Best Super Socket 7 GPU? Part 2: Nvidia

[@soylentgreenb]

The T in T&L emphatically does not stand for texture; it stands for transform. Rasterizing, z-culling and texturing is pretty much all a 3DFX voodoo 1 does. Transformation is taking the coordinates of a vertex and multiplying it by a matrix that represents several different rotations, translations, skews and other transformations. You have a viewport in the game, you have to translate and rotate the coordinates of everything in the world so that it represents what you see from that viewport, with the camera at the origin. Then you have the perspective divide. Things further away usually are supposed to be smaller; there's some particular field of view that you want to use. This isn't always the case; sometimes you want orthogonal projection for 2D or a top down game. In the end all, the coordinates fit neatly into a cube with x, y and z-values between plus and minus 1 and clipping that which is too far away, or not on the screen is very easy. Triangles which are partially inside the cube have to be clipped. The big innovation of the 3DFX voodoo was to not do T&L in hardware. Games had to support software rendering, so they couldn't use that many polygons anyway; therefore, what you needed to offload from the CPU was the expensive texturing and z-culling. This made the voodoo cheap and effective. What nvidia did with their "invention of the GPU" was to reintroduce hardware T&L which had been in 3D accelerators for workstations and flight simulators since the early 80's (I really mean that, e.g. see the Evans and Sunderland CT5 from 1981: kzbin.info/www/bejne/bIiQopWVn62FnqM ) T&L wasn't really that important when the geforce 256 was introduced, but gradually games stopped supporting software rendering and started really beefing up the number of polygons. In the Geforce 2 era and beyond it started really hurting to not have hardware T&L.

[@ShadowsBehindU]

I cringed every time he said texture :D

[@dactilardesign]

I was about to comment exactly your words.

[@TheVanillatech]

XD me too

[@si4632]

what version of direct x did games take advantage of T&L 7 OR 8

[@soylentgreenb]

@@si4632 OpenGL had it basically since forever since it was a standard feature in expensive workstation 3d cards since the 1980's (!). Direct3D introduced it in 7.0.

[@DanafoxyVixen]

Im really keen to see your results regarding the Sound card slowdown investigation. keep up the good videos!

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea, especially ISA vs PCI will be interesting :)

[@GAMMAXII]

Oh a 40 minute video from Phil "Grabs Popcorn"

[@KainiaKaria]

Hey Gamma.

[@Synthematix]

Grabs popcorn, golden virginia and pepsi max here

[@clipboard5535]

Love this channel with retro ( ...and no-so-retro ...) hardware...!!!... Keep it up mate...=)

[@MrMilli]

@12:38 I often didn't install VIA chipset drivers in the old days (90's). The MVP3 in Windows 98, without chipset drivers, will run at 1x AGP (instead of 2x) and features like AGP Fast Write and Side Band Addressing will also be disabled without drivers. Basically turning it into a 66Mhz PCI port which was actually sufficient for old cards. This story repeated itself a couple times with VIA's first AGP 4x and 8x chipsets. Old ATI cards gave you the option to set the AGP speed in the driver, which was a life saver in Windows.

[@Martin-sk5df]

I still remember my Geforce 256 SDR purchase. The memory bandwith was a bottleneck and was the main focus for overclocking. Later nvidia released the DDR version which made the purchase feel sour.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yes that sucks when they follow up with a newer and better version shortly after.

[@DatMake]

I'm running a MSI Geforce 4 Ti 4800 SE in my win98 machine, and after seeing the results i'm considering to swap it with my Gainward Geforce 2 Ti. Thanks for this research!

[@andreewert6576]

do benchmarks though. His 4200 seems to underperform here, and your 4800 is a bit faster still.

[@kaneCVR]

That's funny - I have the exact same motherboard and I use a Riva TNT2 PRO + Voodoo 2 SLi on it. I run quite a few games on the TNT2 PRO, and never had an issue. The secret is using VIA 4in1 4.35 OR OLDER. As for nvidia drivers, the most stable driver is 41.09 - this works with most nvidia cards up to the FX series. BIOS - wise you don't have to do anything, but do make sure you COMPLETELY WIPE the Voodoo 3 drivers before you install ANY nvidia drivers because that causes A LOT of weirdness (BSODS, hangs and such). I personally recommend keeping a copy of your windows folder on a seperate partition -with only chipset drivers installed (as well as audio, USB, whatever) - no directX, no video drivers - so you can override your windows folder when testing another brand of card. Windows 98 is EXTREMELY fidgety about drivers and such.

[@JohnSmith-iu8cj]

Very important recommendation, I agree

[@CkRtech]

I have my old Pentium III 700Mhz system that I was considering pulling out of storage and building a Windows 98 system for say 1998-2001. I think I actually still have my Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro (GeForce 256) - in box no less - in storage with it. This video definitely has me curious regarding how everything is going to come together. Probably going to drop a Diamond Monster MX300 (Aureal Vortex 2) in it. Will see how it goes. Thanks for the videos, Phil!

[@philscomputerlab]

Well it sounds like you have all the right components for a great retro gaming PC :)

[@kaneCVR]

My 2 cents: 1. Stay away from the TNT2 M64 - it's ok for 640x480, but if you go any higher (and you will if you want to play Quake 2 and alike) the TNT2 M64 is too slow. The TNT2 PRO on the other hand is great up to 1280x1024 on the K6-III. 2. Don't use a Geforce 4 MX if you plan to play older dos games as well. It has compatibility issues with some titles 3. The Geforce 4 Ti is NOT a winXP card. If you want to play win98 games with eye-candy all the way up, at 1600x1200, it's the card to get. Some games like Dugeon Keeper 2 don't like winXP - they will crash to desktop and other lovely things. Used in a Pentium III or Athlon XP FAST win98 machine, the GF4 Ti allows you to play lots of win98-prefered games at insane levels of detail (I recently finished Black & White 2 on my 3800+ A64 / GF4 Ti 4600 playing on 1920x1080 :D ). My picks would be: - if you want to throw money and time at this retro rig get a TNT2 PRO or Geforce 256. If you want it done CHEAP get a Geforce 2 MX, preferably the MX400. Great video Phil!

[@harryshuman9637]

Can't you just use an FX 5500?

[@eaglemaster7]

@@harryshuman9637 majority ss7 board have poor VRM, either AGP VRM will be too hot or power draw is insufficnent

[@JohnSmith-iu8cj]

The 40 driver was too new for the 4mx, you should use the 28 driver for less cpu bottleneck!

[@Faiadenza]

I had a gf4 mx440se with 64mb vram (I think) back in the days. After hotglueing a 40mm Fan onto the heatsink, it was quite overclockable and put out decent Performance. Fun times!

[@MrMateczkoYT]

Phew, nice long video, always liked your charts, beautiful :) Even though I have absolutely no interest in such old cards and more towards somthing like 6800 GT for 98SE, it's something about the quality of the video and your voice that makes your videos so good to watch :)

[@philscomputerlab]

Haha, I take that :D

[@NikiDaDude]

It probably makes me a weirdo but I still remember the specs of most of these cards, and I still get excited when I see a GeForce 3. I've lusted after them so much as a kid.

[@philscomputerlab]

Not weird at all!

[@MrKillswitch88]

8800 Ultra still does that to me, back then I only had a shitty ATI 2400 pro.

[@ph1losopher]

I remember that too. I remember spending $300 on a GeForce 2 GTS and GTX 970 :)

[@vetzRetro]

One of your best videos to date :) Loved the analysis with the graphs. That ELSA card is a VIVO card, not 3D glasses (Video in, Video out). Suggestion: Show some footage of the game/benchmark being run in the background of the graphs (just barely visible), could make for a bit more visually interesting presentation.

[@philscomputerlab]

Thanks. I feel mixed about this video, because I had to start over so many times. No idea how it ended up being 40 minutes long LOL This was a case of just getting it out the door. Anyway, lots more videos to come looking at other cards and stuff :)

[@WizardNumberNext]

You are absolutely right I have had some old computers Those almost always required some playing there and back until they decided to just work. My last and favorite Super Socket 7 motherboard is Asus P5-99B in fully loaded version with up to 124MHz overclocking. It is ALi Chipset. It is extremely rare too. I never was able to find another one, not to mention photograph of it.

[@tofuguru941]

I agree with so much of this. I have the majority of those cards... And for me it's between my riva tnt 2 ultra (viper v770 ultra) or my GeForce2 ti. For the price... Go tnt 2 ultra or TNT 2. GeForce2 ti performs better, but not by as much as it's cost difference. The gf2 mx400 is a nice in-between too. Although I get better performance with my tnt2 ultra in many scenarios. Great vid. Great efforts! Wish we were closer. I'd loan you a lot of my equipment if you wanted to test. (I'm in the USA) I have more stuff than I do time 😅 Keep up the good work. Love all your old and new videos.

[@philscomputerlab]

Thank you and warm greetings sent back 😄

[@hulkaman1a]

Thanks for the in-depth review! I can tell that it was a lot of work, made exponentially more challenging when you work full time. The video's are very much appreciated! Back in the summer of 2001, I bought a Geforce 3 that looked just like your Quadro Pro. It was from an obscure off brand company that went by the name eVGA. As I recall, it cost around $300. I bought it to replace my Voodoo 5 5500. As such, I'm excited to see how well the 3dfx cards fare in 98SE. I believe I still have it somewhere. I really hope so, as I can't get enough of this "retro" PC hardware, and I've recently begun collecting these old parts.

[@philscomputerlab]

Thank you! Yea it will be interesting to see the 3dfx cards. I got to make sure the charts don't get too packed and confusing, so I might just pitch a few cards against the 3dfx. Like 3 or 4.

[@hulkaman1a]

I think that would be great. I'm hoping to see the Voodoo 5 5500 results in there, as that's what I'm running on my PIII system! Still considering what type of system I'd put my Geforce 3 in. Back then, it was a T-Bird 1.2Ghz, coupled with a ThermalRight AX7 cooler. Had a very noisy Delta fan on it. Over time the heavy cooler cracked the die, and the capacitors began to leak, yet somehow the system continued to run, years later. I believe I have all the parts in storage somewhere. I hope I didn't throw them out!

[@hulkaman1a]

Just a follow-up. After an hour of digging through my storage unit, I found my Geforce 3, complete with a Thermaltake Crystal Orb, and Arctic Silver paste, as I recall :D

[@philscomputerlab]

Nice!

[@CTFC-GERMANY]

The Lable on your TNT2-Pro says "ViVO" this term was used for "Video in / Video out" back in days. maybe the additional SubD-Port was used for kind on TV-Connection? AFAIR the Elsa 3D glasses are connected via VGA-Adapter Cable. Nice Video anyways!!!

[@kaneCVR]

P.S. @ 6:12 - T&L stand for Transform and Lighting, not Textures and Lighting.

[@Xaltar_]

The Erazor III Pro 32 ViVo has a video input as well as an output (VIVO = Video In, Video Out).

[@retromaniac4563]

Enjoyed your video as always. Im impressed by the Geforce 256ddr and im lucky to have one. Got it from a friend many years ago, but never used it myself so i hope it still Works.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Perfect video, very thoughtful insights. I purchased a Geforce2 GTS for my P3 500 as that's what I had back in 2000. Will be much better than my TNT2 m64...!

[@nesfrk]

I would love to see that Soundcard benchmark! Keep it up, love your videos!

[@philscomputerlab]

Thanks! I finished the 3dfx benchmarks, and I'm actually now started testing sound cards :)

[@AlphaPlace]

@@philscomputerlab cool

[@orinokonx01]

Back when I was a teenager I was given an AX59Pro and a TNT2 and happily used that under win98SE for many years playing various opengl games. No compatibility issues, although I cannot recall what version of driver I used. I believe it was just the driver that came with the card so that probably helped a little...

[@philscomputerlab]

Thanks for letting me know! I do have the latest BIOS, maybe that causes issues. Also, what CPU did you use?

[@MatthewHolevinski]

A lot of the muck ups you found might of had to do with which individual port you had your sound card plugged into albeit isa or pci. I remember back in the day none of my systems would work correctly until I moved my nic to one port and my sound card to a different port. Sometimes I would have to plug my sound card into the first available pci slot and sometimes it was the last, or any variation of any order of any of my expansion cards. *** edit *** Also disabling a ton of stuff in the bios, like com ports and the likes to free up hardware addresses can almost always help too.

[@LawrenceTimme]

Great effort making this video. The quadro would be my pic

[@philscomputerlab]

Thanks and good choice :)

[@Karreth]

We had a Compaq Presario 5000 series back in the day that came with a GeForce 256 - it was actually pretty top spec Ed all around. So sad that computer has been lost to time, I'd love to have it now.

[@NightSprinter]

Yeah, TnL is definitely in play with the GeForce 256 and later, if you open up Quake II's console after launching the game, you should see something that says "enabling GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array". Also of note on the 3Dfx cards if not tested by now, is Quake II has a MiniGL driver for it optimized for AMD's "3D-Now!!" instruction set. Plus I believe some games were also given similar optimization if run on a K6-2/3 and a Voodoo2 or better.

[@AtariBorn]

It's funny you mention the Geforce 2 cards being the first to introduce the DVI port. I've seen several TNT2 cards with the pinouts for DVI ports on them but I've never seen any with the pinouts populated. I just assumed there were higher end versions of the TNT2 with the DVI port or the manufacturers used the same board for different cards that utilized them.

[@mrbrad4637]

The GeForce 4 MX440 was a great gaming card in a tight budget back in its day

[@soylentgreenb]

Super socket 7 CPUs had a weak FPU. I remember it took a while for nvidia to start supporting AMD's 3DNOW extension in their driver, which was an AMD equivalent of SSE that was important to get descent FPU performance. This may be an issue with the TNT/TNT2 cards if your driver is too ancient.

[@WizardNumberNext]

yes there is a difference between ISA and PCI sound cards I have had many in my time there was a time when I had 3 in one system (1 integrated - something with SOLO in name, 1 ISA -Sound Blaster AWE32/64 in form of very long ISA card, 1 as Yamaha YMF724F card) YMF724 had almost best sound and produced least of CPU load, but it had up to 180 interrupts a second AWE32/64 had by far best sound and produced highest CPU load with just 5 interrupts a second and huge latency or beyond count interrupts and great latency solo - I have not really used it

[@k9cj5]

That Nvidia Quadro 2 Pro 64MB AGP is a nice looking card. When I was in highschool I remember wanting one that looked very similar to that card. I think it was the Geforce 2 ultra or something. At the time I think I was using a diamond tnt2 m64.

[@kanopus06]

The Geforce2 MX200 had 64bit memory bus, while the original MX (I had one of those), did have 128bit memory bus, and was quite overclockable. I also had a Geforce 4 MX440, which was not a real Geforce 4 since it didn't have pixel shaders, thus being a DirectX7 hardware instead of DX8. And my last Geforce was the ti4200 from MSI, which was very overclockable to 300 MHz GPU and 600MHz memory, then I left nvidia and my next GPU was a Radeon 9700.

[@kanopus06]

Yes, that's the point in what I was saying. They were not true Geforce4's, more like Geforce 2's at hardware features.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea that explains why they are faster than the proper GF4 Ti. Thanks for pointing that out.

[@vasileios6301]

I used to have a Geforce4 MX4000,such a great budget card,I loved it. And the other commonly used was Radeon 9250

[@jamzales]

ELSA Erazor X A32 GeForce 256 SDR AGP 2X/4X used one of the first GeForce cards $2099 obo on ebay right now 5-16-2020.

[@charlesgrubbs8094]

That might have been a majority of my issues with Win 98 using K6-2 CPUs with and TNT/TNT 2 and GeForce 2 MX cards .

[@Y0URGRANDMA]

Currently building a two p3 (500/866mhz) win98 machines these videos are a godsend i have almost all the nvidia cards in this vid and no idea which was faster then what and yet couldn't get any of them to work with 3d acceleration until i tried that 8.05 driver recommend in this vid.

[@philscomputerlab]

Nice! Well your machine will perform quite a bit faster. The Pentium III, especially the 833, has a lot more performance :)

[@WitoEngelke]

Phil! Please! T&L has nothing to do with textures! It is the part of the pipeline which was not covered in consumer hardware before: Transformation. It was common to have geometry processing on workstation cards, often in the form of a GLINT chip (3dlabs) but these cards were extremely expensive. NVidia made the first consumer card wich supported geometry processing. And also: It was not supported out of the box for games, which is true but for everything using OpenGL, for example id software titles. It was crazy because the first Geforce and first Quadro outperformed these super expensive Elsa Gloria beasts right away and where so much cheaper.

[@philscomputerlab]

You're 2 years late...

[@WitoEngelke]

I just wanted to fill some gaps here and not only say "you got T&L wrong". It is interesting that until this point the professional marked was the main target and driving the industry. I think after this it shifted over to the consumer. Don't get me wrong, it is still a nice video and everything. No offence!

[@jakobwachter5181]

Looks like it's the TNT2 for Win98 and the 3 Ti 200 or the Quadro for anything later than that.

[@moruzx]

I had a similar problem with a TNT2 and a Socket 7 board (VIA Appolo chipset as I recall). The fix was to disable AGP Texturing and freezes were gone. Hope it helps.

[@m9078jk3]

What about a 32 MB Diamond Viper V770 Ultra TNT 2 They are very common and dirt cheap on eBay. I obtained several of them for only $5 USD each However I would add a fan on them though (not hard to do).

[@philscomputerlab]

Great buy at that price!

[@TheSynrgy1987]

Sometimes VIA chipsets can just be a pain in the ass, had to screw around to get a Matrox G400 max working in my P3 machine, but ATI and Nvidia worked fine. weirdness but luckily some bios options sorted it for me.

[@hardcore8uk]

Phil I would recommend an ATI Radeon 64 VIVO / 7200 or the fastest DX7 Radeon 7500, the 32bit performance is great but the biggest reason is it has environment bump mapping that the Nvidia geforce 2 cards didn't have, only dot3, and looks great in games like Giants, Expendable, also comes in agp or pci so you could aquire both and benchmark the difference in bus speeds. I remember buying the Radeon 64 VIVO back in 2000 and was extremely happy with it, no problem from what I remember with compatibility with any games, it just ran excellent with all DX & openGL games

[@philscomputerlab]

I will check out ATI for sure! But AFAIK, Expendable only had a Bump Mapping patch for Matrox.

[@hardcore8uk]

+PhilsComputerLab check this patch out Phil ;-) redtux.rocik.net/?page=projects&sub=expendable

[@philscomputerlab]

Haha, that's cool :)

[@9800xt256mb]

At 26:30 , when you talk about improvements of nvidia's AA, you are forgot about very low power (for gf3 and 4) cpu. I'm sure GF4 on P4 can go much than 200 fps in ''clean'' mode, and there will be still big speed drop with AA. Also, i saw TNT or TNT2 with DVI. And GF2MX was first cheap dual monitor output card. MX440 or 460 clocked higher than Ti4200, thas is why in old (for GF4) games MX can beat Ti.

[@xephorce]

I finally got all my super socket 7 parts together. I got an Asus P5A-b mobo and 2 crappy Compaq mobos to play with. Thanks to the Compaq mobos I got a k6-2 @400mhz and a K6-3 not sure what its clock rate is. found a bunch of old video cards just got to see if any of it works. nothing like finding 6 old computer in a garage that hasn't been opened in 15+ years. lol, Wish I could find more info on the Compaq mobos they are OEM or rebranded to OEM. not sure again tracking info on them is next to impossible due to the fact that HP doesn't have any information on their website. it is beyond there support no drivers nothing. I am just glad other companies still support their old hardware but keeping drivers available.

[@philscomputerlab]

OEM boards work just fine most of the time. They might not have all the tweaking options, or best speed, but they should work reliably.

[@xephorce]

PhilsComputerLab do u have any suggestions on where to fine drivers for a mobo from a Compaq persario 5600s and a 5242. I found some information. for jumpers and what not just can't find drivers. I may have to investigate the mobo at a chip level to find where to go lol.

[@philscomputerlab]

Once you realise that drivers are not made for specific motherboards, it's really easy :)

[@BCProgramming]

I was never able to get any NVidia card I tried to work on my Epox MVP3G-M Motherboard.. With Windows 9x I would get lockups like you've documented here, and with Windows XP it would blue screen right away any time the 3-D Capabilities were used (IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_EQUAL). My understanding is that it may be a chipset issue related to AGP support, though I didn't really look into it myself after finding ATI cards worked without issue.

[@philscomputerlab]

So ATI worked well for you? Cool, I'm looking forward to testing a few of them :)

[@PaintsAreOp]

Used to had Geforce 4400 TI back in the days... Really hate that card! DirectX8 support when DirectX9 had alreade came and the impossibly bad cooler that just didn't stick on the card. Still have it but I'd prefer DirectX9 cards.

[@marcgalloway1926]

For those of us that don't have an AGP slot what PCI cards do you recommend?

[@philscomputerlab]

I don't have a single PCI card I'm afraid...

[@NightSprinter]

Marc Galloway If you can find a PCI Voodoo3 or Voodoo Banshee, go for it. Otherwise, best to go for the most compatible 2D card and at least one Voodoo2.

[@SyphistPrime]

"Stay away from the 420" that sentence makes me sad.

[@MegaSmouke]

GeForce 4 MX series was really dissapointing cards. My story that I can't run blowing-mind shader water in Morrowind with GF4 MX-440. And my friend enjoys with nice water in Morrowind with GeForce 3.

[@DerMannInDerWand]

Yeah, the GeForce4 MX 440 I had at the time always gave me grief, and horrible amounts of graphics glitches. It actually made me a fan of ATi cards for many years, because I was so happy with my next card, which was an ATi, compared to the GeForce4.

[@MegaSmouke]

Yes, ATI rocks at that time, especially with Radeon 9xxx series. I think they made some mistakes with marketing, but from engineering side they cards was beasts. I was quite disapointed when goes from GF 6600 to Radeon X1600 Pro, actually Radeon X1300 XT is the same card, I never understand such kind of marketing. Later they updated whole midle-end line to X1650 Pro/XT and that was a good cards, but I was already with X1950 Pro - that was a beast by very good price.

[@soylentgreenb]

@@MegaSmouke Are you kidding? The water in Morrowind looked like liquid mercury with DX8 shaders on (look for an ancient video on geforce 4 or geforce fx hardware and you'll see how bad it looked; most modern morrowind videos use mods with *much* better water).

[@MegaSmouke]

@@soylentgreenb Maybe from 2020 standpoint Morrowind water is not so great. Also it looks like mercury due to incorrect simulation on modern PC (too fast), on slower PC it looks much better. But I still remember how I saw rainy water in Morrowing at my friend and how I was amazed! If you not believe me, you can read old game reivew articles, lot of reviewers also was blowed away with Morrowind water. There are was nothing like this at 2002.

[@AIM9XSW]

I have both a DFI P5BV3+ and a K6BV3+, which support Pentium MMX, AMD K6, K6-2 and K6-III processors (The K6BV3+ supports higher CPU clock speeds and up to 768 MB of RAM vs 384 on the P5BV3+, but Win 98 does well on only 256 MB). These are AT motherboards which contain both an AT power connector and a 20-pin ATX power connector, which is great. They're both great retro motherboards for Win 98 gaming, and both of them work well with a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 (though this video card will incur a significant CPU bottleneck in this case). The CPU placement on these motherboards is unfortunate. The CPU socket is directly behind the 3 of the 4 PCI slots, making it impossible to use a Voodoo2 SLI solution. This motherboard (K6XV3+/66) is a huge improvement.

[@bojinglebells]

a bit of a failed prediction there about DVI vs VGA, as I have seen more new monitors supporting VGA as a legacy connection, but not DVI, as DVI has pretty much been phased out in favor of DisplayPort and HDMI

[@philscomputerlab]

Without VGA there is nothing you can do, but with DP it easy to use HDMI or DVI.

[@KurtHectic97]

Awesome vídeo. I had a Geforce 2 Ti and was great for old games. Now i had to change to FX5200 and i don't know if is too extreme for old games (it's really cheap here and i have one). Two tests that i'm curious about and maybe you can do it: * Comparison between TNT/Geforce and Rage/Radeon image quality * Benchmark for DOS/Win98 from 32MB RAM to 512MB (or even more if the motherboard can support)

[@philscomputerlab]

Well I will look at ATI cards for sure. I didn't notice any image quality issues between TNT2 and GeForce, but this is really hard to test anyway. Ram could be of interest, good point.

[@tecrdasantos7418]

For 5 bucks you get a radeon 9250, or a fx5200, both just smashes all these cards! yeha they will be overkill for that system, but in my opinion is a waste of time trying to find a suitable card for a system like that... either for retro gaming or anything else

[@si4632]

I'd go for a 9600 pro

[@QuadTubeChannel]

That Quadro looks like a Geforce 2 Ultra. Anyone remember that card? I used to run one with a K6-III+, mainly for GTA III. Use to run it great, even at higher resolutions :)

[@si4632]

MY K6-2 550 was a dog still 50£ for a cpu back then was good i paid £200 for a geforce 256 ddr not the best combo lol

[@gambiarramotores9938]

on the board uses windows 2000 or windows xp which resolves

[@SeltsamerAttraktor]

"I would get haarrd .... lockups" made me chuckle bit.

[@Synthematix]

The DFI Pro875B is my favourite motherboard of all time

[@B24Fox]

I would have REALLY liked to see MDK2 tested with higher resolutions. Testing only at 640x480 was quite pointless, as it was obviously bottlenecked by the CPU. Would have been very interesting to see how each card dips at 1024x768 and 1280x1024, seeing as most cards were launched in '99 & upwards, and MDK2 was the newest game of the bunch.

[@pourquoiunidentifiant]

i had a geforce 2 from ... Sparkle Power .... would be nice to see someone make a build from sparkle power and see if it sparks

[@irgendna]

Really, with any driver above 8.05 on geforce2 i barely got 2000 in 3dmark2000, on the same system, no matter which driver version up to 44.xx, but with 8.05 it reaches ~3500 Like it fails to software TnL, could it be on later drivers hardware TnL should be enabled in registry somehow?

[@adg1355]

NV cards used to run well on Aladdin V though. And why this Creative stuff, BTW? Aureal was the sound card of choice these days.

[@Ziimbiian]

By looking at the Motherboards, a 6200 256mb doesnt work? at least for Windows 2000

[@CMDRSweeper]

Ah this reminds me way back in the day, I was operating an old AMD K6-2 overclocked to 350MHz, socket 7 computer. What kind of GPU got put in it? I put in a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 :P way overkill for the computer, but that GPU was later used in a Socket A setup.

[@philscomputerlab]

Wow, that was a high end GPU back in those days!

[@CMDRSweeper]

PhilsComputerLab It was a nice graphics card, but the motherboard did have some strange issue in games. Textures and models would spike out and weird physics would occur. In Operation Flashpoint, characters and vehicles could all of a sudden be launched into the air causing all manner of problems.

[@davidschaper3238]

In my experience the performance difference between ISA and PCI sound cards is quite noticeable, especially with non-Intel chipsets.

[@johnrickard8512]

My suggestion would be to use the Quadro2 Pro paired with a Voodoo 2 for older games.

[@swiftfox3461]

I now want the Quattro card just because it's​ a bit unusual (workstation class) and because it has DVI output. I standardised on HDMI for my setup, so DVI would fit into this perfectly. Too bad I still have no VGA -> HDMI/DVI converter. Anyone have any​ recommendations for a good inexpensive one that can do 1080p and 1024x768?

[@WaybackTECH]

There is also the Geforce 2 MX100. Definitely see the CPU becoming the bottleneck there with the faster cards. Though if one only wants to game at 10x7 or 12x10 resolutions, then one of those become the obvious choice to maintain high fps. Geforce 2 GTS cards are pretty cheap on ebay here in the states, about $15 or less. Probably that or the 3MX 200/400 cards would be my pick for a K62/3 system at 350-550Mhz, below that I would probably go with the TNT2, but considering the TNT2 cards except the Vanta and M64 cards are somewhat expensive compared to the Geforce 2 and 3 cards, well probably would go with one of the geforce variants if I was shopping around to build something from scratch. I am kind of surprised you went with the TNT2 pro instead of your Ultra for the benchmarking. People who watch videos have no concept of how much time it takes to do benchmarking like this, plus making the video and such. I have people sometimes say I should run this benchmark or that benchmark, but frankly, I am just like you when it comes to time vs benchmarks vs cards or cpu's. Plus it is not much fun to sit there and repeat the benchmarks several times either, gets boring :) and when it gets boring it becomes no fun anymore! Kind of surprised about the issues you had with the nvidia cards. I haven't had issues with my MVP3 chipset boards with nvidia and via chipset drivers before, except when I combined nvidia with voodoo 2 cards and their drivers, that's when things went bust, but fresh clean windows with the nvidia drivers, I never had an issue. The ISA soundcard will definitely hold back the performance over PCI cards. SB64 is a great card but when you start getting to faster chips, and more complex sound in games, that ISA bus becomes a real bottleneck to the rest of the system. You will still see a bit of a hit in fps with a PCI card, but no where near as much. When I did some testing of a SBLive with Quake 3, I saw maybe a 2fps at most increase without sound.

[@philscomputerlab]

Haha, yes, that Forsaken and Drakan benchmarks, they just take way too long. At least Forsaken scales, Drakan is so CPU bound, you get the same result beasically. The 3dfx cards should go quickly because most are 16 bit only :) I actually don't have an Ultra, when I did those benchmarks I just overclocked the Pro :D You are totally right about the cheaper alternatives. A few I had, there are so many others, you just got to look on eBay and see what's cheap and available in your region. The TNT2 M64 cards are just everywhere unfortunately.

[@mikeall7012]

What is your experience with on board sound? I would imagine the bottleneck is the same as the PCI bottleneck, since they are still integrated into the PCI bus. Also, how much of a practical boost do you get from running AGP, vs PCI video cards, on a socket 7 platform? Assuming you are only going to run games from that era. I feel like the processor will limit any performance the AGP will give, if the card is the same, aside from the com interface.

[@philscomputerlab]

I don't have any PCI cards, so can't compare them. Would be interesting. Onboard sound? Interesting, well I never use them, always dedicated sound cards. On faster CPUs it might not matter much, but I will test sound cards for this CPU to see what's going on.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

ATi cards back in the day weren't that good with OpenGL in games. That was always more of a nVidia domain. Also I assume a dedicated sound card could pull some load from the CPU. Besides better audio quality it was one of the reasons to pick one.

[@philscomputerlab]

The multiplier can be changed via software, so I can turn it into a 200 MHz, or 400, whatever I like. Turn off caches and I have a 386. Max it out and I can play some Quake II and Unreal. That's what this is about :)

[@wfp9378]

My decision is difficult and some advice would be handy. I have a CUBX (SOCKET 370) - Celeron 600MHZ with AGP and its pure Win98. I have been using an AGP Voodoo 3 1000 in it but I also have a spare Geforce MX4000EL (64MB). I also have a Voodoo 2. What would be better eep the Voodoo 3 or Pair up the Voodoo 2 and the Geforce MX4000EL?

[@philscomputerlab]

Well it's really about the API, are the games you want to play supporting Glide? If so, Voodoo 3 is the way to go.

[@wfp9378]

​@@philscomputerlab Thanks for these videos. I watched many of these years back and revisit time to time. Over this past week I finally realised that the K6-2/450 system I have is actually a Super Socket 7 board (Asus P5S-B) whose only drawbacks are that it has the ancient bulky AT keyboard jack and the only AGP circuitry on it is only for the onboard graphics, so no AGP slot. But I have a PCI Voodoo 3 so this is not an issue. I also discovered that 2 of my "viewed with disdain" Asus branded TNT2 M64/Vantas are actually both the Pro version! :-) And in another surprise a seemingly very rare card I picked 15 years ago because it had a wavetable daughter board attached actually has an OPL3 chip on it! It's the ISA Samsung Audio Magic 2 - Its a large card, looking nearly like a clone of my Soundscape 2000, with all 4 of the old CDROM interfaces on it. I don't know how the card sounds yet as never tried installing (a Korean youtuber passed me the drivers years ago) so I can't compare yet to the actual SBPro or the Alsound100 which I have.

[@fscSimonetti]

Eae Phils sou brasileiro e não entendo muito de inglês mas assisto seus videos pois gosto de pcs retro inclusive tenho aqui uma 6800gt msi e um athlon xp 2600+ Parabéns pelo seu trabalho e continue sempre trazendo videos para gente

[@dabombinablemi6188]

I really need to replace my dead Geforce 256. Being run with a seized fan for years ended up killing it and I always hated having to go back to using a Riva TNT2 Vanata.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea those little fans slowly die over time and these cards don't have protections built in. My Voodoo 4 has this issue, I put a 80 cm fan onto it when benchmarking.

[@dabombinablemi6188]

Its one of those things that if I'd been thinking at the time, I could have pulled the ball bearing fan off the Riva TNT2 and used it on the 256 as the heatsinks+fan size were the same.

[@mikeall7012]

i would be interested to see you test/compare some of the PCI versions, as well. My socket 7+ setup only has PCI. The only PCI card i have right now is an ATI rage 128 and am kind of curious if it would be worth investing in a more "era appropriate" card and using the rage in an XP system. Thanks, as always, for the video.

[@philscomputerlab]

I wish I had some PCI cards to compare with their AGP equivalent cards.

[@alat_ka]

How to play glquake on nvidia?

[@777anarchist]

Very nice video. I'm impressed with how well K6-3 does in games. Are you going to make a video on non-ATI/nvidia/3dfx cards?

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea it's a good little chip. It would be even better if had stronger floating point performance, but the strength is in the multiplier that can be flicked in real-time and the cache tricks to slow it down.

[@777anarchist]

I've got K6-2 333@450MHz and it performs really bad, worse than 233MMX stock. 5VP3 board has official support only for K6, probably it's the case. Anyway, your config is hard to beat.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yes the floating point performance of the chip is quite poor. I think the 233 MMX will run Quake games just as well.

[@balthron]

Phil. if you ever get your hand around a Kyro 2 card could you also test it with a socket 7 motherboard?

[@philscomputerlab]

I will review the Kyro 2 cards at some point, but I got to wrap up this SS7 project soon. You got to draw the line somewhere I'm afraid...

[@balthron]

Well never mind then, thanks anyway for your replay.

[@djkytronic]

Odd I ran that Aopen Board and a TNT2 pro a while back with no issues...

[@philscomputerlab]

Do you have more details please?

[@djkytronic]

let me pull that system out and see what all is on it I will get back tomorrow or Monday.

[@philscomputerlab]

That would be awesome, thank you!

[@djkytronic]

Okay looking the system over i am using the 2.35 bios I am considering putting the 2.36 bios on it Build specs: Aopen ax59pro Bios 2.35 CPU: K6-2 450 MHz (AFX model) Ram: 128 MB (2 x 64MB PC100) Vid: TNT2 pro 32MB Sound: Awe64 CT4390 (changing it out for a Live ct4830 soon) LAN: None Optical: Lite-On DVD DL Burner HDD: 8 GB CF (Boot) 40 GB Seagate IDE OS: 98se What is in my drivers folder for the system: Drivers: Via Drive 4in1 driver: d34vhvz8ul1ifj.cloudfront.net/Driver/VIA_4in1_443v.zip ftp://ftp.aopen.com/pub/driver/mb/ax59pro/ 580_2133.exe nirq-13.zip Viareg.zip vxd29.zip (not sure if used or not.Believe i used the installed one from the via 4n1) Nvidia 28.32: www.nvidia.com/object/det_xp_win9x_28.32 Bios: ftp://ftp.aopen.com/pub/bios/ax59pro/ Board came flashed with ax259p235 will test 2.36

[@philscomputerlab]

Thank you! That is great information. I haven't tried using an older BIOS...

[@QuadTubeChannel]

Your cards look so pristine.. how do you get them so clean? They look like new.

[@swiftfox3461]

QuadTubeChannel Yes, Phil, please reveal your secrets.

[@lightdark28]

geforce256 tends to be a little hard to find (usually you have to look for a specific model), for me this means the best ones would be either a TNT2 or a Geforce2

[@icqme8586]

What's the oldest card with an auxiliary powder connector? I've had problems with cards on Socket7 boards because of the power draw. Found a 5200 ultra with a connector, seems stable but wonder if it's too new with too much driver overheard.

[@philscomputerlab]

Hmm Radeon 9700 Pro maybe?

[@grzegorz2606]

Will there be Radeon 9600 normal/SE/Pro/XT in the ATI benchmark? I have a 9600SE 128MB and I'm planning to use it with my new Pentium 4 system

[@phillipstearns7258]

what about quadro fx500? I read it's faster, and it's agp. there is a ton of them on ebay here in the US. I got one for $12.

[@philscomputerlab]

Well how is it? Do you have a link, they often don't show up for me.

[@Habbababba]

Hey Phil,. I have strange issue with blue screen in some games ( WIn98SE ) eg. WinQuake. I've got Asus P5A-B with K6-2 500 AFX . Checked GF 2MX, 4MX, FX 5200 all the same giving me blue screen with "0D at VMM(01) +... 0001ABC" error. Checked different settings , different bios, different drivers from your website . BTW nVidia drivers 45.23 works best for me. Worked out that 0D error is from CPU but it runs STD without overclocking. I've bought K6-2+ 500 which is on its way, maybe it solves the issue...

[@philscomputerlab]

Could be anything I'm afraid :(

[@llugnuto7795]

theres a speck on your perfect white background

[@beanovskydurst]

Thanks Phil, this is pretty helpful, I'm working on a K6-2 500Mhz Win98 Retro gaming machine, and I'm getting very low framerates on OpenGL games like Half-Life with a TNT2 M64 16MB PCI card... Thinking of upgrading it to something with more juice. My target is at least 30FPS at 1024x768 max, on games like Half-Life, Quake II and Unreal, and there's an MX4000 128MB PCI that I could get... You think it could work?

[@Iirichil73]

whats the AGP version on that MB

[@gmaverick2k533]

Hey Phil. Could you recommend a monitor for old pc gaming. You have a variety of monitors used in different vides. Thanks

[@philscomputerlab]

I recommend using whatever you already have! I've had had mine for ages but didn't get them for gaming specifically, most are free pickups.

[@gmaverick2k533]

which do you prefer for modern led's

[@philscomputerlab]

I'm up to speed / date. No 4K, no IPS, no super widesscreen. I just have basic 16:9 screens and I'm happy with them.

[@gmaverick2k533]

So in a nutshell, anythang

[@vonhapen1]

What software do you use for creating the diagrams? Is it Excel or something special? Looks very good. Oh and keep up the great work. This brings back time. Thank you very much for this.

[@philscomputerlab]

Just PowerPoint :) But yea, it uses Excel to enter the data.

[@soylentgreenb]

I'm expecting Aureal A3D 2.0 with the wavetracing turned on to be quite CPU intensive. You're probably going to want a pentium II/pentium III or k7 for that. A3D 1.0 _should hopefully_ be a piece of cake; no more punishing than whatever result you're getting with a sound blaster.

[@plaguedoctor3782]

PCI Sound cards are CPU hogs compared to their ISA brothers.

[@soylentgreenb]

More sound channels, higher quality probably is a little worse than ISA. Although A3D 2.0 should be significantly worse. The point of having more CPU power is to use it for a worthwhile purpose. A3D 2.0 is such a worthwhile purpose; it sounds amazing and nothing has conclusively beaten its positional audio still in 2016; would be interesting to see how heavy it really was.

[@philscomputerlab]

I'm working on some benchmarks. One issue I have is finding games that 1. run decently (not low FPS) on a SS7 and 2. have high sample rates, like 44 KHz and 16 bit. GLQuake for example uses only 11 KHz and even Quake III does only 22 KHz and 16 bit max. Any ideas?

[@modernandretrogaming]

Great movie, I have GF4MX440 and GF2MX400, and TnL is Transform and Lighting not "texture". Do you make tests that platform with some Radeons like 9000 or 9250?

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea I got the TnL wrong, rookie move :D I will do ATI cards, not sure if I'll try such modern cards though, I also need to check what I've actually got.

[@modernandretrogaming]

PhilsComputerLab In newer platform with Celeron 433 with motherboard on VIA chipset, Radeon 9250 work very good in 98, 9000 PRO will be even better. Also I haven`t any problems with 9600 in 98SE but I tried that with much newer mainboard ECS K7S5A Pro. I have also that three Radeons, but no mainboards with Socket370 or SocketA or 7.

[@modernandretrogaming]

You can also show TrueForm in some games like Neverwinter Nights, Serious Sam, Quake II and RTCW. But you must use older drivers than 4.7 for using TrueForm with Radeon videocards, and that technology work best on Radeon 8500/9100.

[@philscomputerlab]

Nice, Quake II support this? Got to check that out for sure. Do you know the console command to turn this on and off?

[@modernandretrogaming]

You must find TruQuake patch for that, also you can find that patch for UT99, in UT2004 you can turn on that by editing game.ini and set there UseNpatches=true, on vogonswiki is site about Trueform. And that`s link for that site: www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/TruForm

[@KainiaKaria]

I suspect a 3DFX Voodoo 5 5500 making an appearance.

[@MrKillswitch88]

Unlikely unless someone acts as a middle man and ships him a card or gifts one as they are Rare and crazy expensive in that country. It is a real pity as they used to be cheap but now days they often go for $150 us :c Give it two or three years and they will probably be around $200 a pop.

[@GAMMAXII]

Doesn't Phil have one? I could've sworn that I've seen them in his videos.

[@MrKillswitch88]

***** It was a cardboard cut out ;) One is better off running nGlide and using the money for other cards at that point. $30 Voodoo 3 is a much better value for the money.

[@plaguedoctor3782]

Honestly, V2 SLI is a better price point. Hell, you could get yourself a PII 450 V2 SLI system for that kind of money.

[@GAMMAXII]

Plague Doctor I already had the whole sishkabob with a 1.1ghz Pentium 3 and a Voodoo4. No point in Building a Pentium 2 when I can just use my current system.

[@alexanrsousa]

Just beware the GeForce4 MX4000. That thing is slower than an MX460 or MX440+AGP8x and is somewhat newer. It was launched as an OEM/entry level card below the GeForce FX 5200 cards, and needs FX-era drivers. Also, GeForce4 MX chips have more in common with GeForce2 cores than 3/4 Ti ones. So they probably use a different code path in the drivers that might perform a bit better on SS7 processors.

[@philscomputerlab]

Ah, yes that makes sense! Thank you

[@xaer0knight]

So what kind of performance decrease would you expect from cards of this era using PCI instead of AGP?

[@BoomBox02]

I would also like to know. I have a few Nvidia (i think they are tnt?) PCI cards and would like to know how much slower these cards are compared to their AGP counterparts? A review/benchmarks on the same cards in PCI and AGP form would be great.

[@philscomputerlab]

Don't have any PCI cards, sorry.

[@BoomBox02]

PhilsComputerLab Thats a shame. I think it would make an interesting video if you had PCI cards to compare. BTW thanks for this great video. I found it really informative. Cheers

[@philscomputerlab]

Boom Box Agreed. You should avoid compatibility issues with PCI cards also, so they should work better :)

[@ph1losopher]

I have a PCI Matrox G450 which gets less than half the framerate of a Rage 128 Fury AGP on a PII 400 in Quake 2.

[@JohnAmanar]

Hi Phil! Great video! ^_^ Do you have any idea why I cannot get higher score than 7500 in 3Dmark99? I am sure it is the 75 FPS locked framerate, but why? It's Window ME. 3DMark 2000 and others are working great by default. Also some extra info that might help you with 9x: For Unreal Tournament if you have laggy menus, use OpenGL and not Direct3D. Looks better and it is smooth. Other thing with 3DMark 2000. If it crashes instantly on some builds, run new custom benchmark first with everything set to the lowest and software render. Let it run for just a sec, then reset to default and it will run just great. I've watched a dozen of your videos and in some, these things were and issue and I wanted to share these experiences. Good luck with the new ones! :D

[@philscomputerlab]

75 FPS? You likely have V-Sync engaged.

[@JohnAmanar]

I think so. How can I force it off? From the driver control panel? Why is it only apply for 3DMark99 and not for the other 3DMarks or games? Thanks again!

[@philscomputerlab]

Yes look there, it might take a reboot. If it doesn't work, try tools like PowerStrip or ATI Tray Tools. Beyond that you might have to Google for an answer. Good luck!

[@jameslewis2635]

Looking at the numbers on your screens, it seems to me that the higher performance cards are being bottlenecked by the CPU. The reason I say this is because the end up with pretty much the same performance numbers.

[@nix123ism]

exactly what I was thinking with the quake II test @ 24:00 min in, the geforce 256 DDR and all other cards were smudged together at probably max FPS for this cpu so any better card than the geforce 256 DDR is a waste of time and money.

[@MarcWeavers]

agp aperture size 4MB? avoid turbo? the opposite of what i used to be doing plus ensure the AGP-PCI bridge driver was installed correctly to make sure the AGP texture acceleration showed up properly in DX Diag :D might have something to do with the keyed notch cut into the card on the connector, something to with agp version and voltage compatibility

[@swiftfox3461]

Cheers for the GeForce 2 MX400! This was the card we had in my household's first PC, I still have another one of these stashed away in my parts box. Maybe it will get a use one day :) Edit: Anybody else with this card on here?

[@philscomputerlab]

Psssst: That card will get a showing very soon :D

[@allesbelegt]

Great and interesting video. Did you have the compatiblity issues only with the via chipset or also with ali and sis? Btw: The Geforce4 MX is an Geforce2 MX on steroids, because it is missing all the features of the geforce3 and geforce4.

[@philscomputerlab]

At this point in time I will only use this VIA motherboard to try out all sorts of graphics cards and get a big picture so to speak.

[@ckmhax]

You have lost very much geometry performance on NVIDIA cards with that low 4MB AGP aperture size. That was one of the BIOS mystery I tried to solve back in 2001 (working for pc.com.pl site as an editor (now its called pclab.pl) Best to check on 3dMark 2000 or 2001 (geometry test). Several hundred % diffrence between 4MB and 256MB aperture size in polygon/geometry results (tested on venerable BX440 motherboard). Maby something to look into? I think it has big influence depending on game/benchmark used. Great channel you have here. Greets!

[@philscomputerlab]

I didn't have to use that BIOS setting with the DFI board. The BIOS Turbo defaults worked fine :)

[@MegaSmarthead]

I use a 256MB DDR2 Nvidia 6200 in my retro build