kony wrote:

snip


Well, Geforce 2 is not hardware T&L, Geforce 3 was the first
gen. to do that, so the GF3 should be substantially better
at making most of the slow CPU, but then obviously the video
card isn't so fast these days either. From what I vaguely
recall of that era system/video, a GF3 might be at least 60%
faster at typical games.

Are you sure about that? I thought that the GeForce 2 and the Radeon
7500 both had T&L built in. Does the Geforce 3 have 'hardware T&L' while
the Geforce 2 only has 'T&L'?



I realize this is the bare minimum. But I'm hoping other factors like
FSB, and the bandwidth of both the system memory and video memory, if
they are high, may be an advantage. Installing the less bloated Windows
98SE instead of 2000/XP may also be an advantage.


What do you mean by FSB and bandwidth?
A P3, even using Rambus, is still very slow in these
regards, it's not like it's making up any ground in those
areas. While Rambus memory has higher throughput, even
faster memory than yours uses still loses it's much of it's
edge due to higher latency.


By Front Side Bus (FSB) I mean, that some P3's are designed to run on a
100Mhz FSB, while slightly laters P3's run on a 133Mhz FSB. I think this
Compaq has a P3 600/133. I know, Moore's Law has made the 33Mhz
difference irrelevant, since we have effective 400 and 800 Mhz FSBs now.

When I say bandwidth, I'm talking about memory bandwidth. What has more,
PC800 Rambus, or PC100/133 SDRAM? Does the latency of Rambus make its
memory bandwidth compared to PC133 SDRAM irrelavant? Is the FSB of this
processor a bottleneck? Can I get by with PC600 RDRAM if the BIOS
supports it? I might just get this thing to have basic usablity, and
worry about building a Sims platform later.

snip

I have a Dell System just sitting here with an 866Mhz P3 and 368MB of
SDRAM. I could trade her the Dell for the Compaq.


That's nice of you but probably not going to help enough for
semi-modern games.

Well, I'm not a gamer, even though I can put a PC together. I have
little gaming experience, or evidence to the contrary with regards to
semi-modern games.

Eddie