You guys are missing the point of the topic here. See the 1st post again. O/P is interested in making a Windows 98 rig and already has a system with a Pentium 3 933 MHz CPU. The question was if easily available FX5200/5500 and Radeon 9200/9250 cards will need a higher CPU or not.
And the answer is simple: NO
Again, I've built numerous rigs around Pentium II, 3, and 4. FX5200/5500 and Radeon 9200/9250 are weak cards, but they are not that bad for late 90's games. In fact, they are quite alright - even the 64-bit memory bus versions of these cards. A high-end P3 like the 933 should be able to play most titles up to year 2000 at 1024x768, 32-bit color, and mostly around 60 FPS with these cards. In my opinion, this will deliver a fine playing experience. You DON'T need to aim for 1080p, because a lot of these older games were neither optimized for such high resolutions nor for wide screen. On a lot of them, the HUD scaling becomes really poor at anything past 1280x1024 (or 1280x960 for us CRT heads 😉 ) and the FOV (field of view) looks pretty weird. On that note, even 1600x1200 does not necessarily enhance the experience. Low resolution textures and OpenGL/D3D bilinear / trilinear texture depth filtering make high resolutions simply not add any visual fidelity.
So for a retro rig for late 90's games mostly focused around DX7 or older, the FX5200/5500 and Radeon 9200/9250 will be OK with that CPU.
Like I said earlier, I even had a 9200 SE paired with a Pentium II 400 MHz at one point (and considering to put it back in that build). Even with that setup, the CPU wasn't too much of a limit and I was still able to get decent FPS (45-50 FPS on average) @ 1024x768 in late 90's games. Once you go up to a P3 700 MHz or more, you shouldn't have a problem to get 60 FPS at 1024x768. The games I tested the most on those rigs are as follows:
- Need For Speed High Stakes (1999) & Porsche Unleashed (2000) - easy 60 FPS on a full grid race and all details maxed out.
- Half-Life & Counter-Strike 1.5 - either 60 FPS or 72 FPS frame-locked (depending if using OpenGL or D3D rendering) @ 1024x768.
- Collin McRae Rally 2.0 - >60 FPS @ 1024x768
rezamolaee wrote on 2025-05-27, 15:11:
Thank you, I don't know much, but I think a higher memory bus is essential for games with a lot of textures which I don't think many Win98 game needed it.
Yes, indeed... though if you go with something like a GeForce 2 MX or MX400/420 with very slow RAM and 64-bit memory bus, you will see some games start to perform very poorly. Case in point, my FPS in CS 1.5 dropped from 60 FPS (@1024x768) down to 30-40 with weird stuttering and latency spikes - this on a P4 CPU (so that I could see the limit of some old AGP GPUs). Same story in NFS HS. As soon as I switched to another MX400 video card with 128-bit memory bus (SDR card, but had decent 5 ns memory chips) I could go back to very close to 60 FPS. On that note, dropping the color bit depth on older nVidia cards (like the FX5200, along with any of the GF4 MX line) can often result in a good FPS boost. ATI cards - not so much... but their strength is in better overall picture quality and rendering.
rezamolaee wrote on 2025-05-28, 06:02:
Thank you, that's a massive bump from FX5200 to FX5700! need to get a better card, what are other cards with performance similar to the FX5700 or at least with 10000 points in 3DMark 2001? Can you or anyone else name some worth buying AGP cards.
While I'm not going to outright say to disregard 3DMark benchmarks, I do suggest you use those only as a very VERY rough estimate of how a video card performs.
The best benchmark to use is the games you play regularly.
So consider the games that you want to play rather than solely focusing on 3DMark points.
rezamolaee wrote on 2025-05-28, 07:18:
Is this Radeon 9600 Pro Guru worth buying? Seller want roughly 25 dollars for it.
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It's a pretty nice mid-range AGP card to add to one's collection and you'll probably be able to play games smoothly up to 2002-2003. Windows 98 support / drivers should not be an issue either. Only thing you won't have in terms of features is palleted textures and table fog, which is something a few old games do use. To get that, older nVidia cards like the FX and older are better in that regard.
Price-wise... I suppose that all depends on which part of the world you live in. But for the most part, I think you can do better than $25... unless that also includes the shipping, in which case, that's an OK price.
Where I am, I can find such cards for less than $10 shipped... but that's only because these were really popular here back in the day and there's not much demand for retro PC hardware where I am.
rezamolaee wrote on 2025-05-27, 15:11:
Buying AGP cards are getting trickier these days. I have never saw an AGP HD4850 in my life. I had PCIe version of it, that thing toasted my PSU 😀
Highest you can go with AGP is Radeon HD3850 and HD4670. Neither of these are suitable for Windows 98 due to lack of drivers for them. While such cards could make for a pretty decent but not top-of-the-line Windows XP rig, they are really not worth it because of their high price and rarity. The PCI-E version of those cards will perform just as well (if not better) while being orders of magnitude cheaper... and often times the system platform can be newer - i.e. Core 2 Duo or late Athlon II.
ElectroSoldier wrote on 2025-05-27, 20:14:
I would put the FX5500/9250 in the CPU range of a late P4 Northwood or late Athlon XP Barton.
You'll be wasting lots of CPU power for nothing then. These cards will not give better performance with such CPUs. FWIW, even a 2.4 GHz P4 Celeron will be bottlenecked by such cards, and that's one weak sauce CPU, IME.
As I mentioned, I have the same exact CPU as the O/P - P3 933 MHz... and from my experiments, even that CPU is more than enough to get bottlenecked by these cards, at least in post 2000's games. For late 90's games, it's totally fine.
ElectroSoldier wrote on 2025-05-27, 20:14:
Its only the hype of the FX5500 thats pumping its price. Its not worth writing home about. And its not worth 40 off quid either, but the hype is driving up the price to more than that.
40 odd quid buys you an X800 not a FX5500!
Agreed.
I get my FX5200/5500 cards locally for around $1-3 on average and maybe $5 max if I really don't care to look around enough.
Same goes for GeForce 4 MX400/420/440/460 cards... or actually most old AGP video cards with a small heatsink (the scrappers here based the price on the size of the cooler/heatsink really.)
Speaking of which, for late 90's games that are DirectX 7 -based (or older), GeForce 4 MX 420 and 440 SDR with 128-bit memory bus or even the 64-bit memory bus with faster (4 or 5 ns) DDR RAM will perform very nicely. Actually, since these cards have hardware T&L, they will do better than the FX5200/5500 in quite a few games.
Archer57 wrote on 2025-05-28, 03:33:
It is also possible to downclock and undervolt regular CPUs
Yessir! 😀
Although worth noting here is that not all motherboards will offer you the option to change the CPU voltage (especially to a lower one.) So unless you go modding on the hardware level, under-volting may not be possible.
On that note, I really like AMD socket 754 and 939 boards, as I can use tools like CrystalCPUid to change the CPU voltage from the desktop. It also allows to lower the CPU ratio / multiplier for a lower CPU clock, which in turn allows for even lower core voltages. I can run most of my s754 CPUs at 1.375V or less at stock speed and at around 1.3V with the next lower multiplier. The stock voltage on these CPUs is usually 1.5V, so the reduction in power becomes quite noticeable. On my Kill-A-Watt meter, it will register anywhere from 15-20 Watts in power reduction, which probably means 10-15 Watts heat reduction for the CPU. And I can confirm this as my CPU temperatures can go down by as much as 6-10C.
