Based on those numbers i would think the ti500 is the best fit (and an awesome card). It is much faster than the ti200 and it will probably match the bottlenecked ti4200 numbers.

But the ti4200/ti4600 is a nice choice too because of the bottlenecks you will have no problem adding some AA to your favorite games and make them look even better!

meljor wrote:

Based on those numbers i would think the ti500 is the best fit (and an awesome card). It is much faster than the ti200 and it will probably match the bottlenecked ti4200 numbers.

But the ti4200/ti4600 is a nice choice too because of the bottlenecks you will have no problem adding some AA to your favorite games and make them look even better!

... the Ti500 is slower then the 8500le in everything but quake 3, and quite a bit slower then the GF4 Ti 4200 in everything. It scores about as much as the Radeon 9000 in 3DMark. It's VERY close to the 8500le UT99 but the 8500 takes the lead in 3dmark and UT 2004. The Ti500 is slightly faster in quake 3 arena (1-2fps). I'll post benchmarks as soon as I finish processing the results and test some more cards.

The Geforce 3 Ti500 is indeed a great card to use in this rig as the 8500 might be better suited in a faster socket A machine. I think the Ti 4200 is wasted on this - I'd rater use it on a fast socket A or 478 machine. I'm not done benchmarking everything yet, but frankly right now I favor the Ti500 and the 8500LE.

Oops, my bad. I did a quick reading about these cards. I was thinking about the 8500le as a cripled version but in reality it is almost as fast as the normal 8500, didn't remember that.

I simply like the ti500 for beeing not that common and i always prefere the nvidia's (and 3dfx) when it comes to older cards. Not so much today as i consider them pretty equal and just buy the best bang for the buck (R290 right now in my system).

If you don't use AA they are both nice choices it seems. I like to use AA to make the older games look a little better and then the true power of a geforce4 Ti is very usefull.

The ti4200 is indeed a perfect fit for an athlon xp system but i use geforce 6 GT/ultra in them for the same reason: extra AA power.

Keep the benchies coming 🤣

I would try more games than three first person shooters.

Putas wrote:

I would try more games than three first person shooters.

Could you recommend some 2000-2003 games with built in benchmarks?

meljor wrote:

Oops, my bad. I did a quick reading about these cards. I was thinking about the 8500le as a cripled version but in reality it is almost as fast as the normal 8500, didn't remember that.

The LE is easy to OC to Radeon 8500 levels (at least the core).

meljor wrote:

I simply like the ti500 for beeing not that common and i always prefere the nvidia's (and 3dfx) when it comes to older cards. Not so much today as i consider them pretty equal and just buy the best bang for the buck (R290 right now in my system).

I found 8500 cards to be pretty rare (in Romania at least). In contrast I have 4-5 Geforce 3 cards and I keep finding them online cheap, but this is the only 8500 card I have, and I've only recently come across it. For retro stuff, my preference depends on what games I want to play. If I want to play 1996- early 1999 glide games I'll use a voodoo 3. For late 1999-2003 games I prefer an ATi or nVidia card since the're a lot faster and easier to get. I don't really care if it's ATi or nvidia - I like both equally.

Going up in classes like these, I personally like Radeon the best. The radeon is close to the speed of the GF4, and it is more quiet.
This is only a personal preferance that I have. I know you love GF's, so yeah... Have you considered changing a cooler on a GF3 or 4?
(In order to get a more quiet card)

Anyway... Love the pic's. Hardware pr0n is most welcome all the time. 🤣

brostenen wrote:

Going up in classes like these, I personally like Radeon the best. The radeon is close to the speed of the GF4, and it is more quiet.
This is only a personal preferance that I have. I know you love GF's, so yeah... Have you considered changing a cooler on a GF3 or 4?
(In order to get a more quiet card)

I like both ATi and nVidia cards - I'm not biased towards one or the other. Throughout the years, when it came to choosing between ATi and nVidia the deciding factor has always been price/performance ratio and nothing more.

The cooler on the GF4 is not that noisy - it's A LOT better then the stock cooling solution (witch I kept but the noise keeps me from using it on the card - witch is a shame too because it looks great). I could have used a A280LE witch is the AGP 8x 128MB version of leadtek's 4200 - the fan on those is really quiet and has a 3-pin pmw connector - but it's bottlenecked by the PIII and so I prefer using a slower card.

brostenen wrote:

Anyway... Love the pic's. Hardware pr0n is most welcome all the time. 🤣

I also love HW pr0n - the more pics the better I always say 😁

Is 9700 Pro an option? That's period correct (Aug 2002) and sets it forward for "the future" quite a bit.

leileilol wrote:

Is 9700 Pro an option? That's period correct (Aug 2002) and sets it forward for "the future" quite a bit.

It would be but I don't have one (unless I mod my 9500). The 9700 is also way too fast for this build, but if I had one I would test it just for poops and giggles 😜

- Sapphire Radeon 9500 275 / 540 (L-shaped vram placement)*

The fastest card (and the best) you have is the one I quoted.
It can be easily softmod to 9700.

No doubt on that.

Plus, I don't think it could be too fast for a Tualatin-s, Instead I think a 9700/9800 Radeon could be a perfectly balanced VGA.

Just like the GF4 titanium the 9700 will perform at least twice as well on a faster machine. The whole point of this test suite is to find a card that will not be bottlenecked by the CPU or vice-versa.

For more period correct Geforce 3 Ti 500 for sure 😈
Ok lyric starts here - When i first swapped GF4 Ti 4200 for Radeon 9600,because of CRT,but i still remember how bright and juicy picture was after GF,difference in fps was not such big probably because of crappy celeron,anyway yep its a bit after 2002,but my thumbs still up up for 9600...

kanecvr wrote:

Just like the GF4 titanium the 9700 will perform at least twice as well on a faster machine. The whole point of this test suite is to find a card that will not be bottlenecked by the CPU or vice-versa.

I really don't think that a Radeon 9800 could be seriously bottlenecked by a Pentium-IIIs 1400Mhz.
Sure it could be faster on a native DDR Platform such as nForce2 or KT333 (and so on), but it's about the whole system. The A64 you tested is double powered itself compared to the P-IIIS.

Heck the Tualatin overclocked where waaaay faster than ANY Pentium IV 423 clock for clock (and some 478 for the S)

http://www.anandtech.com/show/804

It's true that a Geforce-3 Ti is more period correct, Raddy 9800/9700 IS the true power unlocker for that Platform, Tualatins where ahead of two years, performance-wise, we all know the story of Netburst.

Check your gpu usage in game (you could use Quake3) at different resolutions, if it's low then it's a cpu bottleneck generally.