I was restoring a Compaq Deskpro EN/SB with the Compaq GARRY motherboard (Slot 1/440EX), and I had heard good things about Mendocino Celeron CPUs, and this one came with a 400MHz Slot 1 Mendocino.

I was planning to pair it with an ATI Rage 128GL 32Mb - thought that would be period-correct and on the level of a Riva TNT more or less. The board gave the "can't initialize graphics card" beeps. And because the Rage card was untested, I decided to try a known good AGP 2.0 card - an S3 Virge/GX2. That did not work either.

I was about to give up, for the time being, on the GARRY board, but I still had a card in storage - an Intel 740, the Palit Daytona 740 8Mb variation.

One thing to remember about Intel 740 is, remember on Voodoo1 and 2, you had framebuffer memory and texture memory - in a sense, 740 similarly separates FB and texture memory, except all the memory on the card is for the framebuffer. The textures are read from the RAM via AGP aperture. And while someone might think ok, Voodoo2 has a 64 bit memory bus and 90MHz EDO memory, clearly it can't be faster than PC100 SDRAM with the same 64 bit memory bus. Except in practice Voodoo2 has 2 TMUs with 64 bit memory bus each, and the texture memory and the bus are used exclusively by the TMUs, while the RAM is used by everything, so in practice Intel essentially crippled the card by making it reliant on the AGP aperture exclusively.

Other than that, you get a 66MHz core clock on Intel 740 and 90MHz core clock on Voodoo2, and 2 pixel shaders, 1 TMU and 1 ROP on Intel and 1 pixel shader, 2 TMUs, 1 ROP on 3dfx. In comparison, Riva TNT comes with 90MHz core clock, 2 pixel shaders, 2 TMUs, 2 ROPs, and Rage 128GL has similar specs to Riva TNT except the core clock is 80MHz. These stats do not fully represent the real world performance of the cards because of differences in the underlying architecture. But I'm not going to compare Intel 740 to 3dfx Voodoo2 or Riva TNT or Rage128 GL.

I want you to understand that at this point I was fully committed to the idea of making this PC a DOS-first, mostly software rendered 3D machine, because I had no other period-accurate cards, and my known good universal AGP TNT2 M64 cards had also refused to work on this board.

So I set up Windows98SE, added an ESS AudioDrive Es1869 ISA card, and found out the first good things about Intel 740: namely, it had very good, very fast VBE 1.2, 2.0 and even 3.0 support. It also had nice picture quality - not on the level of Matrox Mystique or other Matrox cards, or Voodoo3, but clearly a step above TNT/TNT2 M64 and I'd argue even a bit better than good S3 Virge/Trio cards. The Windows performance was fast even without drivers, something even newer/more powerful cards often struggle with, and I assume it's because of VBIOS level VBE/AF support.

So I kept to my plan, going for DOS/software accelerated titles, up to Quake, and then I decided to try Quake 2. The software mode was decent, mostly giving me 20+ FPS @ 640x480, but then I decided to see for myself how bad the hardware accelerated mode would be.

I got 26 to 30 FPS in Quake 2 in OpenGL mode with really nice picture. I had been told so many times that Intel 740 was a disappointment and useless for 3D, and now I was seeing very playable performance on Quake 2. Not what I expected. Then I tried to push it further with Half Life. Again, totally playable, even comfortable. I did not try to go to 800x600 to keep maximum details, but considering what me and my friends had back in 1998, if I had this setup back then, I'd be more than happy. I tried Twisted Metal 2 World Tour - me and my sister spent most of our allowances on playing it on PS1 in the local gamezone - D3D acceleration, played like greased lightning.

I understand why someone who got Intel 740 over Voodoo2 or TNT or Rage128 or Matrox G200 might be disappointed - and by the time Unreal was released, the card was already outdated, but in this day and age, I got it for $10 and a Voodoo2 is south of $200.

And for games up to 1998 at 640x480, it showed commendable performance. It supported VESA, Direct3D and OpenGL, the drivers were rock solid and caused me no problems at all.

I found out the Deskpro had an old revision BIOS and updated it - which might have fixed the compatibility issues with AGP cards, but I was so impressed with the Intel 740 card I decided to keep it. It's good and if you get your hands on one, I suggest you give it a chance. You too might be pleasantly surprised.