Fallout 3 on AGP era cards? In my opinion should have just gone with a PCI-E machine, cheaper and you can get later hardware. But you might find something cheap in the nvidia 6800 series. I dont know how good that will play FO3 though.

You need quite a beefy Retro Gaming PC for that game.

Building the Fallout 3 Retro Gaming PC

I may just stick with the Quad AMD apu and see if I can disable 2 of the cores either in the BIOS or in a virtualbox vm so I don't have to worry about the game engine freaking out about more than 2 cores. That way I have access to my old 8800 GT PCIe card and don't have to fark around with AGP cards.

Is that even retro? That's just... obsolete.

snorg wrote:

I may just stick with the Quad AMD apu and see if I can disable 2 of the cores either in the BIOS or in a virtualbox vm so I don't have to worry about the game engine freaking out about more than 2 cores. That way I have access to my old 8800 GT PCIe card and don't have to fark around with AGP cards.

Sounds much better 😀

If you're using an APU, note that even disabling all cores but one, leaves you with a dual core in the eyes of Windows. That's because it uses AMD modules rather than cores.

A 8800 GT would be great. That sounds more like a practical way to go for FO3.

SRQ wrote:

Is that even retro? That's just... obsolete.

That system is in a weird spot. Too new to be a retro system, too old to
be much use for modern stuff. I've hung onto it as long as I have because
it was the first proper workstation board I bought myself, and it was the first
PC I bought after losing practically everything when I lost my job and
having to sell things to pay bills. If I could get a slightly more modern
GPU for it it's perfectly capable to run win 7 or win 10, just not the
most modern games with all eye candy. Unfortunately it will only take 4Gb ram
but then I've never updated the bios so who
knows, maybe if I updated the bios and could find 2gb sticks of PC 2100 it could take 8.

In my opinion running newer games like fallout 3 on an AGP machine is masochism. I'd rather run it on a modern rig with eye candy cranked all the way up.

Snorg, a couple years ago I found AGP 3850's to be much more affordable compared to the seemingly always pricy AGP 46x0's, whilst it should be about equally fast.
If one ever looks for a powerful AGP card, the 3850 may be a good and affordable option, I got a couple for like €10 each only 1 or 2 years ago.

HD3850 is, as far as I know, the fastest AGP card. There's also a newer HD4670, but it's slower due to narrow bus.

4670 is also newer and consumes less power. I think the 4670 is an interesting card, if only for the fact it's the most modern AGP card that exists and I think veeery few AGP systems will ever even notice any kind of performance drop when switching out a 3850 for a 4670. It's very silent too (dunno how noisy a AGP 3850 is).

Few years ago other 'modern' Ati/AMD AGP cards were very cheap (anything Ati/AMD that used a bridge chip and basically was faster than 9800). I think one of the reasons for this may be due to them having had issues with drivers and the GF6's being more popular and about just as fast in virtually any AGP system except maybe Core Duo etc.

The 4670 should be faster than the 3850 when AA don't forget. The R6xx chips tried to do AA on the sharers as the part of the GPU that was intended to do AA was broken so it was pushed off to the shaders and fixed with the R7xx series chips, so if your going to do AA the 4670 came in between a 3850 and 3870 in performance.

But why, if its a dual core chip can you not find a cheap PCIe motherboard. I know for 939/AM2/775 series cpu's there is a lot of cheap OEM class boards from Compaq/Acer/HP ect that are all micro ATX not more than 20 bucks and all have PCI-Express. And why you may spend 50-60 dollars on an AGP card alone, you could get a board for 20 bucks on fleabay and an 8800GT/8800GTS for around 30, which would smoke anything on AGP. I know I paid $23 for my 8800GTS 512 last month on fleabay

HD 4670 won't be faster because 1/2 of bandwidth available limits it's ROPs and TMUs really hard in any reasonable resolution (ie. 1280x1024 or higher for me, and yes I did checked myself : HD 3850 IceQ3 (512MB DDR3) > HD 4670 IceQ (1GB DDR3)).
^There is a catch to this tho : Can ONLY be seen on Dual/Quad Core CPU.

For single core Pentium 4 or Athlon XP, anything higher than X1950 Pro/7900 GS is pointless (without really high resolution or AA/AF levels).
For low power HTPC, I recommend HD 2600 XT (DDR3).

If those are too expensive, go for 7600 GT or GS (DDR3).