They were never positioned as GeForce 4 Ti replacement, just look at the pricing. Also MX 4000 is a cost reduced "refresh" of GeForce 4 MX with 64-bit memory bus and the crappiest memory possible to install, so it's in no way capable to beat any FX 5200 with 128-bit memory bus.

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

No, that's no the case. GeForce 4 MX 4000 had lower price than any GeForce FX card. I suspect that there was a demand for very cheap videocards in Asia which were capable to decode DVD.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 13:54:

Yeah, for your system a higher end FX series would not really make sense, especially with the high prices they go for these days […]
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predator_085 wrote on Today, 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 Yesterday, 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. 😀

Thanks for the reply and the advice. The main timeframe of us for my system is from 1997 to early 2001. From later 2001 onwards I want to gift myself with a pure winxp system. Either a fast athlon xp or pentium 4 system. For my win98se gaming on the asus tusl 256mb served me well. I have no real reason to upgrade to 512mb. Was just curious if might be worth considering or not.

[=douglar post_id=1404036 time=1770212338 user_id=42154]

predator_085 wrote on Today, 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.
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Thanks for the advice as well. yes I can rember reading quit often that 512mb is max amount of ram suitable for win98se. Like mentioned above I am not dead set on the ram upgrad was just curious if would be worth considering if I want to max out my mainboard.

predator_085 wrote on Today, 18:03:

Thanks for the reply and the advice. The main timeframe of us for my system is from 1997 to early 2001. From later 2001 onwards I want to gift myself with a pure winxp system. Either a fast athlon xp or pentium 4 system. For my win98se gaming on the asus tusl 256mb served me well. I have no real reason to upgrade to 512mb. Was just curious if might be worth considering or not.

If you're making a dedicated Windows XP system, I would go for something a bit faster if possible. A fast Athlon XP would be a big improvement over your Celeron 1.3 + SDRAM, but in XP's 13 year lifespan, these would still represent the lower end of XP-compatible systems. An Athlon 64 or Athlon 64 X2 would offer a bit more performance if you want to stick with AGP cards. Plan on spending a bunch of money to get an AGP GPU that is substantially faster than your Ti 4200 though. High end AGP cards were really only made for 3-4 more years after the Geforce4 Ti series aside from a few outliers, and they are all going to be quite pricey while also at times having some compatibility issues due to using PCI-E to AGP bridge chips.

If you're okay going to a PCI-Express GPU then the sky is the limit... you could get a fairly boring but massively powerful XP system by just picking up a dirt cheap Dell or Lenovo workstation equipped with a 2nd or 3rd Gen Intel Core i5 or i7 and tossing in whatever video card you can get your hands on that fits in the system and has XP drivers. Or, if you want to sacrifice some CPU power for a bit more "retro" aesthetic you could put together a fancy Core 2 Duo\Quad system. Either will be orders of magnitude faster than an Athlon XP or Pentium 4 and game compatibility shouldn't be much different since you already have a system to cover pre-2001 games.

There is something to be said for running every XP game at the absolute maximum settings, completely smoothly and doing it with less noise, heat and power consumption than systems a fraction of the speed. 😀

The Serpent Rider wrote on Today, 16:16:

They were never positioned as GeForce 4 Ti replacement, just look at the pricing. Also MX 4000 is a cost reduced "refresh" of GeForce 4 MX with 64-bit memory bus and the crappiest memory possible to install, so it's in no way capable to beat any FX 5200 with 128-bit memory bus.

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

No, that's no the case. GeForce 4 MX 4000 had lower price than any GeForce FX card. I suspect that there was a demand for very cheap videocards in Asia which were capable to decode DVD.

The 4200 was introduced at the next higher price point when it came out, yes. Still, the 4200 vs 5200 naming convention carries certain unspoken connotations and begs for comparison.

I should have stated what clock speed I was using when I compared the MX4000 with the FX5200. and I should have mentioned that I was using the more commonly available 64bit FX5200. Sorry about the confusion.

The FX5200 does start to pull ahead when the clock speed goes over 800Mhz.

Edit - After looking at those numbers, I gotta think that my PNY card might actually have a 128bit bus or something. I'll retest and some point. The 3dMark 2000 scores look higher than expected

Usually the FX5600 series cards are much cheaper than the Ti4200 so if you were to look for one without having the other, the FX5600 would be a more economical choice. But if you have one, there aren't too many reasons to go for the other and the reasons you have are mostly edge cases.

Going higher the FX series pick up on price fast and anything above the 5700 costs a premium. The 5700 itself is a good graphics card for Windows 98, but the FX series cards came in two batches (?) and the 5700 is from the second one. It demands more recent drivers on Windows 98 and has a lot more issues because of it.

Without adding more witchery to the discussion, it's my opinion that if you were to pursue an upgrade then a FX 5950, 5900 or 5800 would be the only cards worthy of the change. The 5600U would be good too but I fear it wouldn't be enough of an improvement to satisfiy you longterm. The FX is considered to be one of the best series for Win98 gaming and prior, albeit heavily opinion driven, so only with one of the aforementioned high-end cards would you be led to happiness in the longterm, otherwise, the 4200 is good enough, IMHO.