shevalier wrote on Yesterday, 07:15:

Nope, LM63 is a "Remote Diode Digital Temperature Sensor with Integrated Fan Control"

Makes sense. And makes the decision if i should look into why fan connector is not working or not whole lot easier. Fan control would be useful, but without it... easier to find 12V elsewhere...

I have had fairly well experiences with them.

- X800XT AGP - got it from Socket3, it's the Powercolor version of the card. This thing RIPS through any 2003-04 game under 2k... although every now and then I am experiencing VPU crashes randomly - I don't have a Rialto card for now to test if the same issue occurs.
- X1950 AGP - originally had a frankenstein'd card (HIS version 512MB, but someone stuck a X1950 HSF on it so I rolled with it that way 🤣). Worked pretty well but unfortunately died quietly around the time I came back from college - no POST on several mainboards. I'm trying to get another one, specifically because I LOVE HIS's design, and because it'd be a great way to test if the Rialto-enabled cards also suffer from the same VPU crash under 2k that the X800XT does.
- X1650 AGP - also had one of these. Originally had some dinky blue cooler, replaced with one salvaged from a dead PCI-E counterpart (blue PCB). Died from old age - it self shorted one of the 4-5pin regulators near the AGP finger
And that's about it. I still have some X1xxx series card but they're all PCI-E at the moment - X1550, X1800XT (converted from FireGL V7200) and X1950XTX.

I like them, BUT

1. I only had the R400 based AGP versions.
2. There are only 2 of those the X700 series and the X800 series in that generation. Anything lower is a rebrand of the Radeon 9600 series
3. The X1050 is a tricky one. They are made with 2 different GPUs. The RV370 which is just an updated Radeon 9600 series GPU and the RV410 which is an X700, therefore much faster. I have the latter and it's a very competent card and flies under the radar because of it's lowest-of-the-low-end naming.

I would only consider the cards with a native AGP chip.

The bridged PCIe chips are very picky about chipset and driver release.

One of my favorite cards was my old Radeon X850 Pro AGP (seen below).

Mine was flashed to unlock all 16 pipes and overclocked, hence the aftermarket cooling. It was a beast of a card I can't recall having any issues with it at all. It was used with Win 9x and XP. I had no issues overclocking it and getting XT/PE performance out of it.

Sadly, I sold it off years ago, huge mistake, wish I still had it. Those photos are the ones I took for eBay, it pains me to look at them. 🤣

Either way, It was stable and a good performer in my humble opinion. Excellent card!

I guess that would use ATI R481. The natively AGP chips did work very well.

This is how mine looks, as it came from @Socket3.

AFAIK it has been flashed to XT (not sure if the PE version?), and aside from occasional VPU crash and recovers under 2k SP4 (which...neither of us figured out why do they happen), it runs like an absolute champ.

It's one of the cards that kept me away from the bugged R350 9800s for a good while. I'm planning to move to 9800s on the R360 - hope these aren't as plagued as the R350s were, and hopefully the few cards my scrapper contact got hold of, at least one of them R360s work.

EDIT: nvm, pretty sure it ain't flashed to PE despite 1.6ns RAM - one thread I found about the conversion implies voltage modding... which is a SMD work I don't think either of us are gurus in 🤣

So, played around a bit more with that X800GTO... sadly, no unlock into X800XL for me - this one seems to be laser cut...

Also imaged fresh copy of XP (a few times), this made CCC from 8.5 work normally, but otherwise did not change anything.

7.11 still does not work correctly - half of applications, be it games or 3dmark, outright refuse to run.

10.3 and 9.2 both work, but with some crashes and stutters.

8.5 is mostly good, games work, 3dmark works, except battle of proxycon in 2003 crashes. Which works just fine with 10.3 and 9.2 =\

AMD/ATI drivers are truly garbage. As someone who mostly used nvidia cards since the very beginning - it surprises me. I mean nvidia stuff is not perfect, some versions can have worse performance or worse compatibility, sometimes they outright remove features or royally screw up with stopping fans or deleting user home dir on linux, but... i can pick up a random card + random driver which supports that card and there is 99% probability it'll work correctly within its limitations. I mean i've tested a dozen of cards generations apart on the same system with the same 175.19 driver and it worked, always. With ATI/AMD i have to dig around and try a bunch of versions just to get something mostly functional.

But as someone mentioned before - it is less critical now that we have all the versions available and it is, at least, possible to find one that works. I can only imagine how frustrating it must have been back then - waiting for driver releases and hoping they finally fix something...

All that rant aside... i am quite happy with this card. Performance is decent, it does not have min FPS issues like HD2600XT, it is not excessively hot, noisy and did not cause issues for 300W PSU i am testing with. Next i probably need to try if it'll work on W98 and how good compatibility would be. If it does it might find its way into one of the systems i actually use.

By the way seems someone was really fooling around with this card, bios is from powercolor, cooler from sapphire. No idea who actually made the card 😁

Also bought a box of "untested" cards for cheap, including x1650 pro (and HD4650 DDR2). Judging by what the seller is selling and obviously dead caps on the cards i have some hope this are really untested and fixable (and not tested, dead as usual). We'll see how it goes, will be interesting to play around with x1650 if it works.

RandomStranger wrote on Yesterday, 15:45:

[*]The X1050 is a tricky one. They are made with 2 different GPUs. The RV370 which is just an updated Radeon 9600 series GPU and the RV410 which is an X700, therefore much faster. I have the latter and it's a very competent card and flies under the radar because of it's lowest-of-the-low-end naming.[/list]

Hmm, curious. May try to play some lottery with X1050. I like such stuff which tends to be underestimated...

swaaye wrote on Yesterday, 15:52:

I would only consider the cards with a native AGP chip.

The bridged PCIe chips are very picky about chipset and driver release.

The issue is - they are unobtainable, at least where i live. Was not able to locate a single one, expensive or not, working or not, there are simply zero offers. So will have to be content with what i can actually get...

StriderTR wrote on Yesterday, 16:11:

One of my favorite cards was my old Radeon X850 Pro AGP (seen below). […]
Show full quote

One of my favorite cards was my old Radeon X850 Pro AGP (seen below).

Mine was flashed to unlock all 16 pipes and overclocked, hence the aftermarket cooling. It was a beast of a card I can't recall having any issues with it at all. It was used with Win 9x and XP. I had no issues overclocking it and getting XT/PE performance out of it.

Sadly, I sold it off years ago, huge mistake, wish I still had it. Those photos are the ones I took for eBay, it pains me to look at them. 🤣

Either way, It was stable and a good performer in my humble opinion. Excellent card!

That looks like a very nice card. And native AGP... but yeah, everyone at some point made this mistake...

I wish it was practically possible to get something like this nowadays...

Archer57 wrote on Today, 11:13:

AMD/ATI drivers are truly garbage. As someone who mostly used nvidia cards since the very beginning - it surprises me.

While ATi drivers from that time were indeed crappy, I think at least some of the issues that you're experiencing might be caused by the bridge chip on that card, or possibly the platform on which you're testing it.

Catalyst 7.11 is regarded as one of the best driver versions for X800 series cards, since it retains OpenGL compatibility with problematic titles like Star Wars: KOTOR. It also introduced perfect table fog emulation on ATi Radeon cards, though that works fine on newer drivers too. I'm using that driver with my PCIe X800 GTO, and I haven't encountered any of the problems that you've mentioned. My platform is an LGA775 system, in case that matters.

Add OS to the factor. My experiences with X800XT weren't that fun on 2k, but XP was smooth sailing. Both using the same Omega 7.11 drivers.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on Today, 12:06:

While ATi drivers from that time were indeed crappy, I think at least some of the issues that you're experiencing might be caused by the bridge chip on that card, or possibly the platform on which you're testing it.

Catalyst 7.11 is regarded as one of the best driver versions for X800 series cards, since it retains OpenGL compatibility with problematic titles like Star Wars: KOTOR. It also introduced perfect table fog emulation on ATi Radeon cards, though that works fine on newer drivers too. I'm using that driver with my PCIe X800 GTO, and I haven't encountered any of the problems that you've mentioned. My platform is an LGA775 system, in case that matters.

Perhaps. But... when stuff consistently does not work with different drivers like it was with HD2600XT - that's obviously hardware related. When things change between driver versions and work mostly fine with some - that looks more like drivers themselves are the issue. I am not sure why 7.11 does not work, may be that's caused by "too new" XP, directX or something.

But yeah, many variables, many different parts and things which may go wrong with no real way to tell the root cause. In this case it is... acceptable though, since i've found the version which works.

By the way - what's the issue with KOTOR? I've played that game a lot, on various HW from FX5900XT to RTX2080s. Everything seems fine. And it works on this card with 8.5, only soft shadows option is not available which i've seen on ATI cards before.

And yeah, i'd expect LGA775/PCIe to be somewhat less problematic, AGP had its quirks, bridge or not. PCIe is ultimately a better interface in general.

Archer57 wrote on Today, 12:35:

By the way - what's the issue with KOTOR? I've played that game a lot, on various HW from FX5900XT to RTX2080s. Everything seems fine. And it works on this card with 8.5, only soft shadows option is not available which i've seen on ATI cards before.

In their newer drivers, ATi deprecated some OpenGL extensions which KOTOR uses. See further notes by @swaaye here.

I don't think Nvidia cards are affected by this.

Archer57 wrote on Today, 11:13:

8.5 is mostly good, games work, 3dmark works, except battle of proxycon in 2003 crashes. Which works just fine with 10.3 and 9.2 =\

Hmm... I've seen something like that somewhere.
Ah, this is NVIDIA FX5xxx + Tualatin.
Only they never fixed it in the end, they just gave up.
And as far as I remember, it was there too, in the battle for Proxycon. 😀

In my opinion, drivers from all manufacturers ( AMD, ATI, Aureal, Creative, Intel, nVidia, VIA) in the Windows 2k/XP era were peace of trash. And I'm glad Microsoft put an end to this.
But at least now there is the Internet, and WebArchive has notes on which NVIDIA Detonator works well with which VIA 4-in-1.
And what to do with Aureal Vortex if you have Intel 815 chipset.

shevalier wrote on Today, 14:27:

Hmm... I've seen something like that somewhere. Ah, this is NVIDIA FX5xxx + Tualatin. Only they never fixed it in the end, they […]
Show full quote

Hmm... I've seen something like that somewhere.
Ah, this is NVIDIA FX5xxx + Tualatin.
Only they never fixed it in the end, they just gave up.
And as far as I remember, it was there too, in the battle for Proxycon. 😀

Hmm, now you are making me curious. I actually have the hardware to make that happen, so may be a fun way to kill an evening or two 😀

Though P3 (is Tualatin critically important here?) + FX + 3Dmark 2003 is pretty... interesting combo. Would not expect it to run very well...

In case of ATI/AMD though, it nice that it works on newer drivers, the only disadvantage is - other things break. If only they could fix that without breaking something else it'd be amazing 😀

shevalier wrote on Today, 14:27:

In my opinion, drivers from all manufacturers ( AMD, ATI, Aureal, Creative, Intel, nVidia, VIA) in the Windows 2k/XP era were peace of trash. And I'm glad Microsoft put an end to this.
But at least now there is the Internet, and WebArchive has notes on which NVIDIA Detonator works well with which VIA 4-in-1.
And what to do with Aureal Vortex if you have Intel 815 chipset.

Mostly i agree. I had enough fun with via 4-in-1 in win98, especially combined with creative stuff. On XP it is a little better, but only a little.

However somehow nvidia stuff always worked better for me. Far from perfect, but better. Like i've installed nforce drivers and video drivers on XP, i swapped the drive between motherboards, videocards, etc and it all worked. Correctly reinstalled itself without me taking any actions, etc.

I had more than enough "fun" with nforce+memory, but that's another matter.

And just to be clear - not trying to be "a fan" here, i consider that silly, and that's one part of why i am interested in messing with this stuff - to get first hand experience i never had back then.

Archer57 wrote on Today, 14:46:

Hmm, now you are making me curious. I actually have the hardware to make that happen, so may be a fun way to kill an evening or two 😀

Though P3 (is Tualatin critically important here?) + FX + 3Dmark 2003 is pretty... interesting combo. Would not expect it to run very well...

Nobody knows it.
GeForce 6, Pentium 3, 3DMark2003 and Mothernature Test Crash
Here they complain about the 6 series with any processor. Personally, my FX5200&5700 with Tualatin crashed in Mother Nature 3dMark03 with drivers version next to 93.71 under XP(Or 56? This is the one that remained in the my NAS, but this is not an indicator)
In general, the latest official driver for FX+Windows XP from the NVIDIA website definitely crashes.
On I815 - I think, I haven't tried, on 440BX - definitely.
I read that this is a problem with the drivers - and forgot.

shevalier wrote on Today, 16:11:

Nobody knows it. GeForce 6, Pentium 3, 3DMark2003 and Mothernature Test Crash Here they complain about the 6 series with any pro […]
Show full quote

Nobody knows it.
GeForce 6, Pentium 3, 3DMark2003 and Mothernature Test Crash
Here they complain about the 6 series with any processor. Personally, my FX5200&5700 with Tualatin crashed in Mother Nature 3dMark03 with drivers version next to 93.71 under XP(Or 56? This is the one that remained in the my NAS, but this is not an indicator)
In general, the latest official driver for FX+Windows XP from the NVIDIA website definitely crashes.
On I815 - I think, I haven't tried, on 440BX - definitely.
I read that this is a problem with the drivers - and forgot.

Hmm, curious. Those thread also mentions wilamette and athlonXP, i've definitely ran 2003 on those with FX/6/7 about a million times. But i've used the same 175.19 driver which happens to be the latest FX driver for XP...

Perhaps i'll play around with this, sounds like fun excuse to play around with S370 HW i have...