where to find old video card fx series high end?

[boredtodeath]

I have some old games that run best on an old system, thanks to nvidia not caring about old games and breaking stuff here and there to make new games work properly, I am eventually going to just bite the bullet and build an old system again to run old games on.

I used to have this system:

ASUS P4C800E mobo with 875 chipset

kingston hyperX ddr memory

Albatron geforce FX5700EP agp video card

Sound blaster audigy 2 sound card pci



This old rig worked great for all the games I had on it which were:

Tachyon the Fringe

Mechwarrior 4 vengance/black knight/mercs

Starlancer

X2 the Threat

Mech Commander 2


The problem with my current rig is that with these older games I get some problems like the game crashes with some errors that don't usually occur, graphics anomalies that will never be fixed like crosshatch looking stuff in shadows or on anything especially with X2 the Threat and some games like mechwarrior games won't install properly the first time. I have to reinstall the game several times before it will play right.

So this is gonna be a legacy rig lol but I wish I had kept that old rig because now I can't find the video card anymore. Oh I can find the mobo here and there but the video card is just gone from existence. Tried feebay and pricewatch... google too but it's not around right now. Even amazon doesn't have it.

Does anyone have a lead on either the same albatron fx5700EP or even better a FX5900 series card? Also why does the quadro series cards still use the FX part in their model numbers?

[PaganII]

I have a BFG 5700 Ultra laying around somewhere.
Buddy of mine still uses a comp I built him years ago with a Leadtek 4600Ti. Runs all the Half Life games great.

[boredtodeath]

Whats really funny is how opengl has been hated on so much over the years and yet all my opengl based games work just fine with my current rig like quake 4 doom 3 cs 1.6 cs source lol all the opengl games work just fine it's only the d3d games that have all kinds of problems if they are older than 2004.

[Darxide]

Too true. I have a lot of old'ish D3D games that run very badly on my new rig.
Been thinking of doing the same thing you are, I might even have enough old parts lying around to do it.

[PaganII]

I'm guessing the Dx8 cards don't have to process all the Dx9 code so they still get great FPS. Without comparing side by side HL2 looks very good on the old 4600ti, that and he's playing at 1024 x768 ha ha with an AMD 2100+/1G.

[Jamesrt2004]

heya mate if it's agp slot, maybe look at the 6600gt's? I had one in an old rig n it was great :D

[boredtodeath]

I was thinking about that but I can't remember if the 6 series had problems with X2 or not. My old fx5700EP handled X2 just fine, even showed LOD correctly. X2 is a DX9 game but the other games are older.

[boredtodeath]

I was googling stuff and found this little gem over at nvidia developer site...

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/General_FAQ.html#s3

Also youtube has some interesting video of this flickering problem in BF2 and some similar games. So google tells me it's called z-fighting and game devs will say it's nvidia fault, nvidia will say it's in their faq and it's dev fault.

Wikipedia says it just sucks:-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-fighting

I hate this problem and was thinking that old hardware would solve it but what can really be done to solve it on current hardware/software?

[FlawleZ]

I have 2 FX 5900XT's. One Leadtek which I did a BIOS flash to 5900 Ultra and I can't remember the status of, and the other is an MSI I believe.

[tiro_uspsss]

what about an ATi 9 series? performance is waaaay better :)

[FlawleZ]

what about an ATi 9 series? performance is waaaay better :)

True.
The 9700 Pro was slightly trumped by the 5900 Ultra but the 9800 Pro and 9800 XT were a fair amount faster than the 5900 and 5950 Ultra.

[SoulsCollective]

Plus they didn't sound like a leafblower.

I have an old S3 Virge, if it helps :p:

[tiro_uspsss]

True.
The 9700 Pro was slightly trumped by the 5900 Ultra but the 9800 Pro and 9800 XT were a fair amount faster than the 5900 and 5950 Ultra.

just make sure u dont get a 9800 Pro SE! :down:

[FlawleZ]

Plus they didn't sound like a leafblower.

I have an old S3 Virge, if it helps :p:

Well it was really only the 5800 Ultras that sounded like leaf blowers. Those were quite possibly the biggest fail from Nvidia ever. They were even 128 bit cards. Idk what the hell they were thinking.