Use the socket 478 system for Windows 98 SE. Its great for games from 1997 - 2002.
The Geforce Ti4200 is perfect, add the Voodoo 2 for games that works better with Glide.

Use one of the socket 775 systems as a Windows XP box for games from 2003 - 2006.
För the XP box you will need a better video card. Buy a Geforce 7800/7900 GTX or a Radeon X1900/1950 XT(X).

I'd keep the GeForce 4 over the Radeon 9550 - performance between them really won't be a lot different, and if the 9550 is a "cut down" 64-bit variant it may even be a downgrade. The only thing the 9550 may have a consistent advantage with is DVI compliance, but you'd have to know more about both specific cards to be able to better speculate at that. And even if it is better in that respect, you may never notice, because your monitor, cabling length, desired resolution, etc may not be a problem (or enough of a problem to "see" problems). Here's an article that explains in more detail: http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/55254- … liance-shootout (and note that none of this matters whatsoever if you're using VGA to connect; it's just something to keep in mind with early DVI-equipped cards).

As far as 2001-2005, the 3.06GHz P4 is likely to be up for that, but the GeForce 4 (or Radeon 9550) will be likely inadequate. It depends heavily on what games you want to play - I think most people assume demanding shooters and RPGs, like FEAR, FarCry, Oblivion, Neverwinter 2, etc. But if you're instead hoping to play lighter RTS or "sim" games (e.g. The Sims 2, WarCraft III) it would probably be fine. I agree with Skyscraper on 775 + faster GeForce/Radeon for heavier DX9 gaming though. The GeForce 6600 may actually be all you need, again depending on games you want, resolution, etc but otherwise the 7800/7900 or X1800/1900 would be good choices. I wouldn't limit yourself to only the absolute TOTL GTX/XTX cards though - usually the one-or-two model down offerings are much cheaper and easier to find, and offer nearly as good performance. If one of your PCIe-equipped motherboards appears on this list: http://www.nvidia.com/content/geforce_gx2_sbios/us.asp the 7950GX2 could also be an option. That isn't to say that list is the only boards that GX2 works with, but because it can have finicky compatibility with PCIe boards, I'd generally be inclined towards picking off that list versus rolling the dice, unless you can get a GX2 very cheap/free.

^+1 to both Skyscraper and obobskivich's suggestions. Also I like that case. Perfect generic beige matx case. I would suggest giving everything a good wipe down however as there is a lot of dust on the Ti4200 at least.

Something I just thought of
- check that the PSU is up for it before you get too crazy with upgrades. I'm remembering a lot of P4 OEM machines having units that are barely up to driving the CPU, and may not like tons of expansion hardware wanting another 100W+.

Also pop it open and check the caps. If it is around a 300 watt it should be OK for what you are using it for. I have a similar supply that weighs like 6 pounds 😀

obobskivich wrote:

I'd keep the GeForce 4 over the Radeon 9550 - performance between them really won't be a lot different, and if the 9550 is a "cut down" 64-bit variant it may even be a downgrade. The only thing the 9550 may have a consistent advantage with is DVI compliance, but you'd have to know more about both specific cards to be able to better speculate at that.

Performance-wise, the GF4 is quite strong, but don't forget that the 9550 is a newer generation. GF4 is a DX8 card, with only limited fixedpoint shaders (PS1.3), where the 9550 is a full SM2.0 part with floating point precision and other features (such as geometry instancing, more efficient hierarchical z-buffering, MSAA and AF).
So the 9550 will give better image quality in DX9 games, and the more efficient newer shader stuff may also give it better performance in practice. The 9550 will also run games that won't support GF4 at all (yes, it will run Crysis 😀).

ODwilly wrote:

Also pop it open and check the caps. If it is around a 300 watt it should be OK for what you are using it for. I have a similar supply that weighs like 6 pounds 😀

Good call. It looks like a Sparkle if I'm seeing it right, so it's potentially a good PSU. 😀

Scali wrote:

Performance-wise, the GF4 is quite strong, but don't forget that the 9550 is a newer generation. GF4 is a DX8 card, with only limited fixedpoint shaders (PS1.3), where the 9550 is a full SM2.0 part with floating point precision and other features (such as geometry instancing, more efficient hierarchical z-buffering, MSAA and AF).
So the 9550 will give better image quality in DX9 games, and the more efficient newer shader stuff may also give it better performance in practice. The 9550 will also run games that won't support GF4 at all (yes, it will run Crysis 😀).

Yeah, DX9 support is worth keeping in mind, but another machine with a GF6600 was mentioned, so I figured that was maybe irrelevant. 😊 To note, GeForce 4 does support MSAA and AF (or do you mean that the R300 does those more efficiently?). Performance wise, that's an interesting question - assuming the 9550 in question has the proper 128-bit bus (and there's *a lot* of 64-bit cards out there), it looks like a toss-up on paper with the Ti 4200, so it'd probably come down to driver optimizations and whether or not the SM2.0 shaders confer any advantage in DX8.1 titles. That'd probably be a toss-up if averaged out too, assuming there's nothing broken by drivers/etc (e.g. I've read about fog being broken on Radeons in Win9x (Catalyst 7.10 and above fix it for XP, but aren't supported in 9x)).

obobskivich wrote:

To note, GeForce 4 does support MSAA and AF (or do you mean that the R300 does those more efficiently?).

Yes, that's what I meant. The Radeon 9500/9700 was the first to have efficient MSAA/AF, which you could actually use. GF4 and earlier had very bruteforce implementations that took a huge hit on performance, and were only useful for older games.

Basically, the main reason people here choose Ti4200 over 9550 is that 9550 is kind of a budget card. However, 9550 is quite good, much newer and very fast for its price. The 128-bit 9550 is a lower-clocked version of 9600Pro. It is quite possible you'll reach 9600Pro clock with no problem.

Considering newer games, NWN2 will never run well on such a config. I remember my C2D E6300/x1800GTO rig was barely enough.

I think that your CPU cooler has copper base and painted aluminium ribs.

Scali wrote:

Yes, that's what I meant. The Radeon 9500/9700 was the first to have efficient MSAA/AF, which you could actually use. GF4 and earlier had very bruteforce implementations that took a huge hit on performance, and were only useful for older games.

Okay curiosity: what earlier than GF4 actually did MSAA? AFAIK GF4 was the first from nVidia, but did someone else actually get there first?

RacoonRider wrote:

Considering newer games, NWN2 will never run well on such a config. I remember my C2D E6300/x1800GTO rig was barely enough.

My Prescott + 6800GT crawled through parts of NWN2... 😒

obobskivich wrote:

Okay curiosity: what earlier than GF4 actually did MSAA? AFAIK GF4 was the first from nVidia, but did someone else actually get […]
Show full quote

Scali wrote:

Yes, that's what I meant. The Radeon 9500/9700 was the first to have efficient MSAA/AF, which you could actually use. GF4 and earlier had very bruteforce implementations that took a huge hit on performance, and were only useful for older games.

Okay curiosity: what earlier than GF4 actually did MSAA? AFAIK GF4 was the first from nVidia, but did someone else actually get there first?

RacoonRider wrote:

Considering newer games, NWN2 will never run well on such a config. I remember my C2D E6300/x1800GTO rig was barely enough.

My Prescott + 6800GT crawled through parts of NWN2... 😒

I can report that NWN2 runs great using a Prescott 540@4266 in combination with a Geforce 7900 GTX

If you want to run NWN2 using strict 2004 hardware I guess a high clocked A64 and Geforce 6800 GT/Ultra SLI would work.

Skyscraper wrote:

I can report that NWN2 runs great using a Prescott 540@4266 in combination with a Geforce 7900 GTX

That's clocked a fair bit higher than mine was (3.3GHz on the top-end), and of course 7900GTX is also probably helping it out a bit... 🤣

If you want to run NWN2 using strict 2004 hardware I guess a high clocked A64 and Geforce 6800 GT/Ultra SLI would work.

X850 would probably do a good job I'd think, but I've never tried. I know it ran reasonably well on A64X2 + GeForce 7900 a year or two later though. 😊

obobskivich wrote:

Okay curiosity: what earlier than GF4 actually did MSAA? AFAIK GF4 was the first from nVidia, but did someone else actually get there first?

Afaik the GF3 already had the same thing... I don't really count them as MSAA though. It's more of a hacked SSAA (afaik they only do the texture fetches once, but still run the shader for all samples, at least, that's how the tech descriptions read... True MSAA only runs the entire shader once, where obviously the textures are only fetched once as well, since the shader triggers the texture fetches).
Radeon 8500 also had some 'MSAA'-like thing called SMOOTHVISION, and also some adaptive AF-optimizations.

In my book though, the Radeon 9500/9700 was the first 'true' MSAA. The first modern implementation as we still know and use today.

Wow thank you everyone for the great responses, so to sum it up, I can keep the system as it is now, add my 8MB Voodoo to help with Glide games, then experiment with the cards.

I dont care to much for 2004 games , as I can run them fairly happily on my Main Rig (Xeon E31230, Atl 6850 crossfire).

PS Like with all of my computers, this one is going to be properly dissembled, cleaned and inspected before I power it on for the first time 😀

I would say yep! Kind of cool that you have a Sparkle PSU and GPU in the same machine btw.

Just a little update, I cleaned the system and fired her up (no bad caps in either the psu or the motherboard) , it turns out that Ati 9550 is actually a Ati 9600Pro (128-bit) O.O , so I presume thats better to use over the Nvidia Gefore 4200.

Sadly the hard drive needed a lot of TLC it had bad sectors right at windows boot, I managed to get it working (using HDD Regenerator) but will keep an eye on it if it gets any worse, which might be the case.

PS The original owner left the computer filled with games,mostly shareware and demos, all nicely organized with nothing els loaded on the system, its almost a shame to format it.

Hey you could always back up the original drive before formatting it (if you have not already) 😀

A full-on 9600 Pro is a nice improvement over a 9550, and will probably be better than the Ti 4200 across the board. If you're running Windows 2k/XP, load Catalyst 7.10 or newer as that's where they fixed fog. I've run the latest 10.2 legacy with no problems on 9550 and 9800, as well as on my X1600 under Vista, and that's probably where I'd start with a 9600Pro too. Keep in mind it requires, but does not include, .NET resources - you can get them as direct downloads from Microsoft though. If you can't find them, let me know - I have the links saved somewhere.

Funny thing you should say that, I just started installing Windows 2000 as I want to get the system to dual boot WinME and Win2k , thing is according to the ATI/AMD webstite the latest driver for it is 6.10 for windows 2000 , If I try and install the latest version 10.3 I get a incompatibility warning stating that I do not have a 64bit version of windows, and if I look at the executable its clearly for both 32bit and 65bit?

Any ideas? Or should I just go with the Omeaga drivers?