ATI Radeon 9250 PCI - too much?

[SpidersWeb]

Building an ultimate tweener box (I have lots of Pentium parts and cases) to amuse myself.

I found an ATI Radeon 9250 PCI in a Pentium-III that I stripped out, and have the Windows 98 drivers.

Is putting it in a Pentium class machine a complete waste or should I keep it in there?

(I wont be finishing/powering up until tomorrow, just curious on opinions)

 

[Windows2000]

It's a bit overkill but I see no real problem if you can get the drivers for it. A regular Pentium can pull just a basic Windows 98 install but you won't make much use of the GPU without the CPU becoming a bottleneck to the whole platform.

To utilize the whole system, something a little weaker would work better. Unless of course you'd want to upgrade to a Pentium II, which I doubt since that would ruin the whole point of the project.

The original 3D RAGE or Mach 64 would be a more practical replacement but it really depends on what you'd like to do with the machine.

 

[Old Thrashbarg]

It's way overkill, but that's not really a problem in and of itself. However, if you're planning on gaming on the system, the 9250 may not be a good choice... some of the Radeons of that era supposedly had issues with VESA speed/compatibility, and I've also heard of image quality problems in old DX5/6 games. I can't personally verify that since I've never tried such a card for such a purpose, but it might be something to watch out for, anyway.

 

[SpidersWeb]

Cheers guys, that sums it up for me. It's mostly a tweener (network / syquest / zip / floppies / usb / serial transfers), but chances are I'll probably end up playing games on it, and I'd rather compatibility if there is potential concerns on that front - so glad you bought that up.

Oddly I have no Pentium II machines at all, after Pentium all I have is high end Pentium III and these models only supported a single 1.44. So it'll be staying as a Pentium - this board also gives me 4 ISA and 4 PCI slots - which works pretty well for me.

What I do have is a few S3 Virge's and I could steal a Diamond Monster 3D from another machine (VooDoo accelerator). I'd have thought I'd have had a TNT around somewhere as well but I'll have to dig. Don't think I've ever had a Mach 64 - great name.