Unless it's FX5600 Ultra (or FX5600 with good memory chips) or higher, this would be a downgrade.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2026-02-03, 11:29:

Unless it's FX5600 Ultra (or FX5600 with good memory chips) or higher, this would be a downgrade.

I see thank for the info. Which models of the FX 5600 have good memory chips? The ultra versions are too expensive for my likings but from time to time I see some normal FX 5600 models at a decent price point.

To give you an idea how fast Ti 4200 is :

Here's FX 5600 Ultra :

Here's FX 5700 Ultra :

And lastly regular 5800 for good measure :

There is no point of getting anything faster than 4200 for your PC.
Unless you want newer features (DX9), but at that point just get a 6600 class card.

The answer is "it depends".
Even vanilla 5600 can leap over the GeForce 4 if you use some eye candy features.

Spending money to upgrade from a 4000 Series Ti card to an FX Series card was a waste of money back in the day, and it still is now.

I think that "leaping" is also quite limited when GF4 also has 128MB of VRAM and default 250MHz on VRAM...

When my eVGA Geforce 4 Ti 4400 128MB died back in the day, it was replaced under warranty with an FX 5600 256MB (non-ultra)... it was a very noticeable downgrade.

So, as others have said, don't even bother unless you can get an FX 5600 Ultra or better. The "Ultra" designation makes a huge difference for the FX series below the 5800 and 5900.

An FX 5500 is usually identical to an FX 5200 and will be a huge downgrade. A good FX 5600 non-ultra is better than those but not enough to make it better than a 4200. Even an FX 5700 non-ultra would not really be worth it, as they are barely better than a 5600.

Also, keep in mind that your Celeron 1.3Ghz + SDRAM system is going to be bottlenecking any of the these GPUs unless you are really cranking the graphics settings to keep the frame rates down. I think your current combo is in a good place as it is. You can turn up the graphics settings thanks to the overpowered GPU, but any more GPU power than that would likely be wasted most of the time. When I had a Ti 4400 (and later FX 5600... which I promptly replaced with a Radeon 9600 Pro 128MB) I had an Athlon Thunderbird 1.33Ghz with DDR, later an Athlon XP 1800+ and then an overclocked 1700+ which are decently faster than the 1.3Ghz Celeron with SDRAM, but at least within a similar ballpark.

Keep your Geforce 4 Ti and take good care of it. It's an excellent GPU for games up to about 2002-2003. 😀

agent_x007 wrote on 2026-02-03, 15:53:

I think that "leaping" is also quite limited when GF4 also has 128MB of VRAM and default 250MHz on VRAM...

Details are important. AA and AF implementations are quite different, and the memory bandwidth efficiency of NV31 is higher.

Ideally, a decent upgrade would be GeForce FX 5900XT. Regular GeForce FX 5800 would be also great addition, if it's cheap.

predator_085 wrote on 2026-02-03, 11:18:

All in All I am happy with my asus tusl2-c mainboard with a tualtin celeron 1,3 mhz cpu running with geforce 4 4200. I am quite happy with the results. But i am consodering the max the system with getting a tulatin pentium 3 and maybe a better card.

Which brings me to the question if upgrading from gf 4 to gf fx would do anything for my mainboard/chip in the win98se gaming realm or is the extra power usefl for win98se. I coul get gf fx 5500 at a decent price.

The geforce 4 4200 was one of those iconic cards that was affordable with performance that stayed relevant for a while at a time when old video cards were often tossed in the bin after a year.

What is less certain though is the life span of you card. Keep it cool, check your capacitors & thermal paste, and don't put too heavy of a heat sink on your card.

Back in the day, I thought I was suave when I used thermal epoxy to attach a full sized socket 7 heatsink to mine, thinking that was a great idea and I could run fanless. It still wasn't enough mass to run it fanless in the high heat we had that summer (No AC) and the weight probably shortened the lifespan of my card quite a bit.

Thanks a lot for the many replies. Well, the ultra series of the FX cards sounds interesting, no doubt about it. But since they are quite pricey, I will follow the advice and keep my GeForce 4 Ti 4200. I will check the FX 5800 or 5800 for fun, but I doubt that they are less expensive than the Ultra Series. which means my original sentiment is still valid.

@dougar Thanks a lot for maintenance advice for the gf4.

In my tests (on 3ghz Pentium 4), even a Geforce 2 Ti scored higher than the fX 5500 at 3DMark 2000. The GF4 MX 460 scored even higher than that.

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2026-02-03, 20:00:

In my tests (on 3ghz Pentium 4), even a Geforce 2 Ti scored higher than the fX 5500 at 3DMark 2000. The GF4 MX 460 scored even higher than that.

Thanks for your reply. This is interesting. The p4 is way more powerful than tualatin cerleron and the fx 5500 is still scoring lower than an older card.

@all I have done some further reserach about the ultra card and the highter fx sereis and while I consdiering as very interesting I have to admit that are over the budget I want to spend.

I will keep the gf4 as long as it works.

Would do it do any good to max out the possible ram for win98se. As of now I am using 256m PC133 ram.

predator_085 wrote on Yesterday, 06:56:

Would do it do any good to max out the possible ram for win98se. As of now I am using 256m PC133 ram.

No, that is unlikely to help anything in Windows 98se unless you have a specific work load that 1) requires more than 256MB ram and 2) runs on Windows 98.

If you do add more ram, probably best to not go any higher than 512MB RAM. There are reports of stability issues in some situations if you go over 512MB RAM. And safe mode might stop working.

predator_085 wrote on Yesterday, 06:56:

Thanks for your reply. This is interesting. The p4 is way more powerful than tualatin cerleron and the fx 5500 is still scorin […]
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RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2026-02-03, 20:00:

In my tests (on 3ghz Pentium 4), even a Geforce 2 Ti scored higher than the fX 5500 at 3DMark 2000. The GF4 MX 460 scored even higher than that.

Thanks for your reply. This is interesting. The p4 is way more powerful than tualatin cerleron and the fx 5500 is still scoring lower than an older card.

@all I have done some further reserach about the ultra card and the highter fx sereis and while I consdiering as very interesting I have to admit that are over the budget I want to spend.

I will keep the gf4 as long as it works.

Would do it do any good to max out the possible ram for win98se. As of now I am using 256m PC133 ram.

Yeah, for your system a higher end FX series would not really make sense, especially with the high prices they go for these days. That's a good choice. 😀

256MB of RAM is plenty for Windows 98SE, generally, but it really depends what games you are running on it. If you are using the system to run games from 2001-2003 then upgrading to 512MB would definitely be recommended, though realistically at that point the CPU and memory bandwidth will start to be a limiting factor in heavier games. If you're only playing games from 2000 and earlier then going to more than 256MB is unlikely to make much of a difference... but you could just get the memory anyway since it is a fairly cheap upgrade. Just doing bother going over 512MB, since Windows 98SE tends to have issues at that point.

EDIT: Yeah, what douglar said. 😀

FX series cards above the 5700 are better than the GF4, in my humble opinion.
But price also plays a role in whether an upgrade is worthwhile. I have an FX 5700 that I've had since 2004 and an FX 5900XT that I bought for $30 locally about three years ago. Looking at the current prices for these cards on eBay, you're unlikely to want them.
And with your processor, you probably won't even notice the difference.

Kruton 9000 wrote on Yesterday, 15:19:

FX series cards above the 5700 are better than the GF4, in my humble opinion.

But below the fx5700 ? The 5200 & 5500 cards are the reason that the GeForce4 MX 4000 was still manufactured until 2006.

douglar wrote on Yesterday, 15:37:

The 5200 & 5500 cards are the reason that the GeForce4 MX 4000 was still manufactured until 2006.

What made these GPUs (FX 5200/5500) such a desperate mistake?

Ydee wrote on Yesterday, 15:50:

douglar wrote on Yesterday, 15:37:

The 5200 & 5500 cards are the reason that the GeForce4 MX 4000 was still manufactured until 2006.

What made these GPUs (FX 5200/5500) such a desperate mistake?

They were positioned as a successor to the Geforce 4200 and promised new features, but in practice they were:

1. Too slow to run most games that used DirectX9 features in DirectX 9 mode, so the new features were inaccessible
2. Significantly slower than the the Geforce 4200 in DirectX 8 games
3. Frequently slower than the Geforce 4 MX 4000 in DirectX 7 games

However for retro builds with AGP x2 systems today, the FX5200 cards often offer a good price/performance ratio if you just want directX 7 and maybe a little direct X 8.

There is the plus that the 5200 series still supported 2d GUI acceleration, Win98, native table fog support, had an MPEG-2 hardware decoder, and was pretty durable.