No.

If vintage Linux is appealing to you, really old mesa3d drivers support R200 but not R300. That's a huge win for the Radeon 9200. Assuming you like Tux Racer. 🤣

The choice of dithering method to use is probably of interest if you like the aesthetic of the old ATI lookup noise for 16bpp. R300 got rid of that for a more standard ordered dither, IIRC

STX wrote:

No.

wouldn't be surprised when more "No" answers come in lole

snickersnack wrote:

If vintage Linux is appealing to you, really old mesa3d drivers support R200 but not R300. That's a huge win for the Radeon 9200. Assuming you like Tux Racer. 🤣

Tux Racer sounds fun but those versions of Linux are too old for me to be into lmfao

Radeon 9000/9200 have universal AGP support, while most 9600 Pro cards don't.
I like the 9600 Pro because it's one of the most powerful cards that don't require external power (correct me if I'm wrong). That's why I use it in my main test system.

Not sure why people would hate on RV250/RV280, they are fine for what they are. Perhaps it's because of the 9200SE 64-bit variants.
All of the cards work perfectly for me out of the box with modern Linux distributions.
Also, the 9600 Pro should be relatively affordable, if you pay more than $15 for it, you're getting ripped off.

watson wrote:

Radeon 9000/9200 have universal AGP support, while most 9600 Pro cards don't.

I was going to say this exactly. I keep a Radeon 9200 128bit for this reason, for testing AGP motherboards. Plus it's passively cooled.
Back in 2002 I was using a 9000pro as my main gaming card, and it worked great until newer games like Half Life 2 came out. Still better than people who got suckered into buying a gf4mx, thinking it was a gf4 ti at the time. 🤣

watson wrote:

Radeon 9000/9200 have universal AGP support, while most 9600 Pro cards don't. I like the 9600 Pro because it's one of the most p […]
Show full quote

Radeon 9000/9200 have universal AGP support, while most 9600 Pro cards don't.
I like the 9600 Pro because it's one of the most powerful cards that don't require external power (correct me if I'm wrong). That's why I use it in my main test system.

Not sure why people would hate on RV250/RV280, they are fine for what they are. Perhaps it's because of the 9200SE 64-bit variants.
All of the cards work perfectly for me out of the box with modern Linux distributions.
Also, the 9600 Pro should be relatively affordable, if you pay more than $15 for it, you're getting ripped off.

Universal AGP support was originally why I bought this 9200, since I wanted to have a card that works in virtually any AGP board.
You would be correct on the 9600 Pro being one of the fastest cards not requiring external power. Other cards I can think of like that are the 9600 XT, GeForce 6200, GeForce 6600 (not the GT), maybe some HD 2400 series, and the HD 4350. Correct me if I'm wrong on any of them aside from the 9600 XT.

The RV250/RV280 aren't bad cards if you don't have a 64-bit RV280. All those 64-bit 9200SEs and 9250s are so common maybe that's why "9200" in general tend to bring a bad omen. With old forum posts back in the day I kept hearing the 9200 was slower than the 9000, but that probably only applies to the 9200 being slower than the 9000 Pro, which would be true due to the lower clocks of the 9200. Though I'm not sure if the 128MB 9200 can make up for the lost performance from a 64MB 9000 Pro.

Now when you say I'm getting ripped off when I pay more than $15 for a 9600 Pro, that's exactly my problem. Finding faster AGP cards for low prices can get so tedious to where the cheapest 9600 Pros in the US can sometimes cost more than a few 9700s. I paid $16 for this 9200 back in May, and that's still too much in my mind but as long as it's $20 or less I'm fine with it. What's laughable but sad at the same time is that AGP card prices can get so bad to where the cheapest FX 5200, a notoriously bad card, is $15.

pixel_workbench wrote:

I was going to say this exactly. I keep a Radeon 9200 128bit for this reason, for testing AGP motherboards. Plus it's passively cooled.
Back in 2002 I was using a 9000pro as my main gaming card, and it worked great until newer games like Half Life 2 came out. Still better than people who got suckered into buying a gf4mx, thinking it was a gf4 ti at the time. 🤣

I would definitely keep my 9200 as a testing card even if I was to get a faster card for primary use in my Athlon XP build. As I said with far more demanding games like Half-Life 2, I could just play that along with all the other DX9 games I'd want on my HD 4650 PC.

Fact, I almost ended up getting an MX 440 for my AGP card (at the time, I just wanted a faster replacement to a dying 8MB Vanta LT) but I'm glad I didn't get one. FX 5200 was also a card I was looking towards at the time, and again, glad I didn't get one of those either. Just before I settled on this 9200, I almost won an auction to a 9000 Pro thinking I would be the only bidder, but of course someone did a sneak attack and bid just after I did and won the bid.

I'm revisiting this post 7 years later, and wow I was really whiny for no valid reason.

In hindsight, I wish I kept the 9200 in question and recapped it since it had a failing capacitor - because such a card would be perfect for a Pentium II machine. Pretty mediocre, but if 128 bits then it's decent for an Athlon XP like 2000+ on an already low end board to begin with (A7N266-VM), but as users watson and pixel_workbench implies, it would be excellent for a 3.3V only machine like a Slot 1 PII-350, as RV280 (along with R200 and RV250) can still do 3.3V AGP whereas RV350 as found in the 9600 Pro can only do 1.5V AGP.

I bring that up because I'm having the opposite dilemma with my own Slot 1 system, albeit much tamer than this dilemma from 7 years ago. I got a cheap $10 GeForce3 at one of the VCF East Swap Meets a couple of months back, and the only system I have for it to go into (besides my 775i65G, which already has a faster 9600 Pro) is my Dell Precision 410 with a 350MHz Pentium II... now that is bottleneck city, combined with said system only currently having 128MB RAM. Though I do have that system running Windows 2000 as it is dual-CPU capable, and 9x would not be able to recognize that, at least not without any modifications. Ah well, it was cheap and it works and I'll keep it around should I end up with another AMD K7 or a faster PIII system that has an AGP slot.

^ actually that doesn't matter, the GeForce3 (at least the slightly slower Ti200) and 128-bit 9200 perform similarly in older (up to early DX8) games anyway.

To answer my own question 7 years later: compatibility with 3.3V-only AGP motherboards, as most DX9 cards (besides GeForceFX and some early R300's like 9700) only do 1.5V AGP. Also, better utilization with slower (sub-GHz) CPU's and potentially better driver stability in Windows 9x - but 9x is held together with hopes and dreams so you gotta take what you can get there.

I think 128 bit 9200’s are great, wish I had one. The fact that it does not have a fan is a huge plus. Nothing to do with noise, but with the fact that it cannot just seize up and stop working after a couple of years. Maahn these graphics card fans are shitty.

st31276a wrote on 2026-08-04, 06:15:

I think 128 bit 9200’s are great, wish I had one. The fact that it does not have a fan is a huge plus. Nothing to do with noise, but with the fact that it cannot just seize up and stop working after a couple of years. Maahn these graphics card fans are shitty.

9200's usually don't have one, at least. I had a Dell GT 620 fan's bearings go bad a couple of years ago and that made the card really noisy, so eventually I pawned that off with a computer I sold. Pretty nuggety and worthless card, but it made for a decent low profile-compatible testing PCIe GPU. The only advantage to adding a fan to a 9200 or an otherwise passive card would be temperatures (not like 9200 gets that hot to begin with) and potentially overclocking the GPU, if the silicon is not the limit.

There are some passive AGP to PCI adapters for Voodoo cards which apparently also work really well with RV250/RV280.