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First post, by Sandi1987

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My father have old computer Pentium III 733 with 384 MB RAM SDRAM and ATI Radeon 9600XT. He had ATI Radeon 9200SE 128 MB 64-bit. Will computer works faster in Windows XP with 9600XT? Same performance with 9200SE? Too slow CPU for this GPU?

Reply 1 of 13, by emosun

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Xp will actually run on anything with a pentium 1 and 64mb of ram or higher.

98 would be more suited , but xp will work totally fine.

Reply 2 of 13, by synrgy87

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best thing to do is get some benchmarks done, XP will run fine although probably better suited to 98SE, a 733mhz PIII i ran for a while with a 9800XT and it worked fine although the CPU was holding the card back, I changed the card out for a Matrox G400 Max, just to balance things out a bit with 2 Voodoo2 cards in SLI.

the motherboard may be upgradable to 512mb ram (or in some cases 768) and may support a 1ghz + pentium 3, all of which are dirt cheap and nice upgrade options.

Windows 2000 is also an OS to consider for a PIII machine.

Reply 3 of 13, by kanecvr

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emosun wrote:

Xp will actually run on anything with a pentium 1 and 64mb of ram or higher.

98 would be more suited , but xp will work totally fine.

Running XP on anything other then a fast tualatin or early socket A / 478 machine with DDR is masochism. My advice for slot 1 / socket 370 is - stick with win98se.

Also the 9600 will be severely bottlenecked by the slow p3 CPU. A more appropriate card for that machine would be a Geforce 2 pro / gts, GF 3 ti or GF4 MX. On the ATi side a 7500 or 9200 / 9250 would do fine.

I've recently come to the conclusion that there is absolutely no benefit from running a faster video card on a slow machine. In an attempt to play Dungeon Keeper 2 @ 1600x1200 on my 1400MHz tualatin, I moved from a GF 4 ti4200 all the way up to a 6800 incrementally, with little to no performance improvement. There's way to much stuff going on on-screen for the CPU and CPU to AGP bus to keep up with the video card.

I'll open a topic on this when I have some free time.

Reply 4 of 13, by candle_86

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kanecvr wrote:
Running XP on anything other then a fast tualatin or early socket A / 478 machine with DDR is masochism. My advice for slot 1 / […]
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emosun wrote:

Xp will actually run on anything with a pentium 1 and 64mb of ram or higher.

98 would be more suited , but xp will work totally fine.

Running XP on anything other then a fast tualatin or early socket A / 478 machine with DDR is masochism. My advice for slot 1 / socket 370 is - stick with win98se.

Also the 9600 will be severely bottlenecked by the slow p3 CPU. A more appropriate card for that machine would be a Geforce 2 pro / gts, GF 3 ti or GF4 MX. On the ATi side a 7500 or 9200 / 9250 would do fine.

I've recently come to the conclusion that there is absolutely no benefit from running a faster video card on a slow machine. In an attempt to play Dungeon Keeper 2 @ 1600x1200 on my 1400MHz tualatin, I moved from a GF 4 ti4200 all the way up to a 6800 incrementally, with little to no performance improvement. There's way to much stuff going on on-screen for the CPU and CPU to AGP bus to keep up with the video card.

I'll open a topic on this when I have some free time.

Well yes with SP3, but XP SP2 works great on as low as a Pentium 3 500/Athlon 600.

Reply 5 of 13, by emosun

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kanecvr wrote:

Running XP on anything other then a fast tualatin or early socket A / 478 machine with DDR is masochism.

Stock xp with every service pack and a ton of extra services and needless programs running? yeah. probably.

Non fluff xp works fine like early versions or standard WFFLP. In my benchmarks on old pentium 2 systems , games ran identical to the 98 counterparts. The only real difference was slightly more cpu usage in the system UI. Course these were 233mhz machines , a system 3 times the power would have no issue.

So if you had something under 500mhz and didnt bother trimming down xp , then yeah it would be slower. but pretty much any pentium 3 can handle xp with the trimmings just fine.

98 is more suited , but xp is fine too.

Reply 6 of 13, by Darkman

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emosun wrote:
Stock xp with every service pack and a ton of extra services and needless programs running? yeah. probably. […]
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kanecvr wrote:

Running XP on anything other then a fast tualatin or early socket A / 478 machine with DDR is masochism.

Stock xp with every service pack and a ton of extra services and needless programs running? yeah. probably.

Non fluff xp works fine like early versions or standard WFFLP. In my benchmarks on old pentium 2 systems , games ran identical to the 98 counterparts. The only real difference was slightly more cpu usage in the system UI. Course these were 233mhz machines , a system 3 times the power would have no issue.

So if you had something under 500mhz and didnt bother trimming down xp , then yeah it would be slower. but pretty much any pentium 3 can handle xp with the trimmings just fine.

98 is more suited , but xp is fine too.

I would go for WinXP SP1 as opposed to stock WinXP , its only with SP2 and especially SP3 that you notice the OS becoming overweight on slower machines. Although on a Pentium III I would recommend Win2K SP3 or SP4 over XP, its a bit lighter on its feet.

98SE would still be the best all around OS though. WinME is another option , but its not the most stable of things (you need to tweak a few things and apply some unofficial patches to get it running decently)

Reply 7 of 13, by emosun

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Although WFFLP is even better than xp sp1 if you got a copy

Reply 8 of 13, by kanecvr

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We clearly have different notions of "runs fine"... and that's OK. To each his own 😜

*I'm not talking about app / game performance - I'm talking about boot time, load times and general responsiveness of the machine.

Reply 9 of 13, by emosun

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I'm not even sure if 98 loads any faster than WFFPL. It would be and interesting test to conduct.

Reply 10 of 13, by Tetrium

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kanecvr wrote:

We clearly have different notions of "runs fine"... and that's OK. To each his own 😜

*I'm not talking about app / game performance - I'm talking about boot time, load times and general responsiveness of the machine.

^This.

I've used XP on a Coppermine 1000 with 512MB RAM and it always seemed to run more sluggish then ME on a Celeron 400 with less then half the RAM (iirc it was XP SP2).

I did notice good improvement with XP when using an NLited install disk specifically made for performance. I'll usually use SP2 as a base for my NLited install disks.

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Reply 11 of 13, by Standard Def Steve

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Keep the 9600XT. It makes absolutely no sense to downgrade the GPU just to avoid a potential CPU bottleneck. I run a 6800GT in my PIII and couldn't be happier! 😊

Which version of XP are you running?
XP SP1 would run just fine on 384MB, although these days Win98SE might actually be a little safer online than XP pre-SP2. Security through obscurity, ya know? However, if you don't intend to run Win98 exclusive games, your best bet would be to bump up the memory to 512MB (i815 mainboard) or 1GB (440BX or VIA mainboard) and perform a clean install of XP SP3. Contrary to popular belief, SP3 does not require a supercomputer in order to run well. 😜

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Reply 12 of 13, by SPBHM

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if the option is 9600XT or 9200SE, I would keep the 9600XT anyway, apart from power usage, I don't think the 9200SE would improve anything.

you can use XP with 384MB, but if you try to run a web browser you are going to use all the memory, also it might be better to use older versions of XP, and avoid any kind of antivirus.

on my slot 1 machine with 384MB I only use XP for testing,

Reply 13 of 13, by Tetrium

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But to actually get back to your question: I'd say keep the 9600XT in your Coppermine 733 rig, due to the fact that swapping your 9600XT for your 9200 has no additional benefits, including no improved performance.

However, you could still go through with swapping the 9600XT for the 9200 in case you would for instance require the 9600XT in another (faster) rig.
The 9200 won't have any benefits for your Coppermine 733 rig, but in theory it wouldn't hurt either 😀 (except maybe for driver stuff etc, you know the drill 😜)

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