I have a couple of old computers, one is a micro ATX K6 that I wanted to mabe dress up for a LAN computer. Sadly I dont have a video card for it. What are some good old-school PCI video cards that I could drop into it
Well...I hope you don't want to LAN with this thing...K6s were kind of weak...but some old PCI cards: GeForce2 MX400 GeForce4 MX440 GeForce FX5200 Radeon 7000/9200/9250
they are not that weak! I could run like quake, doom, and prolly CS on it! Which PCI card would be the fastest and best for a K6
9250 is the most recent you can get for cheap, but a 9200 would be powerful too. I would not recomment the FX5200 or Radeon 7000, and the Geforce2 is a bit older then the others. They made the x1300 as PCI, but that is expensive and overkill for you. Yeah...CS will run on anything! You may be able to get QUAKE II! Try running Unreal Tournament Game of the Year edition on it! That is actually a really fun LAN game.
Well, I am keeping my eye on a few ATI 9250s and a GeForce FX 5200. But one guy said that his 9250 was not compatible with BF2, I dont plan on using my rig to play this game but is that true that the 9250s arent compatible with BF2?
I do not think the 9250s are DirectX 9 compatible, and BF2 requires cards to be, if I remember correctly...
Watch out for the 9250, they don't use the 'SE' suffix to denote half mem speed like the previous models did. 9000-9250 (non-SE) are in a league with GF3TI200 so much faster than a K6 could ever need (max speed 550mhz?). The K6 era was around the time of the Voodoo3/4 and Riva TNT2 so even before the first GeForce or Radeon cards. As such even a GF2/4MX (or any Radeon) would be super-fast, the CPU will hold back these let alone anything faster. GF2/4M & Radeons < 8500 are all DX7, most games reuire at least DX8 but I doubt your CPU would be fast enough to run them (if you even have adequate RAM that is). All that said given likely pricing you might as well get the fastest card you can for 'bottom-dollar'.
Pah! You want old school? I've still got a Matrox Millenium... ONE.. the first one... It had pride of place in my Pentium 200... he he. ...but that aside... 6200 would be your best bet if you ask me.
It certainly should. Although it does look to me as though it's a 64bitDDR card (ie, effectively 9250SE) I bet it would still be more than fast enough considering the CPU. What other cards could you get for around $12-15? Voodoo SLI isn't really worth it, if you want Voodoos for the GLide API then any fast Voodoo3 or regular Voodoo4 should be more than enough. As great as those were at the time the GeForce1 and early Radeons were superior solutions (so long as you don't care about GLide).
I was looking at a old BFG Assylum PCI card but there are none one ebay, should I get a different card or go with this one, the auction ends in less thana hour!
So do you have a card now? The BFG Asylum PCI is based on the GF4MX420 which is a little superior to the old GF2MX/GF2MX400. This places it above the TNT2 and Voodoo cards but means that it lacks DX8 hardware as found on the GF3, GF4TI, Radeon 8500 and later cards. Off the top of my head the GF4MX420 would be a similar speed to that Rad9250(SE 64bitDDR) but the Radeon is built on a newer archy with full DX8 hardware. As said earlier though you should find any GeForce or Radeon card more than powerful enough for that CPU and any game requiring DX8/9 hardware is likely to require a much faster CPU (if not more RAM too), so DX8 hardware isn't a necessity (in this case).
How about the old Voodoo cards (I'm showing my age now!). The redefined graphics for the PC with loads of new types of technology on them. They are a major corner stone of what graphics are today.
sadly the action jumped to $18 at the last minute which I am not willing to buy, so I may just go to the flea market next weekend and try to find something worth of 3D graphics
