If you want XP on it, I won't go past SP1 on Pentium III era machines. Performance is much much superior to later SP packages.

Regarding video card, I have similar system running Geforce 6200 AGP and runs pretty nice, although it's not period correct. It matches more or less performance of a GF 5600 I have in another system and runs pretty cool.

It depends on the games you would want to run, but in general, it runs pretty well.

Mainly want to play games like Morrowind and Halo CE, but also the 3D GTA trilogy and some of the later Need For Speed games. Underground 1/2 and Most Wanted especially. Maybe I'm being too optimistic for a P3, but I have the system on hand already and I don't want to source a P4 or Core2Duo if I can just slap a nicer GPU in what I already have.

Basically the idea is a small form factor desktop PC that runs games from about 2000-2004 with "good enough" performance. Due to case size limitations, this means whatever card is going in here MUST be a low-profile single slot AGP card. I don't mind removing brackets from cards to make them fit, but the card itself physically has to be half height.

I'm not expecting 60 fps miracles at all, but I would like the games I play to actually look good. Halo CE especially looks ugly in DX7 mode even if it does run okay (capped at 30fps in the options menu). No fancy lighting or specularity and the particle effects just look wrong, like they were made in MS Paint.

You can get Geforce 4 MX 460 in low profile. But you will still have the issue of no DirectX 8 or 9 support. Your CPU will already be bottlenecking this card. So I am not sure if either game you mention will be very playable even if you had a better card?

One thing to be careful of with the low profile cards is often they have had the memory bus crippled on them. 64 bit instead of 128bit for instance. That's not usually clear on ebay listings

Sounds like pentium4 era stuff…

Newer drivers for newer cards may also tax the p3.

I hope those games run good enogh.

abrokenhalo wrote on 2026-05-27, 10:53:

Mainly want to play games like Morrowind and Halo CE, but also the 3D GTA trilogy and some of the later Need For Speed games. Underground 1/2 and Most Wanted especially. Maybe I'm being too optimistic for a P3, but I have the system on hand already and I don't want to source a P4 or Core2Duo if I can just slap a nicer GPU in what I already have.

Basically the idea is a small form factor desktop PC that runs games from about 2000-2004 with "good enough" performance. Due to case size limitations, this means whatever card is going in here MUST be a low-profile single slot AGP card. I don't mind removing brackets from cards to make them fit, but the card itself physically has to be half height.

I'm not expecting 60 fps miracles at all, but I would like the games I play to actually look good. Halo CE especially looks ugly in DX7 mode even if it does run okay (capped at 30fps in the options menu). No fancy lighting or specularity and the particle effects just look wrong, like they were made in MS Paint.

I have double checked my card and it is Zotac GF6200 AGP low profile, just in case you are interested!

st31276a wrote on 2026-05-27, 11:35:

Sounds like pentium4 era stuff…

Newer drivers for newer cards may also tax the p3.

I hope those games run good enogh.

Yeah drivers are something else to consider. Right now I'm running Nvidia's Detonator drivers for XP on the GeForce2. I've heard the later Forceware drivers have more system overhead.

I can say from experience that the Optiplex runs Halo and Morrowind about as well as an original Xbox does, just significantly uglier due to being forced into the DX7 rendering path. I'm at 640x480 in both those games and it's very playable for a casual experience.

I wouldn't try anything like Doom 3 though. That would probably turn my CPU into a space heater...

What I recall from the 486/pentium days, the Optiplex was a name used by Dell for a kind of 'cutting edge' (at the time) machines, but they switched out the insides pretty often, so you were never sure to get the same machine hardware even if the name & numbers was the same.

Well, after a week of troubles with the cheap replacement AGP cards I ordered off evilBay (my Radeon 9250 was DOA, and the Radeon 9600se artifacts so bad it's practically DOA... And of course, no refunds!) I'm still stuck with the MX400...

So I figured I might as well push this system to the limit. Here's pics of it running some of the games I mentioned earlier in the thread. Framerates are all over the place and none of the games are graphically impressive under Dx7 mode, but it's actually running some of those 04/05 era games on the old P3 933.