Will work with everything in theory, but there might be some local cases of incompatibility. I have some cards which absolutely refuse to work with ASUS P3B-F for example.

Well, I can tell you that an Intel SE440BX-2 with Pentium III 850 worked fine for me with an AGP NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT.

So perhaps even geforce 7800GS might work?

7800GS will work in a universal AGP, but Nvidia drivers to support it will cause problems on a Pentium 3 system. GeForce 6800 cards without HSI bridge are the last to work fine, but not on every driver version. Radeon HD 3850 or Radeon X1950 Pro will work fine though.

I was playing around with an i815 based system the other week. Surprisingly, my 7800GS worked fine! It just seems to be the VIA P3 chipsets that hate bridged nvidia cards. 815/820/840 based boards should play nicely with all AGP cards.

Unfortunately my motherboard has VIA VT82C694Z chipset. I asume that means that nvidia cards can't be used?
I think ATI cards have worse dos compatibility than nvidia cards, so that doesn't sound good.

I was playing around with an i815 based system the other week.

440BX will not work properly with bridged cards even if they compatible with AGP 1.0 slot. More recent Intel chipsets were also mentioned.

I think ATI cards have worse dos compatibility than nvidia cards, so that doesn't sound good.

If it's typical DOS/Win 9x build, the answer to that questions was told a million times already - GeForce FX 5900XT. If you're feeling fancy, go for GeForce FX 5800/5800 Ultra/5900 Ultra/5950 Ultra or any Quadro FX counterpart. But 5900XT is the most common and cheap.

I was hoping to be able to use one of the cards I already have. Compatibility is more important than how fast the card is when it comes to a P3. I assume with P3 the cpu will be the bottleneck most of the time.

Baoran wrote:

I think ATI cards have worse dos compatibility than nvidia cards, so that doesn't sound good.

Back then I had some graphical glitches on some DOS games (such as ingame graphics messed up on some non-protected mode games using 320x200x8 resolution) with Radeon HD series (3850/4650) AGP cards, although they're relatively newer than the last nVidia AGP cards (such as GeForce 7950) which worked fine under DOS. Interestingly, 320x200x8 was absent in 3850/4650's video BIOS when I tested using VESATEST. I don't have earlier HD series video cards so I'm not sure about these, but the issue might have existed for a while.

Still, I think a PIII may not be able to draw out the full potential of the higher-end video cards even with AGP 4x (universal).

Baoran wrote:

Unfortunately my motherboard has VIA VT82C694Z chipset. I asume that means that nvidia cards can't be used?

It just means that you can't use bridged cards like the 6600GT or any of the GeForce 7 cards. However it will work with native AGP cards like the 6800GT/Ultra, FX series, and earlier cards. Intel seemed to be the only company doing AGP properly back then.

On a side note, I haven't had any issues using the latest supported drivers on my S370 boards. 307.83 works just fine on both my 6800GT/VIA board and 7800GS/i815 board. Think it was only the Slot 1 boards that had trouble running newer drivers.

Still, I think a PIII may not be able to draw out the full potential of the higher-end video cards even with AGP 4x

Only in lowres modes and without high quality anti-aliasing.

I don't really have that many agp nvidia cards. I think only ones I have are 7800GS and Geforce 2 MX.
Actually I found recently a pc that I basically just got because of the case, but inside there was some model of Geforce 6600 that works but looks to be in bit rough shape.