website:
https://www.pc-erfahrung.de/grafikkarte/vga-g … krangliste.html
The rank order is most likely a bit rough on a number of details but for generic purposes it can be useful.

Graphics card for me is a choice between GF4MX440 and Radeon9550. GF4mx440 is not a bad graphics card but Radeon9550 has batter performance. Radeon9600 it's a bit more expensive, but maybe find a bargain. Geforce 4 Ti 4200 costs about 100 Euro. Radeon 9700 is difficult to obtain, expensive and unreliable.

GreenBook wrote on 2024-10-03, 15:10:

Graphics card for me is a choice between GF4MX440 and Radeon9550. GF4mx440 is not a bad graphics card but Radeon9550 has batter performance. Radeon9600 it's a bit more expensive, but maybe find a bargain. Geforce 4 Ti 4200 costs about 100 Euro. Radeon 9700 is difficult to obtain, expensive and unreliable.

Cards like Ti 4200 or 9700 are pretty much a waste on something like ~800MHz P3 and 9600 pro can’t really shine either, although they can be found quite cheap easily and may be a good option. With those high end GPUs you would be seriously CPU limited in the scenarios where those cards would be normally really useful. If you happen to find some GF4 Ti really cheap, there is of course no harm installing it on a potato computer, but considering how the prices tend to be often nowadays, it is better to go with something that is somewhat balanced with the CPU and it is much cheaper and parts may be easier to find.

GF4 MX440 while not being all that good in your mind now looking back it was a great card to go with a P3 800 back then, same with the GF3 Ti 200 same as the GF2 GTS/Ultra. ATi was Radeon 7500 or 8500LE, or it youre feeling flush then a full on 8500 will see you all the way to the tree line.

On a P3 800 i really wouldnt bother going past that performance wise, but the prices of the kit these days you have some wild prices in there, and you could get a Ti 4200 for near half the price of a full ATi built 8500

I think FX5200 128bits is very cheap and enough for Pentium3 => 800mhz

And why Pentium3 processors are more expensive than P4?

Especially Pentium3 above 1GHz are expensive.

GreenBook wrote on 2024-10-04, 16:23:

I think FX5200 128bits is very cheap and enough for Pentium3 => 800mhz

And why Pentium3 processors are more expensive than P4?

Especially Pentium3 above 1GHz are expensive.

More desirable in the retro world

GreenBook wrote on 2024-10-04, 16:23:

I think FX5200 128bits is very cheap and enough for Pentium3 => 800mhz

And why Pentium3 processors are more expensive than P4?

Especially Pentium3 above 1GHz are expensive.

It is the same how prices are set with everything: it depends on supply and demand. Slot 1 and s370 are more sought after and especially those 1GHz+ slot 1 coppermines never sold that much as the slot architecture was aging when those were available. Around 2000-1 people opted S370 or Socket A motherboards when buying new systems and upgrading the CPU wasn’t always that simple as many older slot 1 or s370 motherboards didn’t support all the fastest CPU SKUs. This is one reason why there are more 1GHz+ s370 CPUs available than comparable slot 1 models.

GreenBook wrote on 2024-10-04, 16:23:

And why Pentium3 processors are more expensive than P4?

Especially Pentium3 above 1GHz are expensive.

Supply:

1. P3 were older so working CPU + matching motherboards would be less abundant on used markets.
2. P3 had a shorter marketing lifespan (less than 3 years between the announcement dates of the first and the last of desktop variants) than P4 (about 5.5 years).
3. P4 were released about the same time of WinXP and broadband Internet that significantly increased computer userbases in offices or homes so it's natural to have more P4 rigs surviving today.

Demand:

1. Some P4 already had bad reputations back then, such as Willamette being slower than contemporary P3 and energy inefficiency of Prescott.
2. ISA slots, highly sought after for sound cards for DOS games, were very rare on P4 motherboards.
3. Cooling solutions are much simpler on P3 as they consume less power and produce less heat; Intel had to abandon Mobile Pentium 4 line and introduced Pentium M (basically updated P3 and eventually evolved to Core) for laptops. Therefore building a quiet retro rig with P3 would be much easier than P4.

After doing some research, I think Geforce2mx is a good option for PentiumIII Coppermine. The graphics card is comparable to GF4mx440, but periodically more appropriate. Advantage GF2MX is its price very cheap.

GreenBook wrote on Yesterday, 08:14:

After doing some research, I think Geforce2mx is a good option for PentiumIII Coppermine. The graphics card is comparable to GF4mx440, but periodically more appropriate. Advantage GF2MX is its price very cheap.

Yes it is, but make sure you choose a 128bit card. Others like MX200 or some 'scam' MX400 (which are indeed MX200 64-bit with relabelled bios) are just crap. I had one of these back then.

mmx_91 wrote on Yesterday, 09:20:

GreenBook wrote on Yesterday, 08:14:

After doing some research, I think Geforce2mx is a good option for PentiumIII Coppermine. The graphics card is comparable to GF4mx440, but periodically more appropriate. Advantage GF2MX is its price very cheap.

Yes it is, but make sure you choose a 128bit card. Others like MX200 or some 'scam' MX400 (which are indeed MX200 64-bit with relabelled bios) are just crap. I had one of these back then.

Good to know because I thought about purchase GF2mx400. Does GF2mx200 128bit is only good option in GF2series?

Radeon9550>GF5200fx 128bit>GF4mx440>GF2mx200 128bit right?

GreenBook wrote on Yesterday, 09:53:

Good to know because I thought about purchase GF2mx400. Does GF2mx200 128bit is only good option in GF2series?

Radeon9550>GF5200fx 128bit>GF4mx440>GF2mx200 128bit right?

I wouldn’t bother with any of the GF2mx cards. They are not only slow, but the IQ is with most cards worse than any other GF2 cards and GF2s in general have bad IQ.

mx440 beats fx5200 on most DX7 titles quite handily. If you are targeting something like 2001 games, both work just fine and fx5200 would be roughly on par with something like GF3ti200. The redeeming quality of fx5200 is good IQ and that it is easily available and affordable, but same applies to MX440/460.

9550 has much better DX9 performance compared to fx5200, but with something like sub 1GHz P3, it hardly matters. It also generally is the best performer of the bunch and is also the latest, but performance differences when paired with a slow CPU will be quite small. For a middle of the road P3, all these cards work fine, except I wouldn’t even think GF2mx series for aforementiones reasons, if there is a choice.

One advantage that nvidia generally has over ATi from this era is better DOS compatibility if that is something that is important.