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[Catalyst]

One of my computers is an old Compaq Presario 366 from 1998 I want to give to my brother as a late birthday present. It does Photoshop and many applications well, although it's a tad slow for today's standards. Plays DVD movies, burns CDs, just a tad slower. Anyway, I used to have a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI that ran Quake III using a gig of RAM. It recently burned out so I had to switch back to motherboard onboard 4 MB shit...hahahaha. This $60 card at Walmart...a PNY GeForce FX5200 PCI Card...

...caught my eye. I can imagine I won't be able to run anything higher than Deus Ex or Quake III or Alice, and I can imagine it'll speed up photo editing and whatnot better than the Voodoo3..here are the specs:

32-bit AGP 8x/4x/2x bus, 3.0 compliant
128 MB, 128-bit DDR memory (650 MHz memory data rate) with integrated heatsink/cooling fan
10.4 GB per second memory bandwidth
256-bit graphics core (250 MHz core clock)
1 billion texels per second fill rate
63 million vertices per second setup
DX9 with Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 2.0+
4 pixels per clock 3D rendering engine
128-bit, studio-quality floating point precision through the entire graphics pipeline
Support for 128-bit floating point, 64-bit floating point and 32-bit integer rendering modes
Up to 16 textures per pass
Support for sRBG texture format for gamma textures
DirectX and S3TC texture compression
2D rendering engine is optimized for 32, 24, 16, 15 and 8-bpp modes
True-color 64 x 64 hardware cursor with alpha
Double, triple and quad multi-buffering for smooth animation and video playback
Advanced display pipeline offers full nView multi-display capability
Dual 350 MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to 2048 x 1536 at 85 Hz
Integrated TV encoder supporting resolutions up to 1024 x 768
Integrated full-hardware MPEG-2 decoder is DVD and HDTV-ready with resolution up to 1920 x 1080i
Video mixing renderer supports multiple video windows with full quality and features in each window
Nvidia Intellisample technology for fastest and highest quality antialiasing with adaptive texture filtering and Fast Z-clear
Architectured for CG to ensure that the newest special effects in applications will run flawlessly
Digital Vibrance Control 3.0 for adjust color controls digitally to compensate for the lighting conditions of your workspace
Microsoft DirectX 9.0 optimization and support ensures the best performance and application compatibility for all DirectX 9 applications.
Open GL 1.4 optimizations and support ensures the best application compatibility performance for all OpenGL applications.
Unified driver support guarantees forward and backward compatibility
Connections include two VGA DB-15 analog outputs and S-video output (with S-video cable)
Software on CD-ROM includes GeForce FX drivers, nVIDIA GeForceFX demos, Verto 3D World Desktop and NVDVD


Anyway, the box looks a bit different at Walmart but it's the same card, and it said a minimum requirement was a Pentium II...and my Cyrix M2 processor is >>>> than the Pentium IIs before they got beefier back in the day, if I recall correctly.

This thread's a bit longer than it needs to be, but I have a bad case of insomnia. How about helping a man out?

 

[MightyHedgehog]

IMO, hold on to that card, or find a way to cash it in. Get another $40-100 to upgrade to something that won't be so obsolete.

 

[Catalyst]

IMO, hold on to that card, or find a way to cash it in. Get another $40-100 to upgrade to something that won't be so obsolete.

No no, you don't understand. This is a PC that has a true clock frequency of 250 MHz, but like the AMD processors, the Cyrix M2 runs at a higher speed than its true frequency...hence the Presario 366 I said. I remember it being a faster than my friends' Pentium II 400 MHz PCs back in the day. And it only uses SDRAM....not today's DDR. In other words....no matter what kind of today's videocards I get, there'll be bottlenecks aplenty, and it doesn't really matter what kind of card I'll get. What I'm asking is is this a good card, and furthermore, is this a good card for such an old piece of shit? Hell, will it even work with my computer?

 

[MightyHedgehog]

Oh...well, it's a standard low-end-ish card...certainly enough to run stuff that'll run on that rig really, really, really well.

 

[Catalyst]

:lol :lol, yeah, see what I mean. It'll probably run nothing higher than Quake III, but my brothers won't make good use of it, except for when I'm not using mine and I'm showing him the ropes (Yeah, he's 13, I want to indoctrinate him into this big PC world thing while he's young, but nothing too advanced yet, hence giving him the shitty Goodwill-worthy computer).

Cool, thanks for the tip.