Reply 58560 of 58580, by MattRocks
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andrea wrote on 2026-03-21, 17:37:MattRocks wrote on 2026-03-21, 15:57:Here's a monster 24Mb variant fleeting on eBay and already in someone's basket. I assume the 2nd processor is doing the geometry setup that cheap OEM i740s offload to the CPU. Not spam - just fact checked!
The R3D-400 chip is pretending to be an AGP Host.
Or, the R3D chip is pretending to be a Northbridge?
The PCI version can be faster than the AGP version because it pulls textures over the R3D chip from an extra 16Mb of dedicated local VRAM clocked ~100MHz, while cheap AGP versions in 1998 were pulling textures over a Northbridge from shared system RAM clocked at 66MHz. When system RAM exceeded 100MHz, or when DirectX 6 shipped, the i740 was obsolete and no longer advertised.
From the retro review linked below, "Starfighter PCI is 15% slower than its AGP counterpart," but that was comparing onboard ~100MHz VRAM against ~100MHz system RAM on a later Pentium II - interesting but that's not a historically true test. That reviewer concludes, "all the bad press AGP cards got does not seem so justified, at least on my systems," and that underscores that the retro review is not mirroring actual reviews of the era. My view is that a test should be framed as: Should I upgrade the VGA card, or buy a new PC?
The Starfighter PCI was a retail standalone upgrade in 1998, so that fits a 1997 Pentium MMX with 66MHz TX chipset.
The Starfighter AGP belongs to an OEM system integrator's 1998 base build, so that's a Pentium II on 66MHz LX chipset.
When paired to an Intel i430TX with EDO RAM the Starfighter PCI is era accurate and solid, but expensive and rare.
