firage wrote:Yeah, the 9800 XT looks like an expensive option, too much for the guarantee. Does the X700 Pro PCI-e bridge really require 0.8V? Maybe the card is just faulty or a fluke. Try other newer cards, like X1950 Pro, X800 XT, HD2600 XT, 7600 GT, X800 XL, X1650 XT, etc. They should almost all be 1.5V compatible.
Ok, the situation I have in terms of retro gaming is like this. I have a Windows 98 gaming rig with a 600Mhz Pentium 3, 256MB of PC-100 SDRAM, an nVidia RIVA TNT2 32MB AGP card, and dual Voodoo2 12MB cards in SLI. So that's pretty much maxing out the PRE-GPU graphics and gaming era, not counting vintage DOS gaming. I have a Pentium 1 system in the works for that.
Then I have a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 17" laptop that has a 2.1 GHz Pentium M, 2 GB of DDR2 memory, and a GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB PCI-Express graphics card. And it's a flippin' beast that rocks the hell out of 2005-2009 gaming.
This other system is supposed to be in-between. It's meant to bridge the gulf between the 1998-2000 Pentium 3 rig and the 2005-2008 laptop. And what I have is limited to AGP 4x, so that's what I have to work with. What's the point of jumping way up to the X800, HD cards, or higher if the CPU (an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ Barton) simply can't keep the card fed - ESPECIALLY at AGP 4x speeds? That's why I marked the 9800 series as the highest I wanted to go. The x700 was "supposed" to be equivalent to a 9800 Pro. And the E-bay listing said it was pulled from a working system. But I have no AGP 8x system to test the card on properly. All I know is that when it's in the system, it powers up, but doesn't POST. And there's no beep code coming from the motherboard at all. Fans running, nothing on the screen, no beep codes. I think the MB is waiting for the video card to initialize, but it can't because the card's looking for 0.8v and is instead getting 1.5v. The video card could be talking all day long to the MB and the MB can't read the 0.8v signal.
