i would say ti4200 is a balanced card for p3s-1.4g, anything faster than ti4600 would be obviously wasted.

TI4200, TI4400, TI4600 all have the same GPU, just higher clocks and 128mb and faster ram for the higher end models. Some ti4200's also had 128mb.

Low end gf5 (fx5200) is very underpowered, weaker than gf4 mx. fx5700 is as low as You would want there. ATI radeon 9550 can be bought new
from Aliexpress and ebay, not sure where they fit in performance wise though.

Can't the fx5200 be unlocked to a 5500?

I just bought a 128bit 5200 for the system for what I'm doing it would be best.

But a GF4 cards do seem like a good idea, but I have noticed that a lot of them tend to die and have problems and they arnt as available as some other cards. But if you can get a good one stick with it.

My Asus TI4400 is a great card. I would recommend that.

I almost got a 4400ti for the system, might still pick one up for it too 😁

For me I'm thinking that the 9250 or 5200 would be best all rounder. They will not be held back, good fetchers, lower power draw with equals to passive cooling.

But taking into account what the cpu can push I'd say the best bet is a 5700 or 9600. I'm sure both those cards get held back, but still utilized well. And a ideal pare would be a 4400ti or 8500.

A 5700 or 9600 would be pretty good actually.

Use your 9800 Pro, it's nice with some extra power if your going for resolutions like 1280x1024 and beyond.

Kamerat wrote:

Use your 9800 Pro, it's nice with some extra power if your going for resolutions like 1280x1024 and beyond.

I thought about the 5950, 9800's have given me fits woth older motherboard in the past so I never really considered it.
I rather have a passive card. But I was thinking of using the 5950 in low power mode.

On my P3-1575, there are a few games where a 6800GT provides noticeably (sometimes massively) smoother gameplay than a 9800 Pro or FX5900.
Doom 3, NFS Most Wanted, and Far Cry are a few such games. I usually play at 1280x960 or 1600x1200 on that machine.

in period even a ti 4200 would be commonly bottlenecked compared to a faster CPUs (like AXP 2ghz)
but as the post above, I think it can benefit from a lot more than that if you run newer games (like the ones from 2004 mentioned), or higher res (back in the day 1024x768 was the 1080P basically)

if you want period correct I think a Geforce 3 would be ideal... but anything with good win98 support will probably make sense.

I would say go for the Geforce 4 Ti 4600.
It's almost period correct (2002) and you would have a high end gpu coupled with a high end cpu.

My P3-S 1400 has a Voodoo 5 5500 AGP 😀

Jade Falcon wrote:

Can't the fx5200 be unlocked to a 5500?

I just bought a 128bit 5200 for the system for what I'm doing it would be best.

But a GF4 cards do seem like a good idea, but I have noticed that a lot of them tend to die and have problems and they arnt as available as some other cards. But if you can get a good one stick with it.

Not necessarily. Even though the FX5500 is essentially a slightly faster FX5200, that doesn't mean all FX5200 chips can handle an overclock. Even if you could overclock an FX5200 to FX5500 speeds, the FX5500 isn't all that fast, either. They are good for DX8 and earlier games, but beyond that they are both snails. There are also FX5200 variants that are saddled with a 64-bit memory bus and half the normal amount of RAM. Overclocking one of those would be close to pointless as it would be hamstrung by the memory controller.

sliderider wrote:

Jade Falcon wrote:

Can't the fx5200 be unlocked to a 5500?

I just bought a 128bit 5200 for the system for what I'm doing it would be best.

But a GF4 cards do seem like a good idea, but I have noticed that a lot of them tend to die and have problems and they arnt as available as some other cards. But if you can get a good one stick with it.

Not necessarily. Even though the FX5500 is essentially a slightly faster FX5200, that doesn't mean all FX5200 chips can handle an overclock. Even if you could overclock an FX5200 to FX5500 speeds, the FX5500 isn't all that fast, either. They are good for DX8 and earlier games, but beyond that they are both snails. There are also FX5200 variants that are saddled with a 64-bit memory bus and half the normal amount of RAM. Overclocking one of those would be close to pointless as it would be hamstrung by the memory controller.

yes the FX5500 is minimally faster, I think the reference specs are 128bit for both, 250MHz core for the 5200 and 270 for the 5500, 400MHz memory for both...
but in practice a lot of 5200s have 64bit bus as you mentioned, so it makes a big difference...

but if you look on the tests from 2003, the card was pretty slow, with the latest games being unplayable at high settings, the 5200 was nicer than the 4 MX series, but, it was pretty slow compared to things like Radeon 9600 on complex games.

SPBHM wrote:

yes the FX5500 is minimally faster, I think the reference specs are 128bit for both, 250MHz core for the 5200 and 270 for the 55 […]
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sliderider wrote:

Jade Falcon wrote:

Can't the fx5200 be unlocked to a 5500?

I just bought a 128bit 5200 for the system for what I'm doing it would be best.

But a GF4 cards do seem like a good idea, but I have noticed that a lot of them tend to die and have problems and they arnt as available as some other cards. But if you can get a good one stick with it.

Not necessarily. Even though the FX5500 is essentially a slightly faster FX5200, that doesn't mean all FX5200 chips can handle an overclock. Even if you could overclock an FX5200 to FX5500 speeds, the FX5500 isn't all that fast, either. They are good for DX8 and earlier games, but beyond that they are both snails. There are also FX5200 variants that are saddled with a 64-bit memory bus and half the normal amount of RAM. Overclocking one of those would be close to pointless as it would be hamstrung by the memory controller.

yes the FX5500 is minimally faster, I think the reference specs are 128bit for both, 250MHz core for the 5200 and 270 for the 5500, 400MHz memory for both...
but in practice a lot of 5200s have 64bit bus as you mentioned, so it makes a big difference...

but if you look on the tests from 2003, the card was pretty slow, with the latest games being unplayable at high settings, the 5200 was nicer than the 4 MX series, but, it was pretty slow compared to things like Radeon 9600 on complex games.

nah the FX 5200 could and did loose to the MX440 in more than a few games. The FX5200 was only really useful to OEM's because it was a checkbox for DX9. I guess what matters with the card choice though is resolution. Are you playing at 800x600 or 2048x1536 or somewhere in the middle

The FX5200 was really bad! OMG!
This is an old screenshot from 2004 that I took when I "tried" to run GTA Vice City on it:

Arctic wrote:

The FX5200 was really bad! OMG!

Yup, but it was loved by users in the PowerMac scene and it was among the first cards to support the Aero theme. 😀
And it did run the Dawn demo, of course.. 😁

Imperious wrote:

fx5700 is as low as You would want there.

What do you mean with "low" for the FX5700? As you can see this rating here (consists 5 different benchmarks at 1024x768 resolution), it's quite as fast as the Ti4600.

I would just drop in a $10 9700/9800 and be done with it unless you want Nvidia, occasionally there are some cheap 6600GT agp going for chicken feed on eBay.

Ive tried the geforce4 4200 ti in my p3 1.4 it runs pretty good, but get way better frames in all my games and benchmarks with a 6800 gt, the p3 was more powerful then you think at its time.

The p3-s came out in 2002 and the 6800 gt 2004, not that far off.

I do recall that i was getting even better scores with an HD3850.