Newer card for my old BX

[Hammerman]

Just a quickie to get the old mellon clear on a few things--- What would be the best or better agp video card for my old abit BX motherboard. I have a 3dfx voodoo 3 2000 that is nice but........ Can I spend little to get alot more???? I have to much into this old dog to dump it now, I have to wait a little while longer to get the next best stuff!!!!!! Oh yeah, might there be voltage issues with some of the newer cards? I don't want to fry eggs!! Thanks in advance/

 

[tapir]

if you can afford $50-60 or so, check out eBay for a used GF3 ti200. best bang for the buck since it will still run everything, although i dont know about on a BX board.. still, youre not going to get a decent card for much less.

 

[chizow]

GF3 Ti200 runs fine on my secondary system based on a BE6-II with a P3 500 in it. I had a VT and a MSI GF3 Ti200 and both worked fine. If you can get it for $50-60 like tapir said, that's a good deal even though a GF3 might even be a bit on the overkill side depending on your cpu. It'll also give you upgradeability once you upgrade the rest of your system. A GF3 Ti200 still runs any game out right now very well (I was using it til my latest switch to GF4 ti4200 turbo a month ago).

Chiz

 

[Hammerman]

Thanks for the quick replies-- I believe my board is also the BE6 vers.2 with the raid. Voltage is good for that agp board? Think it will be MUCH better or just marginally better than the voodoo 3 2000?

 

[mithrandir2001]

Hmm, this can be tricky. The BX boards - some of them - don't push enough juice to the AGP slot to use the newest cards. I have an ABIT BM6 440BX board and I've been using a GF2 GTS-V problem-free for a year. Haven't tried anything faster because my CPU (Celeron-800) would be the bottleneck.

What CPU are you running? I think a GF2 would be a good choice for anything less than a PIII-866 or so.

 

[Kowan]

I have two BX systems. A BE6-2 version 1.0 and version 2.0.
The 1.0 is running a P3 850/Gainward Golden Sample GF3 and the other is a P3 1GHz/Visiontek GF3.
Both are the original GF3s not Ti's.

 

[Hammerman]

Oh, the cpu is a pentium 3 850 (slot 1) Will the upgrade be noticiable enough to justify its expense?? Or should I leave it alone?

 

[mithrandir2001]

I noticed a fairly significant improvement when I upgraded my Voodoo3 3000 with the GF2 GTS-V. Number-wise, I recall going from 35-40fps to 55-60fps in Q3A (1024x768) and my 3DMark2001 score at least doubled. The thing about getting an NVidia card is that you are guaranteed having the latest drivers. You can't say that about your 3dfx card. Since a GF2 card may only set you back $40, it would probably be a good "investment". A GF3 wouldn't be out of the question but you wouldn't get the full value out of it.

 

[WarSong]

Originally posted by: Hammerman
Oh, the cpu is a pentium 3 850 (slot 1) Will the upgrade be noticiable enough to justify its expense?? Or should I leave it alone?

I had a P3-933 with a RadeonLE that I upgraded to a Radeon 8500LE and it was definetly noticable and worth it. Of course, it's only worth it if you are going to use it...