🤣

I got a GTX460 768, how does that stack up with your cards? It's very power hungry though.

I benchmarked Lost Planet (demo version has a benchmark) with everything maxed out, no AA, at 1920 x 1200 and even the 8800GTX 512 struggled. So this is a game that would benefit from your approach. However I believe this game, and many others from that era received DX10 support through patches. So Windows 7 is the way to go I guess.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_g … rocessing_units (I have misplaced a much better Nvidia GPU reference, if you know it please post a link) the GTX 460 768MB uses about 3 times the power of a GTX 750 but should almost equal its performance. Bandwidth and fill rates are about the same but shader performance is a little slower. Isn't technology great, three times less power and the same performance of a card from only 4 years ago. Remember the GTX 750 is by no means a high-end card but it's about what I want in terms of power.

Of course if you really need some GPU performance but still want efficiency then take a look at a GTX 980, that thing is awesome. Only draws 165 Watts while doing 4612 GFLOPS. But too expensive for me.

Amazing indeed. Looking at NV drivers there seems to be a 4 year driver gap:

between

GeForce 306.23 Driver WHQL 306.23 September 13, 2012
ForceWare Release 169 BETA 169.28 January 10, 2008

I was unable to find drivers from 2009 to 2011.

EDIT: Ok I can find them by looking up version numbers on Guru 3D and then doing a Google search 😀

I'm uploading them all onto my website, listen from old to new with release notes and supported cards listed on the right. Should make it very easy to find a suitable driver from a specific period.

That is awesome! Too bad Nvidia doesn't archive all their old drivers the way they use to.

Played around with nLite today and slipstreamed the AHCI drivers for the Asrock Intel and Asus AMD motherboard and re-installed XP on both of them. Captured it all for the video I'm working on 😀

The machines feel a bit snappier, but could be imagination 😊

Found another game with an awesome benchmark. This one is from 2007, quite demanding and received a DX10 patch, so ideally to be played on Windows 7: Company of Heroes. Often featured in hardware reviews.

On the 8800GT system ~ 60 fps at 1920 x 1200.

squareguy wrote:

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_g … rocessing_units (I have misplaced a much better Nvidia GPU reference, if you know it please post a link) the GTX 460 768MB uses about 3 times the power of a GTX 750 but should almost equal its performance. Bandwidth and fill rates are about the same but shader performance is a little slower. Isn't technology great, three times less power and the same performance of a card from only 4 years ago. Remember the GTX 750 is by no means a high-end card but it's about what I want in terms of power.

I don't care how much power a video card uses when it's running heavy 3D - if it's going to a purpose then I'm cool with it. I just don't want it guzzling watts when I'm looking at a 2D Windows desktop. This is what I find deficient with my GTX260. 99% of the time it's just wasting electricity to do something an S3 Trio could do.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Some serious FPS there...

Been looking at the 8800GT and 8800GTS 512. There are sooooo many cards using this chip it gets quite confusing. Seems the fastest cards are the 9800GTX+ and 1 GB version of the GTS250. They are still not really available for peanuts so I don't think I will get any soon, but I will keep my eye out for them.

Now there must be a game or two that have issues with these newer cards, just got to find them 😊 Or maybe not?

If I remember right the 9800GTX+ will have a few advantages over the 250 and other GT/GTS cards, because it was positioned as the top offering for a short while; it supports triple SLI, hybrid power, etc which the other boards do not (GTS 250 may, but I know 8800GTS 512MB, 9800GT, etc do not).

As far as games having issues - I've not encountered any problems with games that will run in Win7 and my GTX 660 (which is a lot newer than G92), aside from nVidia breaking shadows in TS2 (http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help … gle_Sim_Shadows), which is fully driver-related (and afaik affects ALL nVidia cards that can use >327). The rub here is that some newer games need updates beyond 327 for performance, and if you have a GPU Boost enabled card there are power management updates in 340 that are worthwhile. It doesn't break the game though - just turn shadows down to one setting from top and it works again (its not the maximum quality shadows for the game, but that isn't a problem for me). 🤣

Hardware-wise, in terms of "this will always have issues no matter what driver" - I know of a few that affect Radeon HD 4800 series, but none of those have been an issue with the GeForce, even with >327 drivers.

Wow I must say I'm a little bit surprised. But this is great news for anyone building a XP Gaming PC.

Had a more detailed look at that 750 Ti and it's almost on the level of my GTX660 😲

And doesn't even need a PCIe power cable. And it's compact, but I wish they made single slot cards. Everything is dual slot, so annoying.

They are quite cheap, but not cheap enough for me to buy one just for this project. I will just use the GTX460 for my video and talk about using other cards such as as the 600 or 700 series and that there are few driver issues reported.

I can confirm now that the GT 740 is slightly slower than the GTX 750

I thought about installing a 256GB SSD drive (have an extra one) and decided against it. AHCI and SSD in XP sounds like it will end up being a PITA at some future date. Sticking with just a single 250GB hard drive.

squareguy wrote:

I thought about installing a 256GB SSD drive (have an extra one) and decided against it. AHCI and SSD in XP sounds like it will end up being a PITA at some future date. Sticking with just a single 250GB hard drive.

My research showed that drives / manufacturers that have utilities / tools for manual TRIM / garbage collection are the way to go for XP. Intel and Samsung are frequently mentioned but there might be others. I have Silicon Power and Sandisk and couldn't find anything on their website...

AHCI is not difficult. You can either Slipstream the drivers or press F6 during installation and load from a floppy. Catch is that not all USB Floppy drives are supported. Mitsumi, Sony, TEAC and IBM are mentioned. I heard there is an edit to a file you can perform so all floppies are supported but haven't been able to test it because I don't have a USB floppy. So I just went with slipstreaming.

It gives you NCQ Native Command Queuing for some extra performance 😀

I really wish there was a way to SLI two GT 635 OEM or GT 730 cards. Anyone know of a hack to SLI cards that do not have official Nvidia SLI support. I understand it would be software SLI if possible.

squareguy wrote:

I really wish there was a way to SLI two GT 635 OEM or GT 730 cards. Anyone know of a hack to SLI cards that do not have official Nvidia SLI support. I understand it would be software SLI if possible.

There are hacks to enable SLI on systems that don't have SLI-certified chipsets or to run SLI compatible cards that aren't the same model, and something like that *may* or may not (likely will not) work with cards that aren't rated SLI compatible; SLI requires both hardware features on the card (even bridge-less), and driver support - most of the hacks just unlock licencing limitations (like checks for nForce chipsets), they don't re-work how the SMP is actually being implemented in the drivers.

As far as the hacks, everything I'm aware of will require Vista or higher because it exploits features through the hypervisor, see here:
http://www.jason-ho.net/Shopping/index.php?ma … &products_id=85
Or here:
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/how … hardware.60844/
Or here:
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/sli … t-cards.158907/

Hardware-wise, Lucid HydraLogix would accomplish what you want (it'll do Radeon + GeForce if you want), but it's big money and low performance returns. And afaik they've discontinued it for consumers.

Thanks for the info

I still plan to test a GT 730 (GDDR5) when I get a chance and I found one more card to try the GTX 745 OEM. It is another Maxwell based, like the GTX 750, with a 384:24:16 configuration instead of a 512:32:16 configuration. It is still listed as a TDP of 55-watts but from reduced core count it should be about 40-watts. The only real downside is only having GDDR3 with 28.8GB/s bandwidth so both cards (GT 730 GDDR5 and GTX 745) end up with a 3D Mark 11 score of about 2200. Not sure if it worth the effort trying to get one to test. Any thoughts?

In the meantime I built a new work desktop from some preexisting parts.

HP 6000 Pro Desktop
Core 2 Duo E8400, 3.0 GHz
8GB DDR3
GeForce GT 635 OEM
256GB SSD
Dual Monitors, 1080P
Windows 7 Pro x64

It flies, as expected. I think I will really like it. Office, email, web apps, surfing multiple tabs, etc.

Maybe I'll load a game on it just for 'testing' purposes, hehe.

Seriously considering grabbing a low-profile GTX 750 and stuffing it in my DC7900 SFF. It is 55-Watt TDP which is above the 'official' 35-Watt spec but I have read of people using more powerful cards, some with better luck than others. This is a great price ($24.00 off regular price) if it comes with the low-profile brackets, it is an open box item. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … 82E16814500332R

Very nice!

At the computer shop that I buy stuff from they don't have any low profile cards.

But they have these 750 versions:

750: https://www.ple.com.au/ViewItem.aspx?InventoryItemId=614566

750 OC: https://www.ple.com.au/ViewItem.aspx?InventoryItemId=614483

750 Ti OC: https://www.ple.com.au/ViewItem.aspx?InventoryItemId=614484

Thing is I have a GTX660 in my current machine and 460 768 lying around, so really plenty for testing and benchmarking. Still these cards are tempting, but once they move to the next smaller chip process they will have even more efficient cards. But will they support XP?

So I will just wait a little bit 😀

That Asus card is nice, I have installed three of those and I love the single slot form facto. It will go into the hard to install boxes like the DC7900 CMT with no trouble and I am sure a lot of other OEM boxes with tight inside.

Well I have reconfigured a few things because of limited desktop space at home. My primary computer is now a HP Elite 8000 CMT PC. I installed the GTX 750 and Audigy 2 cards in it. I installed Windows XP SP3 with AHCI drivers onto a 250GB hard drive and Windows 7 x64 on a 256GB SSD. It has 8GB RAM and a Q9550 quad core CPU. I had decided on a dual boot scenario between work and play but then I decided to look at VirtualBox and noticed that it supports VT-d. The DC7900 and Elite 8000 both have full support for VT-d and I will try passing through the graphics card directly to Windows XP as a guest OS. If this works right it might be pretty sweet for XP gaming without having to reboot. It may take a day or two before I get a chance to get it tested out but I will report back.

Edit:

Looks like VirtualBox only supports PCI passthrough in a Linux host, that's a crock. I will look at other options, possibly VMWare Workstation?

Hmm look like a Linux host or a bare metal hypervisor, oh well.