I'd go with the FX5600. Should be around Ti4200 speeds and will take a bit less of a hit with AA.
Stay clear of Radeon cards, no table fog support. Swaaye is going to start a crusade on this if he sees people considering ATi cards again 😜

F2bnp wrote:

I'd go with the FX5600. Should be around Ti4200 speeds and will take a bit less of a hit with AA.
Stay clear of Radeon cards, no table fog support. Swaaye is going to start a crusade on this if he sees people considering ATi cards again 😜

I wasn't sure about the Radeon 9xxx series when it came to table fog... I know the Radeon 8500 and earlier had issues with fog in some games, but i assumed it was fixed with the next generation of ATI chips. The FX5600 is probably a bit easier on power compared to a Ti4200 too (i've heard about the GF4 Ti series hogging the 3.3v power rails and causing voltage drops).

Actually with the first few Radeons there is a registry tweak that sometimes works for table fog. It was not officially supported and it's not worth the hit or miss effort. Rage 128 officially supports it though.

Getting a card that uses an auxiliary power connection will help avoid AGP power issues. That's what you've run into if I recall correctly.

swaaye wrote:

Actually with the first few Radeons there is a registry tweak that sometimes works for table fog. It was not officially supported and it's not worth the hit or miss effort. Rage 128 officially supports it though.

Getting a card that uses an auxiliary power connection will help avoid AGP power issues. That's what you've run into if I recall correctly.

The Rage 128 is a bit too slow for me 🤣. So would you also recommend the FX5600 from my list? How much faster is it compared to a GF4 MX440? I suppose i could look at some of the GPU's that use external power connectors, but i have to make sure they have good Win98 drivers and support the old AGP 1.0 slot (3.3v @ 2x).

What generation of GPUs started to use the +12V rail more? I know it used to be a mixture of 3.3v, 5v and 12v with older AGP cards, but i think later models relied more on 12v power (which is not too great when it comes to older PII/PIII PSUs with lower 12V output).

Well, the Ti 4200 is much speedier than the MX440 and also has Direct X 8.0 features. The FX5600 Ultra is generally a bit faster than the Ti 4200, so the FX5600 should be on about the same level of performance. I'm only recommending it with the prospect of running games using AA, since even the Ti 4200 will be bottlenecked by your CPU, so running AA 2x shouldn't cause performance to take a hit. The FX5600 will take even less of a hit and will probably look nicer. Anisotropic also will take MUCH less of a hit on the FX5600.
I think you shouldn't worry all that much about your PSU, it should be good enough 😀.

@powerpie

5600 is a lot faster than a MX440. Just go look up some of the old reviews.

If a card uses an aux power connection it is primarily using 5 or 12v because that's what is offered in those plugs. IMO if you're having power problems with these old cards you have a motherboard issue or a really bad PSU.

swaaye wrote:

@powerpie

5600 is a lot faster than a MX440. Just go look up some of the old reviews.

If a card uses an aux power connection it is primarily using 5 or 12v because that's what is offered in those plugs. IMO if you're having power problems with these old cards you have a motherboard issue or a really bad PSU.

I've seen a few old reviews (some have the benchmark pictures missing though 🙄), but i couldn't see any that directly compared the FX5600 to an MX440... But i have a rough idea of the performance now 😀. I also have a few spare PSUs suitable for PII/PIII setups, but none of them have large 12v rails (i think 16A max)... I can't find any reliable info on the power consumption for earlier GPUs either 😒.

Do you know if my Powerleap PL-iP3/T adapter will be drawing power from the 12v or 5v rail? I'm pretty sure it bypasses the the motherboards CPU power circuitry as it connects to one of the PSUs 4-pin molex connectors.

I know some 440BX boards (mainly the early models) were known to have issues supplying power to beefier graphics cards.

EDIT: i think my Powerleap adapter draws power from both the 5v and 12v rails (it uses both the red and black cables from the molex connector).

All this messing around trying to find a good fast Win98 compatible GPU and i totally forgot about DOS! 😳. I'm assuming most AGP cards upto the FX series are ok to use for DOS games? The MX440 i'm using at the moment seems ok with DOS so far.

Yes yes they're fine. You're overthinking things, you should be fine with that setup 😁.

Should look for a used Core Solo/duo and XP Laptop. Portable 2k~2k4 gaming 😀