Dual P3

F

Fooozball

Member
Just finished building my DOS/Windows 98 gaming rig, and now just picked up a dual p3 board for $25 with 1 GB ram. Came with only 1, 1 ghz cpu... thinking about dumping it and throwing in 2, 1.4 ghz tualatin's. Sadly, there is no AGP slot so i'm forced into purchasing a used 9500GT/or 8400GS. What do you think would be my best bet? I have a fx5500 right now so it's not urgent. I'm doing this for fun, so please don't tell me to upgrade my system... 8400gs or 9500GT? Will the Dual setup take advantage of the more powerful 9500GT - or just stick with the 8400?
 
Strangehold: Sorry my post was a bit miss leading. I was saying that I just finished a 98/DOS set up P233 system. But now I wanna build this Dual P3 set up... I picked up 2 1.4 ghz tualatin's for $16 shipped. Will be running windows xp sp3. Anyway, strangehold, i'll probably be playing games like HL2/CS:S/1.6/KF and so on. Do you think that the 9500GT would be a good buy for this rig? Or 8400gs/5450.
 
I do not know how you are going to get decent frames per second. Even using dual Pentium 3 processors you are going to be very limited on the video card you can use.

I do not think it worth putting money into.
 
Which card would give me the least bottle neck. Remember these are PIII-S Tualatin's @ 1.4 ghz. 2 of them. They were faster than the 423 P4's clock for clock. I could easily play SC2 on a set up like this, as well as any source engine game (maybe not l4d) but tf2/cs:s etc... If I can pick up a video card for $50 this project would only cost me $100. But before I go throw down $50 on a card I wanna make sure I can use it 85%+.
 
Why don't you set your system up with the FX5500 and see how it runs first? I would do that simply to avoid nasty surprises that sometimes come with older hardware, but even more importantly, you should be able to try some of the games you're planning to play and see how they play and how the CPU usage goes when you're playing (you should be able to get semi-playable frame rates on source games with all details set to minimum).

Your CPUs is most likely going to be the bottleneck, but remember that the GPU usage depends a lot on the resolution and video settings. If you're happy playing with minimum details, the 8400GS will do the job just fine but if you're looking to pretty it up a little, the 9500GT might be more appropriate. I don't know how well source games run on either GPU, though, or how CPU intensive they are, but I doubt the 9500GT would net a significant performance increase. Having said that, if the price difference is small, I would get the 9500GT just to be sure that it won't be the GPU bottlenecking, but if you'd end up paying a lot more for the 9500GT it wouldn't really be worth it on such an old machine.
 
Looks like one. Doesnt look like it will fit a standard ATX case, the memory slots would be half way under where the front CD/DVD cage is. Measure it, think WTX was around 14X16.75.
 
yeah it won't fit in an ATX case. Closest I could get it to fit is in a Dell Dimension 8250. wont close 100% until i cut into the dvd/cd drive bay.
 
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