that's a shotgun deal! stick the gfmx in a 486, stick the v3 in a p2, and stick the gf7 into the trash.

7300LE with 128mb is what I use in my current system. 😢

leileilol wrote:

stick the gf7 into the trash.

Yeah, whenever I get ahold of a CPU or video card where the previous owner says the fan went bad, I tend to think they are probably going to be junk. The 7300 is junk even with a good fan, but for the price if it works, I'll find some use for it. I could probably slap a Pentium III fan on it and it would work fine. It's still a step up over most integrated graphics cards.

A 7300 GT gives a FX 5900 Ultra a run for its money. 😁

swaaye wrote:

A 7300 GT gives a FX 5900 Ultra a run for its money. 😁

Please don't remind me of the GF 7300GT... 😜 I had one in my Mac Pro before I switched to the Radeon 4890
Couldn't even play Far Cry 2 with the lowest possibe settings without the game looking like a slide show

swaaye wrote:

A 7300 GT gives a FX 5900 Ultra a run for its money. 😁

If you go here and set the core and memory clocks on the 7300GT the same as the 5900 Ultra and unlock any pipes that might be locked and it blows away the 5900 Ultra by a large margin with the exception of memory bandwith, which would probably keep it from reaching it's full potential.

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=454&card2=161#

Yeah, that was the major attraction of the 7300GT, the fact that you could unlock a lot of 'em into 7600's.

The 7300GS is OK in its own right, though... they make nice little low-power cards for running multiple monitors, or adding cheap graphics to a system without onboard video. They also run quite well with passive cooling, so if the card itself works, you can remove the cheesy little sheetmetal heatsink with a dead fan and replace it with whatever random passive cooler you can find. (Something approximately the size of 486/Pentium heatsink would do nicely, hint hint. 😁 )

leileilol wrote:

that's a shotgun deal! stick the gfmx in a 486, stick the v3 in a p2, and stick the gf7 into the trash.

The GFMX wouldn't make any sense in a 486. No game that runs on a 486 could use it, and no game that could use the GFMX would run on a 486...

Anonymous Freak wrote:

leileilol wrote:

that's a shotgun deal! stick the gfmx in a 486, stick the v3 in a p2, and stick the gf7 into the trash.

The GFMX wouldn't make any sense in a 486. No game that runs on a 486 could use it, and no game that could use the GFMX would run on a 486...

There's not a whole lot of 486 motherboards that I've ever seen that have PCI slots, either. They were introduced at the very end of the 486 era and the beginning of the first Pentiums

Thinking about it, though, does it make any sense that they make the 9500GT and HD4350 in PCI? They must have saturated the PCI bus a long time ago but they still make cards for it. Why keep making cards that add new features if the bus you're plugging it into doesn't allow it to run those features fast enough? It doesn't make much sense because most of the OEM systems and even cheap DIY motherboards these days have at least one PCIe x16 slot, even ones with onboard video. The days of being stuck with crappy video because you bought the wrong computer are over. You might have to replace the cheap power supply that comes with the computer, but you can upgrade the video now.

486 boards with PCI slots are anything but rare. It's just that the chipsets aren't that great and as a result the PCI bus is not very high quality on most of the boards. On the other hand, a lot of the Pentium boards with PCI back then weren't that great either. It's not that bad but some cards may not be happy.

PCI became a video card bottleneck around the time of GeForce 2 GTS, I think. Before that it really didn't matter. Those bottlenecks only apply to 3D games though and games aren't everything. For example, up until PCIe took off, you only had one AGP slot. What if you wanted a secondary video card for more monitors? PCI was the only choice. And of course there were a lot of PCI-only systems back with older IGP boards.

If you want to squeeze the last ounce of life out of an old htpc later PCI nvidia cards can offload video decoding.
That way your old PC can do HD, but forget any HD formats not supported by the GPU as there just isn't enough bandwidth.

i'd know exactly what to save that gf7 for. those little compact towers can come in handy for various things like a college computer or low end htpc or a kitchen computer. i see people put little TVs on there counter why not a small pc?

because it has a fan and it will make noise and need cooling.