First post, by rick6
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Back in 1999 i was given my first computer. It had a AMD k6-2 at 450mhz and a chaintech motherboard with no agp slot. Built in sound was messy and the onboard graphics was horrible for my 1999 needs (SiS530). I wanted so bad a agp board and a top of the line NVIDIA or 3dFX videocard, and i always wondered how my K6 would perform with the best video cards out there. Today i decided to built a retro rig around my first computer, most precisely the cpu AMD k6-2. I'm testing various video cards to discover which would go better with it, and later on a voodoo2.
These are the cards i have used for this:
The cards are: Voodoo 5 5500; Voodoo 3 3000; 3D Prophet 4500 Kyro II (PowerVR); Nvidia Riva TNT m64; Geforce 2 MX400; Geforce 256 SDR; Geforce 256 DDR; Geforce 3 TI 200; ATI 9200SE; ATI AIW 9700pro; Geforce 4 MX440. Only the last two gave me problems, the ATI AIW 9700pro refused to run most of the benchmarks (i guess it could be some incompatibility with the motherboard or drivers issues), and the Geforce 4 MX440 didn't even work at all. Both cards work well on "modern" computers.
As for the motherboard i used this FIC PA-2013:
And now the best part, free benchmarks! Oh and here i have the cpu overclocked up to 500 Mhz, with no sound card.
I should explain that Quake 3 and UT at low quality means 16bits\low texture\geometry quality, and high means 32 bits\high texture\geometry quality. Of course the the Voodoo3 ran everything at 16 bits of color and ut ran in glide on both 3Dfx cards so i guess you should take that into account.
As for the "Vogons Score" i used the following formula : =(SUM((SUM(C3:C14)/10);(SUM(C15:C16))/50))*5 <---Example for the Riva TNT m64 32mb score.
Here you get average results of FPS on both Quake 3 and UT for a quick performance check of every card:
Some odd\interesting results here. Yes the AMD k6 is a big bottleneck here in every benchmark but i was amazed how well the ati 9200SE did and how bad the geforce 3 and voodoo 5 did! I guess these last two take a bigger punch on the cpu cycles.
Share your thoughs and experiences with amd k6s\agp gpus. I would like to read them.