erek
[H]F Junkie
- Joined
- Dec 19, 2005
- Messages
- 10,948
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some of us are still living in 2001 / 2002, man
The year of the Erek.
I bought a 5900XT based on the [H] review (my first BFGTech video card!). I had midrange money as a kid and was deciding between it and the 9600XT. I ran Doom 3 on it with a highly customized config file at 1280x960 with good detail around 40-60 FPS. What was really fun was getting Doom 3 to run on my dad's PC with a MX440. I think we finally managed to get it to run at 20-25 FPS at 800x600, and the game basically looked like it was using phong shading on everything. It's too bad I could never get Half-Life 2 to run right on the 5900XT since it didn't have full DirectX 9 support. I don't recall how NR2003 ran, but I know I didn't have any issues. I think a good CPU was just as, if not more, important as the GPU in that game. I had an Athlon XP 2000+.I've got an XFX 5200 with the outer box.. Bought it basically to run Doom 3 better. I don't remember framerates in Doom 3, but Nascar Racing 2003 would pull 27 frames with like 10 cars on the track. I was a dumb kid and thought that because movies were 29 fps that anything 20+ was just fine.
I bought a 5900XT based on the [H] review (my first BFGTech video card!). I had midrange money as a kid and was deciding between it and the 9600XT. I ran Doom 3 on it with a highly customized config file at 1280x960 with good detail around 40-60 FPS. What was really fun was getting Doom 3 to run on my dad's PC with a MX440. I think we finally managed to get it to run at 20-25 FPS at 800x600, and the game basically looked like it was using phong shading on everything. It's too bad I could never get Half-Life 2 to run right on the 5900XT since it didn't have full DirectX 9 support. I don't recall how NR2003 ran, but I know I didn't have any issues. I think a good CPU was just as, if not more, important as the GPU in that game. I had an Athlon XP 2000+.
I had an FX5200 for a short bit, and I quickly realized it was inadequate for most games. Moved to an FX 5700 which was a big leap in comparison, but I didnt really enjoy Doom 3 in higher settings until I moved to the 6600GT. The 6 series was a big upgrade over the FX series.I had a 440 mx at first which was a slide show with Doom. Then I got the FX 5200 and more ram, and then it was playable. My box was a Sempron 2500 but I had it overclocked to 1.8 ghz, and it displayed as an Athlon at that point. It was just the best computer I could scrape together on a 14 year old's wage
My brother picked an FX 5900XT back then and we never had any issues running HL2. Even ran Lost Coast with the HDR stuff pretty well.I bought a 5900XT based on the [H] review (my first BFGTech video card!). I had midrange money as a kid and was deciding between it and the 9600XT. I ran Doom 3 on it with a highly customized config file at 1280x960 with good detail around 40-60 FPS. What was really fun was getting Doom 3 to run on my dad's PC with a MX440. I think we finally managed to get it to run at 20-25 FPS at 800x600, and the game basically looked like it was using phong shading on everything. It's too bad I could never get Half-Life 2 to run right on the 5900XT since it didn't have full DirectX 9 support. I don't recall how NR2003 ran, but I know I didn't have any issues. I think a good CPU was just as, if not more, important as the GPU in that game. I had an Athlon XP 2000+.
Says what it is right at the top: SiS 315. The supposed GeForce MX killer.Ah FX. Something Nvidia and I would like to forget.
When Doom 3 dropped, so did my frames. All due to running this piece of shit. (bonus points for those that can name it)
View attachment 94411
So I went out and got me an EVGA FX 5700Ultra. Doom 3 went from a slide show to around 35-40FPS @ 1280x1024 @ med settings. Needed 256MB of VRAM to run high settings. I solved that by getting a Leadtek/WinFast A400GT(6800GT).
Meanwhile my wife wanted an upgrade for her Pogo games box 1.7GHz Celery and onboard video, so got her a BFG FX 5500 OC PCI, and she was overjoyed.
Says what it is right at the top: SiS 315. The supposed GeForce MX killer.
In 2003 I was smart enough as a teen to get a pc with 9600 pro when it was competing with FX cards and ran Doom with Far Cry relatively good. I wasn’t smart enough when paired it with P4 with HT instead of some Athlon instead though.
You can actually pickup PATA SSDs now and add a surprising boost to those old systems. Even 20 years ago we were held back by our storage devices.All this has me wanting to rebuild my old box. Since I still have the 5200, and an unknown 5800 Ultra ( have to find it ).. I also still have the CPU/ mobo from my build from back then and I think 2gb of ram. Could put it all in a spare but beat up Cooler Master Elite 310. I have IDE optical and hard drives laying around as well
Will a modern power supply power my old board? I kind of blew up the power supply I had from the old box, running some DC projects for the forum a while ago
Soyo K7M-333 Fwiw
So pretty much a quality board that has 20+4 connector or just 20 pin connector
I was a dumb kid and thought that because movies were 29 fps that anything 20+ was just fine.
powered off 5V as opposed to 12V that modern PC's draw most of the power from (regardless of how many pins they had on ATX). With good PSU OEM's like Delta, Lite-On, Zippy this unusual crossloading won't be an issue but some of the cheap crappy brands may have ripple or voltages outside of the correct range if drawing too much on 5V.
Despite all of that, it will likely be a better idea to use a (good) new PSU to avoid dead capacitors, which cause infinitely more damage than anything outlined above.
Film movies run at 24 fps lol. I was a film projectionist for several years. I think you're confusing the NTSC standard which is 29.97 FPS for color and 30 fps for black and white.
The reason it works with film is because of motion blur, games at the time didn't have that. Though there were some movies where 24 fps did create problems, like the large panning scenes in LOTR where things start to get jumpy. Later films tried to avoid large perspective panning scenes, Avatar looked really good on film. In my opinion was better quality than the digital version we had at the same time, likely due to the anamorphic widescreen.
Wow, this brings back memories.Gamers eager to realize the full potential of titles such as Doom III and Unreal II -- and developers creating even more advanced software -- will plunk down the big bucks for these boards right away.
It's better to look for a PSU with a strong 5V rail, picking any PSU that's a "good" brand isn't enough. Later Athlon XP CPUs had a TDP of 89W and could regularly draw more than that, which is dangerously close to the power limits of 5V rails on modern supplies. And since modern supplies often lump the 3.3v and 5v rails off the same regulator, you have even less breathing room.
It's actually better to recap old power supplies and use them rather than force a modern PSU into overload constantly. I recap PSUs all the time because manufacturers didn't learn from the capacitor plague and still use shitty capacitors like CapXon, OST, Teapo and United Chemi-Con. You'll need the practice because many of these old boards have shitty caps on them as well which have either already failed, or on their way to failing.
While recapping an old 5V heavy unit is a good idea in theory, in many cases it's not worth the effort, depending on the make and model of the power supply it may not be the best option. The average PSU's people used in 2001-2005 tended to not only have low quality capacitors but were also based on inefficient topologies and cheaped out on cooling heatsinks + a lot of them had misleading or false output power ratings. But if we're talking about the old Delta-based Antec Truepower or an Enermax then I think those are worth recapping and will do well for this application, but the majority of 5V heavy units made after 1999 I would personally stay away from. Before recommending that you also have to consider whether the person is up for the task, especially if he hasn't done any electronics repair before, you should not assume everyone has the skills to do that (recaps can be difficult for a novice, due to the unleaded solder used nowadays).
Before recommending that you also have to consider whether the person is up for the task, especially if he hasn't done any electronics repair before, you should not assume everyone has the skills to do that (recaps can be difficult for a novice, due to the unleaded solder used nowadays).
It puzzles me why you would include UCC in your list of bad capacitor manufacturers, is it a typo? United Chemi-Con is the US subsidiary of Nippon Chemi-Con, a Japanese manufacturer of high quality capacitors and most of their stuff is top notch, with the notable exception of the earlier KZG series which had issues (mostly used in motherboards).
From article:
Wow, this brings back memories.
I remember the first GPU I ever purchased (with my own money) was a BFG Tech FX5200 256MB OC AGP 8x - and I played DOOM 3 on it at ~40FPS @ 640x480, and just loving it.
Oh how far we have come in all those years.
Thank you erek for sharing this - I don't know how you found that specific article, but if you find more, please share!
Damn, that's awesome!Oh man...now we’re triggering oldnhardware flashbacks! My first system with a graphics card was a Dell XPS P2-300. It had a NVIDIA RIVA 128 4MB in it, and I later put a Voodoo2 12MB. I played a lot of G-Police, X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, Mech Warrior 2, Quake 2, Warcraft 2, Starcraft, and Unreal on that rig.
EDIT: Can’t believe I forgot that we used to format our hard drives with multiple partitions back then. I think my old 6.4gb came in 3 or 4 partitions.
Damn, that's awesome!
I remember those days - Descent, Duke Nukem 3D, DOOM I/II/Final, Quake, SW Tie Fighter - so many good memories.
haha, yes, I do remember when most systems were pre-configured with multiple partitions - makes sense on some server systems or workstations, but on a consumer Windows system back then? Heh, good times.
Nice system in your sig as well - I got Star Wars: Tie Fighter Special Edition (CD-ROM version) running on my Quadro 950 a few years back with a 100MHz PowerPC 601 CPU and 256MB of RAM - managed to muster around 15-30fps on average - not bad for a workstation that would have cost around $15,000 back in 1992.
Man, does that ever bring me back.Duke 3D! Ha! I had an HP P120 that I played that with. Remember having to enter modem strings in DOS? LOL!
I was wondering if anyone would recognize the sig. That LC is the system that won’t die. Still runs.
The Quadros were the bomb back in the day! Man that got expensive fast though! I remember be excited that Mac OS 8 finally got basic HyperThreading. Remember the Copland hype? As a kid, I worked at CompUSA Mac Store. It was great getting to play with those rigs!
My family has always run Macs and PCs. After that we had a couple Mac Clones from Power Computing. One was a 601 with the old Nubus ports, and the other 200mhz 604. We still have it somewhere. After that it was the old blue G3 and grey G4. A couple of Mac Minis, and now mostly laptops for my mother. My father went PC for flight sims.