FFXIhealer wrote:

Fair enough. Not everyone has a Dremel tool and not everyone has steady hands - so I gotcha there. People DO sell pre-modded C […]
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Robhalfordfan wrote:

i not wanting to mod processors etc as i have no idea and worry if i screw up etc

my "current" xp build which i thinking of turning that my win98 build has a p4 2.8ghz and seem limted for what i wanting my "xp era machine" to run and has agp not pic-e

Fair enough. Not everyone has a Dremel tool and not everyone has steady hands - so I gotcha there. People DO sell pre-modded CPUs, but then there's still the issue of modding the BIOS and flashing that to your MB, so if that idea scares you, then you're better off not doing it... or having someone like myself do it for you. *wink*

Did you say your Win98 system was AGP or that your WinXP build you're contemplating uses AGP? Because a lot of the replies you've been getting on here have been suggesting MUCH later PCI-Express cards for your build, like the 660 cards and such.

I've never used a Pentium 4 - I've always heard they ran very hot and not very efficient. Luckily for me I skipped the P4 generation by moving to the Athlon XP cpu for early Windows XP, then when I got my laptop, Intel had already returned to the P3 architecture to make the Pentium M CPUs before coming out with the CORE microarchitecture. Some people love their Pentium 4s, but I've never really had a chance to find out for myself.

my current win98 build and current xp build both have agp which is why i thinking of ditching the current 98 build i have (help to replace PSU) because of psu issues and turning current xp build in my new win98 build and build a whole new xp system which is the cards being mention above are pci-e cause i have a new mobo for it

the thought of modding cpu or bios does scare me and wouldnt want to mess up anything

Given your game list minimum card should be GTX 285 or hd5850

candle_86 wrote:

Given your game list minimum card should be GTX 285 or hd5850

i guessed that roughly and out of all the 1gb or 1.5gb cards out there, not sure which one would give best performance

Robhalfordfan wrote:

candle_86 wrote:

Given your game list minimum card should be GTX 285 or hd5850

i guessed that roughly and out of all the 1gb or 1.5gb cards out there, not sure which one would give best performance

Well it comes down to cost, be aware at this new dx7 and 8 are no longer optimized in the drivers and they brute Force it.

candle_86 wrote:

Robhalfordfan wrote:

candle_86 wrote:

Given your game list minimum card should be GTX 285 or hd5850

i guessed that roughly and out of all the 1gb or 1.5gb cards out there, not sure which one would give best performance

Well it comes down to cost, be aware at this new dx7 and 8 are no longer optimized in the drivers and they brute Force it.

ok don't mind paying a little bit more if needed but not prices where it the same as buying a new modern graphics cards

i will look the cards mention above and research but if any other ideas would help

seen a few different one on ebay UK

what about these ones

GTX 480
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NVIDIA-Geforce-GTX … vkAAOSw2t1cyEBs
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ASUS-Nvidia-GeForc … Q8AAOSw6S9de5xN

GTX 580
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/KFA2-NVidia-GeForc … tUAAOSwLW5dEN4o
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Gigabyte-Graphics- … 9QAAOSwPDBdXNrA

ATI Radeon HD 4890
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ATI-XFX-Radeon-HD- … gAAAOSwBRFdZ61C

ATI RADEON HD 5870
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/CHILLBLAST-ATI-RAD … f0AAOSwhWpdUaNA

any of these of right direction or area, i am looking at and are they good

I'do the KFA2 GTX 580

Robhalfordfan wrote:

seen a few different one on ebay UK […]
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seen a few different one on ebay UK

what about these ones

GTX 480
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NVIDIA-Geforce-GTX … vkAAOSw2t1cyEBs
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ASUS-Nvidia-GeForc … Q8AAOSw6S9de5xN

GTX 580
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/KFA2-NVidia-GeForc … tUAAOSwLW5dEN4o
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Gigabyte-Graphics- … 9QAAOSwPDBdXNrA

ATI Radeon HD 4890
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ATI-XFX-Radeon-HD- … gAAAOSwBRFdZ61C

ATI RADEON HD 5870
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/CHILLBLAST-ATI-RAD … f0AAOSwhWpdUaNA

any of these of right direction or area, i am looking at and are they good

Those prices are completely insane. A HD 4890 should be no more than 30-35$ MAX. 70 pounds for a GTX 580 is completely bonkers. I would look at North American sellers. A GTX 960 can easily be found for 70$ USD and would be faster than any card you listed, not to mention quiter and cooler.

For period correctness, an HD 4890, 5870, GTX 285 or GTX 580 are all pretty close to 2010. A GTX 580 in the states with a reference cooler can be had for 40$ USD. You can buy an aftermarket cooler if you want later, don't overpay for a particular model IMO.

mothergoose729 wrote:

Robhalfordfan wrote:

seen a few different one on ebay UK […]
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seen a few different one on ebay UK

what about these ones

GTX 480
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NVIDIA-Geforce-GTX … vkAAOSw2t1cyEBs
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ASUS-Nvidia-GeForc … Q8AAOSw6S9de5xN

GTX 580
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/KFA2-NVidia-GeForc … tUAAOSwLW5dEN4o
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Gigabyte-Graphics- … 9QAAOSwPDBdXNrA

ATI Radeon HD 4890
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ATI-XFX-Radeon-HD- … gAAAOSwBRFdZ61C

ATI RADEON HD 5870
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/CHILLBLAST-ATI-RAD … f0AAOSwhWpdUaNA

any of these of right direction or area, i am looking at and are they good

Those prices are completely insane. A HD 4890 should be no more than 30-35$ MAX. 70 pounds for a GTX 580 is completely bonkers. I would look at North American sellers. A GTX 960 can easily be found for 70$ USD and would be faster than any card you listed, not to mention quiter and cooler.

For period correctness, an HD 4890, 5870, GTX 285 or GTX 580 are all pretty close to 2010. A GTX 580 in the states with a reference cooler can be had for 40$ USD. You can buy an aftermarket cooler if you want later, don't overpay for a particular model IMO.

i know prices are different but what also need to take into account when importing from u.s. to uk is the price, shipping (which is normally about $25-ish or more, so in uk money about £20-ish) and import tax (which any item being imported has a value of £15 or more, pay import tax) and about 2 weeks-ish min or so for delivery (unless pay higher shipping costs), so wouldn't surpised if the total cost come out to about the same

i don't see period correctness as a big deal cause how inflation-ed the prices for some items and/or rare to find (8800 ultra is a good example - which i looked online most prices was the same cost as new modern graphics cards)

swaaye wrote:

I beat Half Life 2 a few months back, playing across a variety of cards. I dug up an older 2004/2005 version of the game. […]
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I beat Half Life 2 a few months back, playing across a variety of cards. I dug up an older 2004/2005 version of the game.

I found that the Radeon HD cards have a texture LOD bug with Source engine that causes extreme texture aliasing. It's basically just way too sharp. This occurs in at least HL2 and Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. You need to drop its mip map quality down to performance in the control panel. From what I understand this makes these cards behave more like NVidia. I did some web searches and apparently this issue had some controversy back then. It's not limited to Source but there is something extra special going on there. I am not sure how the 5000 series behaves.

You will also certainly run into OpenGL issues with older games and a Radeon. Especially after Catalyst 7.11 (which can only be used with 3870 and older). 7.12 has an overhauled OpenGL driver that removed some old extensions. It actually also is a breaking point for bump mapping with the D3D8 Star Wars Republic Commando.

The GTX 580 is an excellent card. Super fast and quiet. I did find that I needed to use older drivers for MSAA to work with HL2 though. It can obviously run quite a wide range of driver releases and it conveniently works great with the last driver released for the 8800 series which I also played a bit with. No visual issues with these cards.

thanks for advice - will keep it in mind

gtx 580 is looking appealing and thinking about getting that but need to wait till payday 🤣

Robhalfordfan wrote:

i don't see period correctness as a big deal cause how inflation-ed the prices for some items and/or rare to find (8800 ultra is a good example - which i looked online most prices was the same cost as new modern graphics cards)

I would suggest a GTX 960 then. Faster than a 580, with half the power. If you buy in Europe or the States I think you'll end up paying about 75 pounds.

mothergoose729 wrote:

Robhalfordfan wrote:

i don't see period correctness as a big deal cause how inflation-ed the prices for some items and/or rare to find (8800 ultra is a good example - which i looked online most prices was the same cost as new modern graphics cards)

I would suggest a GTX 960 then. Faster than a 580, with half the power. If you buy in Europe or the States I think you'll end up paying about 75 pounds.

thank you, i already have a 2gb graphics card (gtx 660) in windows 7 build and need to limit it somewhere but i will think about it, thank you

BTW here are some links on power draw of various cards around the 2009-2011 generation.
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/his-hd-5850/28.html
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-g … 14,2845-15.html
https://www.anandtech.com/show/2848/13

Note that the GTX570 is a power pig, so I can only imagine what the 580 would be like.

The 5870 is a lot less, but what is interesting to me is that the 5850 uses much less power again (almost 40W less) than the 5870 but is not much slower, certainly not an issue for XP era games, which is why I settled on the 5770/5850 for that era. There may be issues with dx8 games on HD5x series cards, but I only play dx9 titles there.

I moved the texture filtering discussion over to a new thread in the graphics forum.
Radeon & GeForce texture filtering quality

kolderman wrote:

BTW here are some links on power draw of various cards around the 2009-2011 generation. https://www.techpowerup.com/review/his-h […]
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BTW here are some links on power draw of various cards around the 2009-2011 generation.
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/his-hd-5850/28.html
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-g … 14,2845-15.html
https://www.anandtech.com/show/2848/13

Note that the GTX570 is a power pig, so I can only imagine what the 580 would be like.

The 5870 is a lot less, but what is interesting to me is that the 5850 uses much less power again (almost 40W less) than the 5870 but is not much slower, certainly not an issue for XP era games, which is why I settled on the 5770/5850 for that era. There may be issues with dx8 games on HD5x series cards, but I only play dx9 titles there.

i thought most graphics card (old and new) were power pigs 🤣

nothing sucks power like a GeForce 8400GS

Was that supposed to be a joke?

I own an eVGA 8400GS and the only thing that sucks about it (besides it's obvious lack of any serious graphics power) is the fan... that barely works after 12 years and lets the thing idle around 60c. The only thing it's good for now is to test a new build to make sure it works before I put a DECENT graphics card in. 🤣

Man, I wish I had a couple GT1030s for that purpose instead...

Robhalfordfan wrote:

thinking of upgrading the processor to a Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 but prices are weird on ebay etc and most of the cheapest ones seem to come from china and not sure if to go for that.

I recently turned a cheap thrift store find into a build similar to what you are going for, and was looking at the exact same processor to replace the E5200 Pentium that was in it when I found it. I ended up coming to the conclusion that even a standard Q9650 would already be way overkill since I was just trying to handle late-XP-era stuff, so why would I need to worry about whether or not I could overclock it? They are more readily available, and prices tend to be lower and a bit more stable as well (I found mine a month ago for about US$30 shipped).

ETA: Maybe seems off the wall but what kind of HDD / which version of XP are you using? Early install disks of XP may not have the necessary drivers installed to play nice with more modern SATA drives

toastdieb wrote:

Robhalfordfan wrote:

thinking of upgrading the processor to a Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 but prices are weird on ebay etc and most of the cheapest ones seem to come from china and not sure if to go for that.

I recently turned a cheap thrift store find into a build similar to what you are going for, and was looking at the exact same processor to replace the E5200 Pentium that was in it when I found it. I ended up coming to the conclusion that even a standard Q9650 would already be way overkill since I was just trying to handle late-XP-era stuff, so why would I need to worry about whether or not I could overclock it? They are more readily available, and prices tend to be lower and a bit more stable as well (I found mine a month ago for about US$30 shipped).

ETA: Maybe seems off the wall but what kind of HDD / which version of XP are you using? Early install disks of XP may not have the necessary drivers installed to play nice with more modern SATA drives

i am not going overclocking at all, no interest in it at all (old or new hardware)

hdd - debating whether to carry on using current ide hdd (2 x 300gb 7200rpm) or changing to sata hdd and maybe go a 300 or 500gb (mobo supports up to sata 2 standards and ide aswell)

the xp version will be xp pro (version 2002) but will be updating to sp3 and all the updates from windows update (which it still works from last time i on it which was less than 6 months ago) and also some updates i got off the microsoft website before it was gone

as a stroke of luck, found the cpu i been looking for on ebay uk from a uk seller and with no negative feedback at all and also a 10% off ebay voucher as i looking at it and thought, grab it. all it needs is clean (always do that anyway when buying second hand pc parts)

also got the kfa2 gtx 580 graphics card and says a min psu needed is 600w (would 650w or 700w be plenty for this build)

and got myself some 1GB ddr2 800 ram sticks (Corsair XMS2), four of them

just the case, fans, and cooler and psu and maybe sata hdds (debating to myself- to carry on using my 2x 300gb ide hdd or get sata II drive)

finger crossed, it works and one step closer for my xp machine 😀