What is a more "interesting" choice for an AGP card?

I have a Dell Dimension XPX T450 in my collection, and I've just discovered it can run a much faster CPU than I thought(supposedly up to 1ghz). I have a spare 933mhz slot1 I intend to park in it, and it already has the max 768mb of RAM. This machine is also home to my fully functional Sound Blaster 16 ISA card. All around a good retro system.

This leaves me scratching my chin in thought over a good graphics card choice for this system. I already have a separate Voodoo3 build in another tower, so no need to add a second of those. Obviously I could simply slot the fastest Geforce card in my collection, but that seems too obvious.

What would be a choice for an AGP graphics card that is more interesting, unique, less common? I've got some geforce 4s and 5s lying around that aren't very impressive. I've got some Matrox cards that are extremely "meh". ATI is an option, I've got a few of those, too.

What else is out there for some value of "charmingly unconventional"?

Quantum Obsidian AGP Voodoo 2 card? You'd have to pair it with a PCI VGA card.

I can recall going out of my way to get a Matrox G400 at a computer fair because they were renowned for high-quality 2D performance; I assume this meant good RAMDACs and clean analogue sides, which was important in the VGA world.

Go super-weird with something like a SiS Xabre or XGI Volari?

Hercules 3D Prophet 4500

My search is for naught.

As it turns out, the board only supports 100mhz FSBs, and fast 100mhz slot1 PIIIs are literal unicorns. I might try a slocket later since I do have some 1ghz 100mhz fsb socket 370s.

Here's a PGA370 part with a 100 MHz bus:


Maybe you could try it with a slotket?

PGA370 Celeron 1000 chips with 100 MHz bus are around $15-20, but neither is guaranteed to work with the XPS T450, just something to experiment.

As for a video card, if you had more dollars than sense, you could get an XGI Volari V8 Duo:


Just make sure you're married to someone with extensive board level repair experience and a deep knowledge of electronics.

XGI used a vomit menagerie of capacitor plague capacitors, the card you see above is after a failed recap with polymer caps. The card has absolutely massive power planes and is like 12-15 layers thick. I got the card too hot and a BGA joint failed on one of the memory ICs. I called it there because I don't have BGA rework equipment. Any card you get is going to have failed caps, but replacing them can make the card stop working lmao.

Joking aside, if you wanted the best performing AGP card, there were AGP versions of the Geforce 6600GT, 6800GT and 7800GS. On the ATI side, there were some x8xx/x1xxx cards, I think the HD3850 and the HD4650/70. Just keep in mind those will be heavily bottlenecked. Support of these cards also requires an AGP 4x/8x keyed slot, they won't work in AGP 2x slots.

A TNT2 Ultra would be good. The higher end cards need Athlons or faster to get the most speed out of them (they are AGP 8x).

The Matrox G400 Max is a nice card actually especially for games with EBM (environmental bump mapping).

The Kyro 2 4500 needs a fast P3 to get decent framerates (or better yet Athlon).

GiGaBiTe said:

Here's a PGA370 part with a 100 MHz bus:

RARE COPPERMINE Intel Pentium III 3 1000 1.0Ghz 100 Bus Socket 370 CPU SL5QV | eBay

BX80526F1000256 SL5QV. RB80526PY001256 SL5QV. It is designed to fit into Socket 370 and is perfect for those who are looking for a high-speed CPU to power their computer. Its Socket Type is Socket 370, and it is designed to work with a variety of computer systems.

www.ebay.com

Maybe you could try it with a slotket?

PGA370 Celeron 1000 chips with 100 MHz bus are around $15-20, but neither is guaranteed to work with the XPS T450, just something to experiment.

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I've got 2 of those coppermines in inventory, but a good slocket is tough to find these days.

Weird thing is I could swear I had one and its the sort of thing that *should* have survived my purges...

$80 for a P3 1ghz what's the world coming to.

Unknown_K said:

$80 for a P3 1ghz what's the world coming to.

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Oh, the 100mhz fsb Slot1 P3s are so very much worse. The 1ghz ones are so rare they command hundreds of dollars in the rare cases one even appears on the market. Any sort of 100mhz FSB slot1 over about 600mhz appears to be both rare and expensive.

Conversely, you can pick up a 133mhz fsb slot1 for like 40 bucks.

Unless I am mistaken, I have a dual P3 system with 700mhz slot 1 CPUs since they were the cheapest higher end part I could find at the time (which was a while ago).

I ran dual 933s at 733mhz in my dual slot1 system(admittedly I did this because I didn't realize the board only supported 100mhz fsb when I picked it). Still love the machine. I'm either going to keep doing that or downgrade to dual 550s or something. I frankly don't need the machine in question to be "fast" as much as I need it to simply exist.

I had PI/II/IIIs when they were new, so I didn't bother adding too many to my collection, but I did want some dual processor models.

I do have a Slot A here somewhere which were not that common.

Slot As were AMD, and you are correct that those are not common. But I think that has more to do with so many of them catching on fire within 3 years of production.

hunterjwizzard said:

Slot As were AMD, and you are correct that those are not common. But I think that has more to do with so many of them catching on fire within 3 years of production.

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What do you mean by that? The only issues I recall were socketed Athlons would burn themselves up in seconds if the heatsink came off because there was internal temp sensor to monitor core temps.

How about a Voodoo 3 3000/3500?

twolazy said:

How about a Voodoo 3 3000/3500?

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Already have one of those. And a Geforce 6800.

I did not realize that the PIII Slot 1 E versions (100mhz) shot up in price so much. It doesn't seem like they should be so rare. My PIII that I built in Late 1999/early 2000 I fitted with an 800Mhz E PIII and a Voodoo5 5500. I am glad I kept it working all these years. I had thought about upgrading the CPU to one of the E 1000mhz versions but yikes the prices make it not worth it.

So for graphics cards you mentioned you already have a Voodoo3 system. A Voodoo 5 is pretty cool too. Another interesting card is the Savage 3D or Savage 4 cards that support the S3TC. Some games did take advantage of that ability.

Zippy Zapp said:

So for graphics cards you mentioned you already have a Voodoo3 system. A Voodoo 5 is pretty cool too. Another interesting card is the Savage 3D or Savage 4 cards that support the S3TC. Some games did take advantage of that ability.

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You do not need a S3 card to use S3TC compression. S3 licensed their compression algorithms and it was incorporated into Direct X 6.0 and OpenGL 1.3. Most cards that support these rendering standards will also support S3TC compression in some form. Even though S3 has been defunct for decades as a graphics chip manufacturer, they were still getting royalties on their S3TC patent up until it expired in 2017-2018 from anyone that used it.

The Voodoo 4 and 5 support it (both based on VSA-100), as do the Nvidia TNT2 and the ATI Rage 128. The Voodoo3 might support it, but I don't remember for sure.

Unreal Tournament has S3TC in Glide mode, but it can be turned on via the hidden "preferences" menu via the console in Direct X and I think OpenGL as well.

Was the Rage 128 ever actually considered "good"? My only real knowledge of the chip is that it was somehow still being used for integrated graphics cards on servers well into the 2010s and possibly even today. I think I had one on a PCI AIW card, but don't remember it performing any better than the onboard graphics chip it replaced.