Zotac Releases GeForce GT 520 With Classic PCI Connector

jones_supa writes "It turns out that you can still get a legacy PCI graphics card with a modern GPU. In this case it's a Nvidia Geforce GT 520 card provided by Zotac. Both the PCI and PCIe x1 variants feature a GT 520 graphics chip with 48 stream processors, 512MB of DDR3 memory, a 810MHz core clock speed, a 1333MHz memory speed, and a 64-bit memory interface."

Comments

You can also still buy carburetors

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you Slashvertise that too?

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

We like stories about blinkie things that cost money, what isn't a Slashvertisement, then!?

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[DigiTechGuy]

But carbs are still very useful. Is there really much use in having a modern GPU on a PCI card? For those occasional legacy systems there are plenty of PCI cards floating around for cheap. Heck, I've got a stash of old PCI cards I'd gladly give away.

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[AliasMarlowe]

Can you Slashvertise that too?

Just wait until they switch to blipverts instead...

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[julesh]

Is there really much use in having a modern GPU on a PCI card?

Probably. And PCIe 1x definitely. There are many GPU applications that do not require high bandwidth to the host processor (i.e. detailed calculations that can be performed with relatively static data sets such as rotating or stepping through static scenes where most of the geometry remains constant, or on the GPGPU side of things performing similar calculations repeatedly, e.g. neural network training). It also allows many-monitor systems on machines that aren't hugely expensive but need latest-generation features (e.g. complex shader programs).

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[Culture20]

But can you fit four or more carburetors on a car to make it have eight or more displays (with some sweet, sweet, Xinerama action)? You can do that with PCI graphics cards.

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[shish]

I've been on the lookout for something like this; not because of the power, but because I have a lot of legacy PC hardware that I want to hook into my HDMI monitor, and the PCI / HDMI eras don't really overlap. This does seem overkill and overpriced for that job though...

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[HornWumpus]

Yes and yes, although the number of displays you can put in a car have nothing to do with the number of carburetors.

Useful number of carbs is the engines cylinder count. So no less than 8 or more then 10 for reasonable cars.

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[hairyfeet]

I actually LIKE articles like this, as it gives me info on another option for my customers that are looking to upgrade to Win 7 but whose box doesn't have PCIe. I've found Windows 7 can run quite decently on a 2.2GHz P4 with 2Gb of RAM but there are a hell of a lot of machines out there without PCIe and AGP cards are frankly crazy high now.

I just really wish someone would make some Radeon HD5xxx and 6xxx cards with AGP and make them sub $50 like they did for awhile with the HD2xxx and 3xxx cards. There are a lot of late model P4s that can easily and cheaply be upgraded to the Pentium D (I buy them all day long for less than $20 a chip) which works great even on MMOs like LOTRO and Perfect World but Windows 7 runs so much better and videos are so much smoother with a decent GPU for DXVA. With the economy still nasty having affordable options is always of the good in my book, So I like hearing about stuff like this and don't forget XP is still supported until 2014 so that is a hell of a lot of boxes out there that could run better with a GPU boost.

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[DRJlaw]

Is there really much use in having a modern GPU on a PCI card?

DVXA interfacable hardware H.262 (MPEG2)/H.264 acceleration?

You don't seriously imagine that a blu-ray player, or SoC media streamer, has the same general purpose computing capability as a P4 running on an i8xx series chipset (PCI/AGP), do you? I still have two Dell 4550s that are perfectly usable by the kids. Years ago I upgraded them to AGP ATI 3650s because those were rumored to be the last AGP-interface DX9 cards (ATI partners later came out with AGP 4650s). They run Windows 7 in 2GB of RAM with full eye candy quite well despite being nigh 9 years old. Those were $80 cards. These are probably $40 cards.

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[JamesP]

Geez, really, no

I was recommended against this (using a PCI card), around 6 years ago (but maybe even before that).

You can get an AGP board off ebay, or even a more modern system there, which is going to be faster and probably cheaper than the video card.

Or, you guess it, not upgrade to Windows 7. If you're concerned about money, stay with WinXP

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[hairyfeet]

The problem with ebay is you often are just getting some else's headaches. you may have had better luck but the few times i've tried getting AGP cards from there they had either pushed the card too hard and had damaged the mem or had cooked the GPU or toasted the fan. the few sellers with really high rating where you wouldn't have to worry about that want as much as a new card, so no money saved there.

And that is what it all comes down to, money. which is cheaper, $450-500+ or $175? because $450 is what I average on a new AMD build and $175 was what it cost Mr Brown to upgrade his late model P4 with windows 7 HP, new Geforce 8 PCI (I think it was an 8600, can't tell for sure without the invoice) card, and a Pentium D. Oh and pay me of course.

When all they are doing is watching videos and running Aero frankly PCI has more than enough bandwidth, by having videos offloaded to the GPU frankly even the bottom of the line Pentium D is a damned good web surfer, and $175 is a hell of a lot cheaper than $450, especially when money is tight as it was for Mr Brown. Now he can get probably another 3-5 years out of his machine with the way he runs it and by then hopefully the economy will have picked up.

And while I agree that AGP would be the way to go, I'd point out that many business machines didn't have AGP, only PCI.

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[ae1294]

One word... BITCOIN!

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[Guspaz]

AGP might have some use, there's still some decent bandwidth there, 2133 MB/s.. But PCI? 133 MB per second? You can't even blit 1024x768 over a PCI bus at 60Hz. That's right, if you try to play 1993's Doom on a GeForce GT 520 over a PCI bus at 1024x768, you will be bandwidth limited below 60FPS. Doom. A game that was released on the Super Nintendo.

As for DXVA? I'm not sure if you've got enough bandwidth... DXVA normally still does some stages of the pipeline in software, which means copying the uncompressed frame from the GPU to the GPU at least once... Maybe 480p.

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[Guspaz]

The PCI bus can do 133MB/s, half duplex. Your Dell 4550s are AGP 4x, which is 1066MB/s. A wee bit of a difference there. I doubt that you could do even 720p DXVA over the PCI bus, even blitting 720p at 60hz would require 158MB/s. So any device you tried to build with a PCI GPU, no matter how powerful, would probably be limited to standard def.

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[Narcocide]

Well, to be fair, it didn't run at 1024x768 on the Super Nintendo either. I'd also be surprised if it was much over 30fps.

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[Narcocide]

Unless you overclocked your PCI bus a lot.

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[hairyfeet]

Again we are talking about using a PCI card for Windows 7 Aero and for videos NOT playing games, kay? Bringing up Doom in this scenario is as pointless as saying "You can't haul a boat with a Pinto" which of course has jack to do with squat.

Now as for video I doubt VERY seriously you are gonna be pushing 133 Megabytes Per second watching the new Harry Potter DVD. Don't forget we aren't talking about machines with BD here so you are looking at a MAX of DVD quality. For that? Not a problem. And I don't know about Nvidia but I know the Radeon cards take the vast majority of the load with DXVA . finally for someone saying the cost of Windows 7 would make it not worth it? Family pack dude, family pack. you get a couple of friends that want to upgrade and voila! you get Win 7 HP for $35. you keep an eye out on the specials and you'll often find the family pack for around $100, that is $33 a license. And finally like I said you can get a Pentium D which is more than powerful enough for web surfing for under $25, and that fits tons of older machines.

So I really don't see a problem here. the closest these folks would get to gaming is Farmville which I kinda doubt is gonna saturate the PCI bus.

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[neokushan]

I may be ignorant on the subject, but how much bandwidth do you actually need to stream to your graphics card for a Blu-ray film? What I mean is, I realise that an uncompressed stream is possibly hundreds of megabits, but the compressed stream is substantially less than this and it's the graphics card itself that does the decompression, right?. After this stage, does the data get fed back along the PCI bus or does it get blitted to the screen directly from the graphics card's memory?

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[Lonewolf666]

I mostly agree, but the idea of using a Pentium D makes me cringe. TDPs of 95W or more, and being a Netburst part, it is clearly inferior to the Core architecture.
If you have a socket 775 board, I would check if it can run something like the Celeron E3400 (Wolfdale core). This one is also a low cost dual core, will likely run rings around the Pentium D and is cooler with only 65W TDP.

This said, for $175 I would look around if someone has a "moderately old" PC to sell. At that price, you may be able to get an early Core2Duo with a mainboard that already has a PCI Express graphics slot. Maybe it even comes with a halfway decent graphics card.

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[jawtheshark]

Recently, I've taken out my old AMD Athlon MP 2400+. Yes, that's a dual processor machine and it's eight and a half years old. The graphics card in it (and it's really picky about which AGP card you put in it. A GeForce 6600GT didn't work) is just a NVidia FX 5500 (It originally had a Ti4200, but that didn't do DX9.0 and it made a lot of noise because of the fan. The FX5500 is passively cooled). Why do I tell you this? Because I toyed around with it, trying Windows 7 for kicks 'n giggles. The experience was horrible, just in case you wondered.

Thing is, I was wondering what the CPU would score on a Passmark test. It wasn't listed before I submitted my "scores". Why do I tell you this? Because this "beast" of a machine is on par with early Core 2 Duo CPUs used in laptops. It is also very close to "on-par" with my current desktop.... which is... an Atom D525. That's food for thought. I bought that Atom D525 as a complete machine with 2GB RAM and 320GB HDD for a mere 199€. I'd wager to say that you're better off with modern Atom than than to upgrade the graphics card on an old machine. Also note that, while the graphic chipset in that Atom is one of those sucky GMAs, it's enough to run Windows 7 Aero (I don't use Windows, but I did test it). That's the point of the PCI card the story is about: be able to run Windows 7 fully. There are no Windows 7 drivers for anything prior to the Geforce6 series as I have found out on the NVidia website. (5FX series has Vista drivers, though)

I'm not very fond of my Atom desktop. For some reason, Firefox is very slow on it. I don't know why. I have used machines less powerful than it where the browser worked fine. I blame Firefox because it's an "old" version that comes with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (the last "good" Ubuntu release).

I used to be a tech dumpster diver, but the insanely cheap-but-good-enough hardware makes it unviable to refurbish any machines I can get my hands on. (Currently seems to be 2GHz++ Pentium IV or AMD Athlon XP, and early AMD64 and Core2Duo)

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[hairyfeet]

Well here is a page doing some comparisons but sadly no hard numbers. From what I gather as long as the CPU doesn't hit 100% it doesn't matter because the video will play smooth. This page here was written by a guy doing 720p with a Geforce 7200 and AMD XP2600 CPU so if that combo will play 720p I have no doubt the 520 PCI with a Pentium D will play it no problem.

And from what I understand once its passed to the GPU that's it, there is no further interaction with the CPU. I know I've set up AGP cards with hardware decode and AGP certainly isn't feeding data back to the CPU and it worked great. So I still say the 520 PCI plus a Pentium D would make a fine box for surfing and watching videos. Both of my nephews are running Pentium Ds and they even play MMOs with it and never drop below 30FPS, so for something less strenuous like video I think it would work just fine.

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[toddestan]

What in the hell are you talking about? The video stream comes from the card itself and is generated using the textures stored in its onboard memory. That's what a graphics card does. I'd guess that this card will do okay over the PCI bus. The PCI bus may be kind of slow for it, but most graphics cards don't get anywhere near saturating the a PCIe x16 connection or even the AGP bus.

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[mikael]

Blu Ray streams data at a top rate of 40 Mbits/s, while HD DVD streams data at 28 Mbits/s. Largest data capacity is 100Gbytes, which is around 18 hours of HD video and HD video resolutions go up to 1920x1080 @ 30 frames/second.

PCI 2.3 (from 2004) has a data transfer rates of 133 Mbytes/second, while PCI Express goes up to 8 Gigabytes/second.

A raw 1920x1080 image takes 50 mbits/s. At 60 frames/seconds, that's 3000 mbits/s.

A comparision of theGT 520 vs the GT 430 has a bandwidth of 14.4 GB/s

The data gets streamed from the DVD player directly to the graphics card via the PCI bus. CUDA processors are used to compress the data directly into the framebuffer. There's enough processing power to support the HD picture-in-picture feature.

Re:You can also still buy carburetors

[Guspaz]

And how do those textures get from the CPU to the GPU? Over the PCI bus. If you're doing a modern game, that's fine, but anything older that does software rendering is going to need to copy the entire frame over the bus.

Performance

[Spad]

PCI slots cap at 533 MB/s (and a lot are 133 or 266), which is less than a tenth of most PCIe x16 slots, so I can't imagine that you're going to be making the most of the hardware somehow.

Re:Performance

[armanox]

I'd be more interested in seeing it in AGP myself.

Re:Performance

[Andy Dodd]

The 520 is one of the lowest-end within its generation.

Also, cards like these often have a lot of media playback capabilities that aren't bandwidth-hungry. This could likely, for example, allow an old clunker system to be upgraded to Blu-Ray capabilities fairly cheaply.

Due to the nature of PCI Express, it's actually easier for manufacturers to make PCI cards than AGP cards nowadays.

Re:Performance

[hedwards]

LOL, when I read the headline I thought they had put a PCI slot on the card itself. Which would be bitchin' for games that require a Voodoo card to run right.

But, I do see that you're interpretation is the correct one.

Re:Performance

[redmund]

The GT520 is a pretty pathetically slow card anyway and I'm guessing the purpose of this is for people who need more display outputs on the cheap and don't have PCI-E slots to spare.

Re:Performance

[FooAtWFU]

Yes, but sometimes it's nice to be able to stuff in another video card or three and get yourself a second monitor or some extra CUDA processing.... without having to completely replace your motherboard. If nothing else, it'll probably run cooler than an older PCI-based video card.

Re:Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Ding, Ding, Ding, we have a winner.

Re:Performance

[Pino Grigio]

Hmmmm interesting. Does this allow use of NVIDIA's parallel Nsight? You need two cards for that and not all motherboards have two slots. This might be a good, cheaper solution.

Re:Performance

[TeknoHog]

It depends on what you do. Bitcoin mining with a Radeon HD5870 is not noticeably slower when it is on a PCI slot adapter, compared to PCIe x16. Many people use PCIe x1 slots for mining, to make use of all available slots, and for easier use of extension cables.

Re:Performance

[vlm]

Also, cards like these often have a lot of media playback capabilities that aren't bandwidth-hungry. This could likely, for example, allow an old clunker system to be upgraded to Blu-Ray capabilities fairly cheaply.

GT520 should run VDPAU acceleration pretty well... It takes practically zero CPU power to shovel bits at the video card. This means practically any old box out there is an instant HDMI output mythtv frontend. Obviously I haven't tried it, but it should work fantastic.

Re:Performance

[Synerg1y]

It's quite cheap and it's for a niche market, why would u compare it to x16 lol, it's pretty obvious zotac makes x16 cards along w everyone else, so why would you... f'in slashdot.

http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=nvidia+geforce+gt+520&tag=googhydr-20&index=aps&hvadid=7367667084&ref=pd_sl_4c2vcnzv38_b

For $50 to play at 1024 over 800 is probably worth it considering 800 looks so horrible.

Re:Performance

[arbiter1]

i gotta 2nd that say you got an old Athlon XP, Pentium 4, even old Celeron that don't have PCI-e, With this card that only uses like 30 watts using hardware video decoder you got a use outta an old PC.

Re:Performance

[locopuyo]

Yes good idea, I could use another 2 monitors 8 isn't enough. Now I just need to find a bigger desk.

Re:Performance

[Lord Crc]

I can't imagine that you're going to be making the most of the hardware somehow.

Depends on what you do with it. Consider this article about PCI-Express scaling on a 5780... A lot of games get 75% FPS or above using only a 1x PCIe port compared to a 16x. Keep in mind that the 5870 is a high-end card, and the 520 is a low end, so I don't think the performance hit will be that bad.

Re:Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are doing bitcoin mining a better use of the card would be sharpening it and driving it into your skull.

Re:Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

But, I do see that you're interpretation is the correct one.

And you're grammar is the incorrect one.

Re:Performance

[jandrese]

At this point it is hard to imagine that you're even recovering the cost of power with Bitcoin mining. Isn't it down in the low single digits vs. the US$ on the Magic the Gathering exchange? And the complexity is so high that you just get a dribble of coins out of even a high end farm anymore. The only time mining made sense was a couple of years ago when there were still suckers buying the damn things and driving the price up.

Re:Performance

[voidptr]

What about those of us with poor neglected VLB slots? Huh? Who's going to give us an upgrade?

Re:Performance

[idontgno]

I want a recent-generation video card which works well with classic 8-bit ISA bus. I have at least one IBM XT-class machine I want to run Starcraft II on.

Re:Performance

[UnknowingFool]

I suspect people that would get an upgrade with a 520 don't exactly have powerful machines to start. It is barely better than an integrated GPU. I can see this for PVR boxes as it is more than adequate to play movies. For gaming, look elsewhere.

Re:Performance

[timeOday]

The real reason to put a new card in an old computer is because manufacturers stop releasing drivers for old cards, and old drivers don't work with recent OSes (this is particularly bad under Linux).

I just ditched a pretty good laptop (Thinkpad T60p) because ATI doesn't support the video card any more, and the generic drivers don't support the features that make it useful to me (DVI output through a docking station in this case).

Re:Performance

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The nice thing about PCI is that quite a few computers, old or contemporary, still have a fair number of PCI slots. With one or two truly esoteric exceptions, AGP was one slot only. You can never have too many video outs...

Re:Performance

[nobodyknowsimageek]

I'd be more interested in seeing it in AGP myself.

Much as I'd like to see this myself, the brief window of time that AGP existed, means it will never happen.

Re:Performance

[X0563511]

It's nice to see an option anyways. Without cards like these, you'd be stuck with:
1. Integrated graphics (... shudder)
2. ATI Rage or other exhibits of ancient history

Some times you just have to use old hardware. It's nice to not have -all- of it stoneage.

Re:Performance

[Nom du Keyboard]

I want a recent-generation video card which works well with classic 8-bit ISA bus. I have at least one IBM XT-class machine I want to run Starcraft II on.

Have we created a new metric here of FPD (Frames Per Day)?

Re:Performance

[DigiTechGuy]

That might be a good metric for turn based strategy games...

Re:Performance

[Coren22]

Mount um on the wall :)

Re:Performance

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

I want a recent-generation video card which works well with classic 8-bit ISA bus. I have at least one IBM XT-class machine I want to run Starcraft II on.

Have we created a new metric here of FPD (Frames Per Day)?

Not if you set up page swapping to the virtual memory you set up on you 5.25" floppy drive (DSDD, of course.)

Re:Performance

[NJRoadfan]

AGP came out in 1997 and lasted until about 2005 or so.

Re:Performance

[NJRoadfan]

It would be fun to stick one of these on a 486 board with PCI slots. Drivers would be an issue though as it likely doesn't come with Windows 9x drivers.

Re:Performance

[dgatwood]

You have to have multiple drives in a RAFD array....

Re:Performance

[hitmark]

this is why RMS started GNU in the first place...

Re:Performance

[Toonol]

Right now, it's far cheaper to buy bitcoins with cash than to pay the power cost to mine them. If you think bitcoins will be the currency of the future, go spend a few hundred dollars on them.

Re:Performance

[cheater512]

Linux should work happily though.

Re:Performance

[NJRoadfan]

Some of the modern distros come with kernels per-compiled for a Pentium or above out of the box, but a quick rebuild fixes that.

Re:Performance

[Dogtanian]

I want a recent-generation video card which works well with classic 8-bit ISA bus. I have at least one IBM XT-class machine I want to run Starcraft II on.

Bah... you kids with your newfangled PCs and all that nonsense! I want a card that fits in my Altair's S100 bus, you insensitive clods!

I too would like to give Starcraft II a go once I get that card working, but I understand the game has high-end requirements that may require other upgrades to my Altair, such as a keyboard, a mouse and some form of display more sophisticated than the LEDs on the front panel.

Re:Performance

[jedidiah]

I got new life out of an old PC with a 430 which is also very good for HTPC use.

The PC was big and ugly and a bit old but it performs quite well. Where it sits, it doesn't matter so much that it is a full size PC. The noise it generates isn't even a show stopper.

Beats the h*ll out of spending $800 just to get something smaller and a GPU that's less useful for HTPC purposes.

Re:Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind that many of the older 486/early pentium boards had incompatible PCI slots, either 5V signalling or just pre PCI 2.2 standards.

While 2.2 afaik has become defacto (2.3/3.0 I believe mostly cut legacy support which would throw pre-'00 era systems out) there are still systems out there that despite being 'PCI' aren't really PCI enough for any hardware produced in the last 11 years. And I say this with experience (I have PCI wifi cards that won't register in a '96 vintage PPro box, but will post on anything P3 or later.)

Point being, just cuz it fits in the slot don't mean you should expect it to work. Y'know like like when your girlfriend complains your male adapter either fits TOO snugly, or NOT snugly enough into her female peripheral port.

Re:Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironic then that glibc and gcc have dropped legacy C support such that apps using old convention variadic functions don't work, glibc> 2.10 requires cpuid.h to build, which rather than being a seperate package is included in the gcc builds (but if you snag it and put it in /usr/include, will allow building glibc on older compilers, such as 4.2.4 if you're trying to keep clang/gcc compatibility going).

Having been using gnu toolchain stuff for years, besides being quite user-unfriendly, it's been a constant mess of breakage, mutually exclusive versions, undocumented 'features', etc, with a constant turnover of 'compatible' packages.

While it's claimed you can keep running old stuff on newer boxes, how many people have ever tried? Nevermind trying to actually get newer apps using compatible functions linked against old glibc elf symbol versions (so you can say compile against a subset of 2.10/2.2.5 symbols and have it actually link against the 2.2.5 compatibility one so you don't get errors like 'GLIBC_2.3.5 symbol i_am_retarded' not found when you try and run it on an older glibc version.

Honestly between GNU and the Linux kernel proper, backwards compatibility has been steadily declining with the increased popularity it has recieved in the past decade. While there was a period during the late '90s-early '00s where it was slightly less messy (transferring apps between computers would work and such).

Re:Performance

[tylernt]

GT520 should run VDPAU acceleration pretty well

Yep, this is exactly what my MythTV HTPC does, only using an older PCI card.

It takes practically zero CPU power to shovel bits

Case in point, my aforementioned HTPC is a Celeron (yes, a humble Celery) and plays all ATSC content (720p, 1080i) just fine.

VDPAU rocks. PCI does the job.

Re:Performance

[Guspaz]

PCI was 133 MB/s, half duplex, while PCIe 1.0 1x would be 250MB/s full duplex. Any modern computer will have a few spare PCIe slots that you could use for that.

If it's an older machine, PCI will let you connect the monitors, but you can't even blit 1024x768 at 60hz over a PCI bus.

Re:Performance

[Guspaz]

GT520 should run VDPAU acceleration pretty well

Yep, this is exactly what my MythTV HTPC does, only using an older PCI card.

It takes practically zero CPU power to shovel bits

Case in point, my aforementioned HTPC is a Celeron (yes, a humble Celery) and plays all ATSC content (720p, 1080i) just fine.

VDPAU rocks. PCI does the job.

PCI is 133 MB/s. Shoveling 1080i60 to the GPU requires ~178 MB/s. Shoveling 720p30 to the GPU might work, as that only requires 79MB/s, but unless VDPAU does the entire process on the hardware (that is, you send nothing but the encoded stream to the videocard, and it handles the entire decode process end-to-end, including the scaling and overlay output), you're going to need at least two copies, so 720p is out too; PCI was half-duplex. I believe subtitles would require this sort of double-copy, even if VDPAU is end-to-end.

Re:Performance

[tylernt]

That's exactly what VDPAU is and does: send the raw encoded 20mbps (that's bits/s) MPEG stream to the card and let the card display it. The entire process is done in the GPU hardware.

This does mean that the VDPAU hardware (or at least firmware) must support your codec, so only a handful of standard formats is supported.

Re:Performance

[Guspaz]

And subtitles? I understand there's a different surface used for that for VDPAU, though. DXVA, you'd be out of luck.

Re:Performance

[Narcocide]

What about overclocking?

Re:Performance

[tylernt]

I can turn on ATSC closed captioning without trouble, yes. Just another surface (OpenGL I believe) for the card to render, as you said.

Incidentally, VDPAU also does some very nice deinterlacing.

Re:Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Make sure your motherboard can supply the required power to it

Re:Performance

[TeknoHog]

Right now, it's far cheaper to buy bitcoins with cash than to pay the power cost to mine them.

I have done my math. Electricity is fairly cheap in Finland, and currently I'm barely making a profit. There is also this idea of long-term investment/involvement, and not everything needs be profitable right now.

If you think bitcoins will be the currency of the future, go spend a few hundred dollars on them.

I already have plenty of BTC saved, after selling some of them to recover my costs (including hardware).

The point of mining is not to make money, but to verify transactions. People who believe in the system should participate in maintaining it. No point in saving some BTC if nobody is running it.

Re:Performance

[sander]

You forgot to check that it is indeed a 32bit, 33Mhz slot it goes into. So forget about 533 MB/s, the maximum burst is going to be 133MB/s. But this also doesn't mean you would not be making full use of the card - the external card bandwidth only really matters if a lot of data is transversing the interface.Which would not be the case if you are using it largely for 2d, or 2d with 3d effects. And a 520 does not really have all that much of hardware to make the most of.

Re:Performance

[sander]

Well, go ahead and make a VLB to PCI bridge with a fpga and then you can use this card in your poor neglacted vlb slot ;)

Re:Performance

[Claggy]

I agree, a PCI 8400 GS wasn't detected in my Asus P2B, and neither was a Wireless Card i bought years earlier, i think the board only has PCI 2.1, The P2B has the very latest Beta Bios, a Slocket, and a Coppermine (FC-PGA) Pentium 3, and it has a AGP x4 FX5600 fitted in it's AGP x2 slot, on which the fan doesn't work, you can't get AGP cards to fit as all recent ones are AGP x8, PCI 8400 GS works fine in a Athlon XP system (Asus a7n8x delux)

Re:Performance

[mjwx]

Also, cards like these often have a lot of media playback capabilities that aren't bandwidth-hungry. This could likely, for example, allow an old clunker system to be upgraded to Blu-Ray capabilities fairly cheaply.

More likely it's to go in a more modern machine for someone who wants a third monitor to display their emails on. Probably why they're building PCI-E 1x model as well as a legacy PCI model. PCI's bandwidth is enough to run outlook on a 1280x1024 screen. I wouldn't use it to set up a three screen CAD/GIS workstation though.

Re:Performance

[jawtheshark]

Weird, my experience is that Linux is actually great at supporting older graphics cards. It usually chokes on the new cards. You can run Compiz on a GeForce2 MX. Try finding Windows 7 drivers for that. A hint: Anything older than the GeForce 6-series is not supported on Windows 7, at all... NVidia simply doesn't provide drivers.

ATI is actually pretty surprising on Linux because the open source drivers work wonderfully. I just googled reviews of your laptop so I could date it. It's from around 2006. My (second) personal laptop is also from that time-frame. It's a Fujitsu-Siemens Pa1510 and has something called an ATI X1100. It's pretty badly documented to what it really is. To get drivers on Windows, it's a pain because AMD/ATI says "it's up to the laptop manufacturer" and those obviously don't want to support such "ancient" machines. On Linux there even aren't any proprietary drivers, but the stock drivers work including compiz.

Re:Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Compare it to whatever graphics a PCI-only computer has, though. GT520 or GF2 MX200? That thing is a beast.

Re:Performance

[Ash Vince]

I'd be more interested in seeing it in AGP myself.

Much as I'd like to see this myself, the brief window of time that AGP existed, means it will never happen.

It can't have been that brief as they managed to get several versions out, most of which seemed to be completely incompatible with the preceding version.

If all you were doing was doubling the speed from AGP 4X to AGP 8X why the hell make the physical connector different? I know there was a voltage difference but not changing the slot would have meant we could buy motherboards that supported both.

Not really disagreeing with you, just having a rant about something that annoyed me.

Re:Performance

[idontgno]

"See that flickering pattern of the A12, A10, and A9 address bit LEDs? That's my outbound Ultralisk rush. Heheheh... he'll never see it coming... OH CRAP! All the data lines lit up! That's an inbound nuclear strike! Dammit, which switch is 'Sensor Sweep'? Man, I have got to invest in an ASR-33 so I can at least type commands."

Re:Performance

[idontgno]

I dunno. There are still several AGP-based Radeon HD 3xxx and 4xxx class video cards on the market, and they came out not very long after those GPUs were market baseline. It is feasible, both technically and from a (niche) market perspective. So I wouldn't say "never", just "not immediately".

Although, admittedly, even these cards are pretty serious overkill. I'm actually using an HIS HD 4670 IceQ AGP card on a Pentium 4 machine, and ultimately the motherboard and CPU are the bottleneck. Still, World of Warcraft looks pretty good, even on this ancient POS. (This is my backup gaming machine, which I use only when my primary machine has been monopolized by my kids, such as right now, since the most recent Shogun 2: Total War DLC has come out.)

Re:Performance

[jandrese]

Long term investment in bitcoins? I know there is a sucker born every minute, but seriously, there are zero people with any sense who consider bitcoin a good long term investment. Literally the only people who should be interested in it are short term speculators looking for bigger suckers to give them their money before the whole thing goes up in flames, and the smoke is already getting thick.

Re:Performance

[TeknoHog]

Have you missed the point of Bitcoin? It's a distributed payment system, not a free money generator. I'm not investing in it in the sense of getting free money. I want to help create a world with more freedom and individual responsibility, for example by getting rid of Paypal. Since I have already recouped my costs, I have no risk in continuing at this point. Besides, my biggest reward comes from all the development experience related to Bitcoin, and I keep getting donations for my FPGA code.

Re:Performance

[jandrese]

Bitcoin is a big scheme to part suckers from their money, nothing more. The bullcrap about totally non-governmental private currency is just a ruse to lure in the Ayn Rand libertarians in the hopes that they'll use real money to buy bitcoins. They are the ones that are going to be left holding the bag in the end.

Bitcoins are insidious because the scheme is set up to make it look like hoarding the coins is the way to "win", which discourages people from trying to cash out too early. In the meantime, the people who set it up slowly but continually sell off coins for as long as there are still suckers buying them. Eventually the incoming suckers dry up (because the "market price" for coins drops too low) and they get to walk away with the money. It's a very well designed scam, but I can't help but to think that at least some of those guys are going to appear in front of a judge at some point and be made to answer for their actions.

Re:Performance

[tylernt]

What about overclocking?

CPU is normal-clocked (1.somethingGHz), and the GPU is actually underclocked by about 100MHz to keep it cooler -- my case isn't ventilated very well.

Re:Performance

[rwa2]

I'd be more interested in seeing it in AGP myself.

LMGTFY.... ah, here we go: Zotac 5200 AGP

I bought an XFX AGP GPU a few years ago... it was simply the current version of their nVidia 6800 chipset with a PCIe - AGP bridge thrown in. Good times.

Unfortunately, I finally sold that machine a year or two ago, since a bunch of games started requiring DX10 :-/ Would have kept it around as a Linux server, but it was kinda power hungry and relatively noisy compared to my new box.

Re:Performance

[armanox]

You're confusing the FX 5200 with the GT 520 my friend, they're several generations apart.

Re:Performance

[rwa2]

aw, but the performance difference is only off by a factor of 10 or so ;-) Oh well, point taken :-D

Re:Performance

[galanom]

Compared to my old computer's ISA 8bit, it sounds great!

Re:Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone doesn't seek the best performance. A PCI card can be useful for people who want more than 2 screens (CAD ...) and have only one PCIe slot.

Overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering PCI's bandwidth, the usefulness of the product is quite limited...

PCI? Legacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not legacy. This is legacy.

Re:PCI? Legacy?

[f8l_0e]

Sweet comic. I had the exact same experience with X-Wing on 486 with 4MB of ram. I eventually made memmaker my bitch and finally got it working.

Re:PCI? Legacy?

[jandrese]

The timing is slightly off on that comic. In 1995 you could get a Pentium (with floating point bug!) and 16MB of memory for reasonable (at the time) prices. That Pentium might even have triple digit Mhz! You would also get a double or maybe quad speed CD-ROM and maybe a whole gigabyte of Hard Drive.

The utterly braindamaged DOS memory model was still a problem though. Luckily, that year also saw the release of Windows 95 and the beginning of the end of segmented memory.

Re:PCI? Legacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not legacy. This is legacy.

LOL, page slashdotted from a comment.

Re:PCI? Legacy?

[PRMan]

Most people didn't upgrade to Windows 95 very fast. I was doing desktop support to free low memory all over the place in 1996. I finally convinced them to do a nationwide Windows 95 upgrade.

Re:PCI? Legacy?

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

I remember these fights and saving the successful config.sys, himem.sys, etc. files to a boot floppy to use just to play that game. Nothing else loaded but the bare essential mouse, keyboard, and video drivers and load those high.

Re:PCI? Legacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd have left out ANSI.SYS. You can probably get rid of EMM386.EXE too, as it likely takes up more conventional RAM than the CD-ROM driver does (and using UMBs would rob you of a hundred or so KB of extended memory).

Re:PCI? Legacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember killing my dad's 386 trying to fit more games onto the HDD/memory. It seems that Stacker wasn't too happy about being loaded into high memory...

Re:PCI? Legacy?

[rvw14]

I remember trying to get Wing Commander 2 to work on a 486sx as well as X-Wing. Good times playing X-wing with the mouse, scrolling it across the desktop like mad to try and get the bead on a Tie Fighter.

Ideal for HTPC

[0100010001010011]

There are a TON of older computers that people still run with PCI slots. They would work just fine repurposed as a HTPC but until now there was no hardware acceleration available. The XBMC Forums will have someone come along that is looking for the "Best" PCI option and usually that involves either an SVIDEO or VGA connector. Some new TVs will have a VGA but not all of them.

Re:Ideal for HTPC

[QuantumPion]

Might as well just get a $50 sandy bridge pentium g620 and a $50 h61 motherboard with HDMI out and be done with it rather then try to keep an obsolete machine running with a silly PCI graphics card that is probably slower than the graphics core built into intel's new cpu's.

Re:Ideal for HTPC

[jedidiah]

As "pathetic" as a "slow nvidia card" may be. It will probably still run circles around an Intel part, especially for the given use case.

"Good Intel GPU" is along the same lines as "Year of the Linux Desktop".

Re:Ideal for HTPC

[Anonymous Coward]

Might as well just get a $50 sandy bridge pentium g620 and a $50 h61 motherboard with HDMI out and be done with it rather then try to keep an obsolete machine running with a silly PCI graphics card that is probably slower than the graphics core built into intel's new cpu's.

.... and then you need to get new RAM, because it takes DDR3 instead of DDR or even SDRAM. .... and then you need to upgrade your hard drive (and optical drive) to an SATA drive, because new boards don't have IDE...or at least get a IDE board for PCIe for the new motherboard. .... and then you need to get a new power supply (or a 20->24 pin converter) because the new board doesn't work with the old power supply.

Re:Ideal for HTPC

[Tukz]

For HTPC purposes, Intel GPU's are good enough.

Re:Ideal for HTPC

[wagnerrp]

You are absolutely correct. Technically, the GF520 is still considerably more powerful than anything Intel produces, but the Intel part will make up for at least in part with latency and bandwidth. That's besides the point, however, as no one looking to use onboard Intel graphics, or one of these cards, has any care for any meaningful graphical or computational performance. They both run hardware accelerated decoding well enough, and the new system will idle around 1/3rd the power as the old Athlon/P4 combined with discrete graphics.

Re:Ideal for HTPC

[Bleek II]

No it's not. I've played with recent PCI gpus and they aren't suited for decoding video. Even decoding a 480p youtube will suffer. It's not just about the Mbit/s of the video because the GPU still has to make lots of calls to the system's memory when decoding video in most cases! So PCI will not handle current requirements video well! Stay away from PCI GPUs unless you have a real use for it. Video can be handled by PCI GPUs as long as the CPU does the decoding and not the GPU.

Re:Ideal for HTPC

[PRMan]

This card couldn't touch the new Intel Graphics Family stuff, which is pretty decent ( http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/11 ). Still, that would require a whole new system build at about $300 minimum, even using the built-in graphics. The card is probably less than that.

Re:Ideal for HTPC

[Telvin_3d]

Actually, no. The third party chipsets include hardware for better up-scaling and decoding of h.264. Removes a lot of noise and produces a better result, particulartly if you are outputting to something like a TV.

Re:Ideal for HTPC

[Anonymous Coward]

Weird,
I was unable to decode 720p with my CPU until I put in a PCI GPU with onboard hardware decoding. The CPU must magically be able to decode that now.

Re:Ideal for HTPC

[wagnerrp]

That benchmark puts the a low end Radeon 5450 at comparable to the best Intel graphics in some tests, and significantly outperforming it in other tests. Meanwhile, this benchmark puts the GF520 at somewhere around 50-100% better performance than the Radeon 5450, depending on the test. So yes, this card is far more powerful than anything Intel offers, but it's moot because no one looking for one of these cards or Intel graphics cares much about graphical performance.

Re:Ideal for HTPC

[Darinbob]

PCI exists on more than just PCs as well.

Re:Ideal for HTPC

[Anonymous Coward]

And why would I want that when I can get an AMD APU + motherboard combo for that same price, but with 80 Radeon cores for the same price as the underpowered g620 (*without* the motherboard)?

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/apu/mainstream/Pages/mainstream.aspx#3

http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-brazos-platform-tested-e350-apu-review/1

Heck, for your Intel's price and TPD, I could get a triple core A6-3500 with Radeon HD 6530D integrated on the die.

If someone is not limited to PCI due to external factors, there is little reason to get g620 over AMD's APU.

Re:Ideal for HTPC

[RightSaidFred99]

Fanboi says what? Intel's GPUs are perfectly fine for media (Bluray, h.264 mkvs, whatever). You must be thinking of gaming, where they're barely adequate for low res gaming.

Re:Ideal for HTPC

[RightSaidFred99]

Nonsense, Intel's GPUs include this as well.

Re:Ideal for HTPC

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll make up for most of that in power savings over the next few years (saving 100w over 2 years = about 1800kwh = about $250).

And you'll make up for the rest and more in medical bills, because instead of sitting there slitting your wrists while the computer takes a shit for 10 minutes, you'll be watching porn. Lots and lots of porn. The porn will be coming at you so much faster, you won't have TIME to slit your wrists.

Re:Ideal for HTPC

[Lisandro]

I had to skip a Zotac mobo with Intel chipset specifically because it limits (by hardware) its HDMI output to 720p. It's a shame, because otherwise Intel GPUs perform quite well and have great Linux support.

What

[YodasEvilTwin]

And what are you going to put this in, a PII? That won't help, the bottleneck is the processor (~400 MHz) or some other part of the ancient hardware.

Re:What

[sconeu]

No, you put it in a system with AGP and PCI slots.

Re:What

[vlm]

And what are you going to put this in, a PII? That won't help, the bottleneck is the processor (~400 MHz) or some other part of the ancient hardware.

Running VDPAU video card acceleration on a zbox my CPU varies a lot depending on content but it would seem a pentium 75 Might be able to act as a mythtv frontend with this card. I think something in your specified PII era would be far more than enough. Especially since in ye olden days when mythtv was new, a PII was a kinda decent frontend, and its not like TV has changed much since then.

Re:What

[afidel]

Of course tv has changed since the PII came out, there was no HD back then. NTSC encoded as MPEG2 is simple, playing back 1080p30 content using one of the modern codecs is much, much more difficult, especially if you don't have hardware acceleration (which would be a big reason to add an NVidia card to an older system).

Re:What

[vlm]

Of course tv has changed since the PII came out, there was no HD back then.

First commercial ATSC broadcast = July 1996. Mid summer anyway, as I recall. I'm in the telecom biz, trust me on this.
First retail sale of a PII = 1997ish, certainly not before 1996

Its quite the horse race there.

Re:What

[julesh]

And what are you going to put this in, a PII?

I have PCI slots in my Core2 system. It only has 3 PCIe slots. If I wanted 8 monitors (and let's face it, who the hell doesn't???), this card would allow me to get there.

Re:What

[afidel]

First consumer ATSC card that I know of: 2006 (Hauppauge HVR-950 though that was USB, most HTPC's would have used the HVR-1600 which didn't launch till 2007).

Re:What

[nsaspook]

1st gen consumer ATSC cards started being released about 2004-5.
http://www.bbti.us/download/datasheets/Air2PC-ATSC-PCI.pdf

They work ok but are very sensitive to multipath. I still use a few in old HDTV servers.

Re:What

[Lanteran]

Well, perhaps not a pentium II, but this will help immensely on both AGP era boards (this is much more powerful), and later boards that were too cheap to even include more than a few PCI slots- in fact, I have such a 775 board like that. With vdpau, though, I think this brings HD video into the realm of the Pentium III or even, possibly, the Pentium II. I'll probably buy a few for older machines I work on, hell, this may even allow for compiz.

Re:What

[Reziac]

Ha, I have a very nice P4 server board that has *ISA* slots. Mine has an AGP slot, but the standard version only has ISA and PCI.

http://www.ibase.com.tw/mb800.htm

Internal combustion powered buggy whip for sale!

[Chas]

Woo!

Neither fish nor foul nor good red herring!

What about the C=64

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still waiting a version compatible with the CBM-64 serial bus.

Re:What about the C=64

[jameskojiro]

Naw, we need a S100 version.

SERVERS!!!

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

If the form factor is correct, then plenty of recent Xeon/Opteron servers, with a free PCI slot, suddenly become AWESOME desktop platforms. Around here, you can get late model 4-core Xeons, with maybe 8GB of RAM, on Craigslist, from name-brand companies [HP, Dell, etc], for circa $500. And they will be of VASTLY higher quality [with esp. vastly better motherboards] than the consumer-oriented junk that those same companies are peddling.

Re:SERVERS!!!

[erikscott]

There are an awful lot of PCI slots in all sorts of embedded systems out there, and some of them may be looking for a graphics upgrade. For that matter, I still have instruments that have EISA slots in them. I suspect I'll be running them for another decade. 10Base2 is getting to be a pain to deal with, though.

Re:SERVERS!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

If the form factor is correct, then plenty of recent Xeon/Opteron servers, with a free PCI slot, suddenly become AWESOME desktop platforms.

Bwahahahahahahah! Ah hahahahahaa! (this goes on for several minutes)

Have you ever seen or heard a server, dude? I'm thinking no. Rackmount servers are (a) unwieldy to use on the desktop and (b) FREAKING LOUD. Hope you like living with a vacuum cleaner.

(Also what makes you imagine most servers have a classic PCI slot, anyways? These days they're usually 100% PCIe.)

Re:SERVERS!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Poweredge T110. Tower form factor and quiet like a desktop. I have one for my VMs.
4 memory slots for max 16GB
Two x8 slots
One x4 slot
One x1 slot

Granted, no PCI slots which was the point of the article, BUT not all server chassis are loud.

Re:SERVERS!!!

[afidel]

There are a lot of Core2 era Xeon servers with PCI/PCI-X slots, including a lot of pedestal servers which are designed to be used in an office environment. We use HP ML series for most of our remote offices where we don't have room for a dedicated rack. The biggest obstacle to using one as a workstation (other than the large size) is the fact that you generally can't just slap a new SATA drive in there, you need a carrier and on many systems the RAID card will only recognize certain drives.

Re:SERVERS!!!

[Coren22]

I have an old ISA 10BaseT card if you are serious...

Re:SERVERS!!!

[Delusion_]

I don't know about the T series, but the SC series of PE machines have 8x slots that have dividers which prevent use of 16x cards in them.

Interestingly, this can be solved by a heated blade and a heated screwdriver.

Re:SERVERS!!!

[haruchai]

I like that it has a variety of PCIe slots. Most of the affordable consumer mainboards have only 1 x16, and 2 or 3 x1

Re:SERVERS!!!

[Roman Mamedov]

What?... I can't hear you from all that noise your new 'desktop' is making.

Oh, SO going into my Alpha Personal Workstation...

[derinax]

I'm hoping it's got a bog-standard PCI interface specification, so that the old PWS console firmware works with it. The PWS 600au works great with an ATI Radeon 9000, NetBSD + X11. Not so sure about the xorg support for the GT520 though. We'll see.

No Win98 drivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, this doesn't help my Win98 retro gaming tower at all then, does it.

Re:No Win98 drivers?

[zaibazu]

Some of the recent Nvidia Chips caused nasty geometry artifacts in older games which kept getting more and then the game crashes. I wasn't able to play Sim City 4 and Startopia.

Problem disappeared when I switched from my 8800GT to a Radoen HD5870. A friend with a GTX280 had the same problem as me.

and today my voodoo4

[Anonymous Coward]

can decode vc1 in xp and linux. Sounds like they are pandering to the broke diy crowd who would otherwise ebay, but don't have enough sense. That and the senseless relative techs of clueless elderly folks.

Sweet!

[damn_registrars]

I can have a video card with 512mb of ram in my 486 with 8mb of ram. I can't wait to see what Doom looks like now!

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your 486 has PCI? Gotta be one of the later models, made when pentium had become the norm then...

Re:Sweet!

[damn_registrars]

Your 486 has PCI? Gotta be one of the later models, made when pentium had become the norm then...

2PCI, 1 shared ISA/PCI, 4 ISA (2 with VLB).

7 slots to rule them all...

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a 486 with PCI slots???

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now the next question, are the PCI bus master or not?

Had a Pentium 150 MHz box that had 3 PCI and 3 ISA. (Bought May 1996. My parents used it as their normal computer until 2007 when they finally upgraded. 48 MB RAM, 1.6 & 2.1 GB HDs, Windows 95 (not 95B or C, the original 95, didn't even support FAT32) )

The PCI slots didn't support Bus masters. Machine would not boot when I had a 10/100 Ethernet PCI card in it(swapped card to verify it wasn't a bad card). Ended up having to get an 10 Ethernet ISA card to get it on the network. (Plus side, learned about Linux routing between a 10 Mbs network and 100 Mbs network (single speed hubs) (around 1999 or so) )

Now the video card might not care, but then again it might.

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

On Linux you can use Video RAM as swap or a ramdisk, might be useful on a machine with only 8MB of RAM.

Not about the bottleneck

[Anonymous Coward]

My mom has an old pc that works fine, but I gave her a large monitor, that is beyond the resolution of her on-board video. It still works, and looks reasonable. But we've all seen what non-native resolution looks like.

My guess is that there are plenty of P-III and P-4's out there that are a video card away from being able to take full advantage of modern monitors. A PCI port is the least common denominator, AGP comes in 3.3 and 5v flavors, and was absent in some machines with onboard video. It can also be sold to people looking for extra non-gaming monitors on a modern pc, where AGP has died.

Mac Pro1,1

[HTH NE1]

Can it be flashed with Mac-compatible firmware?

As yet there are but one or two video cards compatible with a Mac Pro1,1 capable of playing Portal, and they are still quite expensive ($400+), no longer manufactured, and vendors are unreliable for (1) shipping the correct card for the model of Mac and (2) don't seem to last very long once they do ship a "working" one (apparently a reflashed PC card). The last one I got eventually decided that it had to drive the display connected to it at exactly the same resolution as another display of differing resolution on the original video card. Even if no display was connected to it.

Re:Mac Pro1,1

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an 08 Mac Pro with a radeon 6870 in it. Install the drivers from Lion, no need to flash. Cheers :)

Re:Mac Pro1,1

[HTH NE1]

The 1,1 was '06 with EFI32, the '08 has EFI64. Lion can really make that work on the '06?

Re:Mac Pro1,1

[Anonymous Coward]

Can it be flashed with Mac-compatible firmware?

As yet there are but one or two video cards compatible with a Mac Pro1,1 capable of playing Portal, and they are still quite expensive ($400+), no longer manufactured, and vendors are unreliable for (1) shipping the correct card for the model of Mac and (2) don't seem to last very long once they do ship a "working" one (apparently a reflashed PC card). The last one I got eventually decided that it had to drive the display connected to it at exactly the same resolution as another display of differing resolution on the original video card. Even if no display was connected to it.

You're barking up the wrong tree: the card this story is about is a classic PCI card, not PCI Express. You can't even physically install it in a Mac Pro 1,1.

Just buy one of Apple's official ATI 5770/5870 upgrade cards from Apple's online store (Mac accessories -> Displays & Graphics). Don't bother with a retail store, availability can be spotty. The 5870's pricey but the 5770 is only $250. Apple claims these cards won't work in the Mac Pro 1,1. Ignore that, they turn out to have dual mode 32/64-bit EFI firmware and work just fine. (The most likely explanation I've heard is that ATI designed its standard Mac PCIe expansion card firmware to support all generations of Mac Pro, but Apple doesn't want to pay for full testing and support on older machines, so when they OEM'ed ATI's 5770 and 5870 designs they just listed the old machines as unsupported even though the cards work perfectly in them.)

I've been using a 5770 in my 1,1 for something like a year now with zero issues. First time in the entire life of my Mac Pro that I've had a non-dodgy video card (I went through both the X1900XT and 8800GT fiascoes, thanks ATI and NVidia for turning out video chips which reliably kill themselves).

You do have to run at least OS X 10.6.4 or thereabouts to get acceleration, so if you're one of the weird holdouts on 10.5, you'll have to upgrade.

Re:Mac Pro1,1

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a proper computer.

Re:Mac Pro1,1

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? The Mac Pro doesn't have Classic PCI slots, only PCI Express slots.

So even if you could flash the thing, how would you put it in the Mac Pro?

The 5770 is a card compatible with the Mac Pro 1,1, in the $200 price range, and it plays Portal 2 great.

Re:Mac Pro1,1

[HTH NE1]

Yeah, I got confused what with my previous PC and my Blue & White G3 (upgraded to G4 so I could run a patched installer of Final Cut Pro) being PCI-only. I upgrade infrequently, trying to get the most out of the hardware until it is OS-obsolete. Yeah, no chance of there being drivers for this card under Tiger let alone a PPC port of Portal. I really should get that server room wired up for networking and that G3 given file server duties; the case internals have already been modded to accommodate more drives (some rivet popping and moving of the power button board).

Graphics cards don't need PCI-E 16x

[flimflammer]

A lot of people don't seem to understand that you don't need a 16x PCI-E slot for graphics cards, or even half that. The cards will rarely ever require that much bandwidth and certainly not under normal gaming conditions.

This card seems to be designed for situations where you want to do things with your PC that isn't bleeding edge gaming. That particular card isn't really that great anyhow. This would be perfect for a multimedia PC, or for casual games.

Question

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Would a card like this be helpful in any way for adding a 3rd or 4th display to your computer? Possibly still with some 3d accelleration, even if it's relatively slow?

Re:Question

[PRMan]

It would be VERY good for that.

Re:Question

[julesh]

Yes. The PCIe 1x variant should be particularly useful for up to 8 monitor systems, as systems with 4 PCIe slots are very easy to find. Beyond that you may find getting enough power to them problematic, but it is theoretically achievable.

Re:Question

[William-Ely]

Yes, I've done just that with some Dell Optiplex 380 systems. You can also use the on-board video along with PCI graphics to get multiple monitors working.

Why does it need to be modern?

[erice]

If you are going to saddle it with a PCI or a single lane PCIe, why do you need a modern GPU? Older technology cards are still available and still supported.

Re:Why does it need to be modern?

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

For FOLDING / Coin Mining on the side?

Re:Why does it need to be modern?

[julesh]

If you are going to saddle it with a PCI or a single lane PCIe, why do you need a modern GPU? Older technology cards are still available and still supported.

Because the GPU manufacturers actually charge nearly as much for older designs as they do for low-end modern ones. Because the memory for older GPUs is becoming hard to acquire. Because if you're investing large sums of money to design a board for a specialised application that isn't going to sell spectacular numbers, the difference between a $10 GPU and a $15 GPU isn't really going to make a proportionally huge difference to the retail cost of the board, and it might make a difference to whether it's useful for some customers.

link speed can be a limiting factor

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you don't max out the pci-e 16x throughput, doesn't mean the 16x linkspeed is useless, faster throughput means less time waiting for data, every millisecond spent waiting is not being used for calculations..

No AGP?

[Hamsterdan]

Wouldn't it make more sense to sell one with AGP too?

Before my X2 died, It was upgraded with a HD3850 and could run pretty much anything, albeit not at highest settings. I'm trying to see what good a PCI card could do besides

A) adding a third monitor
B) adding hdmi on the cheap on an HTPC

Systems with PCI slots will either have PCI-E or AGP slots. Those that only have PCI will be in P2 class, and it makes no sense to upgrade that kind of machine with a fast video card, even for folding or mining.

Re:No AGP?

[FreonTrip]

Strictly PCI would be restricted to Pentium and pre-Super7 systems. The Pentium IIs were marketed heavily on the back of AGP, but some forever alone lunatic out there is slapping his hands together, crowing that his quad-processor Pentium Pro box will finally get a "worthy" video card. I almost want to see that.

Re:No AGP?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a dual my dad uses for web surfing, but does that count? :D

And honestly I've got the quads, problem is less finding a videocard and more finding memory/hard disks that will make it usable (*HORRIBLE Adaptec onboard controllers in the one that hardlocks if you try accessing both SCSI channels at the same time, like when for instance, running a raid-5 array across 6-9 disks in a 12 bay hot swap array.

>.

Honestly given how much power they'd suck up with a full bank of memory they're not really worth it, but those things are built like *TRUCKS* and still 15+ years later fire up with no problems.... (that they didn't have the last time I powered them down, like for instance that root drive I kinda broke the SCA connector putting in a diff system without a proper hot swap caddy... oops).

FYI the Dual is currently running a PCI Radeon 7x00 series card due to the still lousy and ever decreasing linux support for now 'legacy' cards. Honestly the Rage 128/R100 cards worked the best, the R200 have had constant lockup/crashing issues since like 2005, and anything newer hasn't been budgeted for yet (Another system is running an FX5200, but nouveau only supports it for 2d, no crashes on it so far though.)

An important feature for this card is actually that *ALL* legacy 3d videocard chipsets, pre-r300 I believe have been dropped from Mesa as of 7.13 I believe it'll be. Very disappointing to me since the legacy stuff has never really made it to mature status, other than in age (ceertainly not features/bugfixes), and the current r600 era stuff still can't handle resolution changes for dosbox and video playback without random lockups/crashes. After 15 years of using linux I feel like I've come full circle, there's no reliable support for my hardware out of the box, and I'm forced to upgrade it just to gain the opportunity at support. Wasn't this one of the major reasons many of us originally migrated from Windows/Proprietary Unix's TO linux? :(

Most likely for dell servers

[weiqj]

Dells has been shamelessly sabotaging it's low end servers by deliberately crippling the PCI-E slot (only allowing PCI-E X1 slots) so that people can't use it s a powerful desktop. This card is a perfect solution.

CUDA farm?

[dutchwhizzman]

Would this work with 4 of these in an old P2 or so and a Gbit NIC? It might actually give great CUDA performance for the money?

Re:CUDA farm?

[Claggy]

I got a PCI 8400 GS for my Asus P2B and it's Pentium 3, but it's BIOS doesn't detect the GPU, an earlier wireless Card wasn't detected eithier, i suspect you need PCI 2.2 or later, I've heard of others with Pentium 3's where PCI GPU's are detected, so your mileage may vary, the PCI 8400 GS runs Cuda apps fine in a Athlon XP system, while it's AGP HD4650 runs CAL apps fine,

Extra GPU

[Anonymous Coward]

My pc has onboard graphics which are perfectly adequate, but I want to add a 3rd and 4th monitor to it, but I've only got 1x pci-e and 1x standard pci.

Adding a graphics card to the pci-e x16 slot causes the bios to disable the onboard graphics, as i have seen it do on a number of motherboards. It's a half height case, I can't afford to fork out for a low profile card with 4 outputs. What this card does is not just give those with old machines a new lease of life, it gives those of us who have limited expansion options some more freedom by letting us easily add a second card.

Not useless at all

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are looking for a GPGPU solution. You could fit up to five or so of this cards in a single machine.

Just what I've been looking for...

[jnaujok]

Right now I have an HTPC sitting at home, based on an Atom chip that worked great (and still does) for pushing SDTV. When the HDTV went in, it was woefully inadequate, what with the embedded Intel graphics that can't push better than about 10fps at 720p.

It's got a single PCI slot for upgrading....

This card is *exactly* what I need to make this thing rock again as a Hi-def HTPC. With HDMI out, I can pump 7.1 surround to the stereo, and this thing should handle up to 1080p video playback without blinking.

This is so going to the top of my buy list as soon as it's actually released. Grumble...

Re:Just what I've been looking for...

[Reed Solomon]

It'd be nice if they also threw in a digital optical s/pdif output on it. But either way, I can now use the PCI slot for this, take out the broadcom decoder mini Pci-e card and use it elsewhere, and put the wireless card in the mini pci-e slot rather than a pci -> mini pci-e adapter. Only problem is now I gotta wait. Do they have an ETA or price estimate anywhere yet?

This may just end up as a hot seller.

Re:Just what I've been looking for...

[jnaujok]

You've got the broadcom decoder too? Only helps on certain things, unfortunately.

I'll probably leave it in, as I have a gigabit hard-wired network running in, so no need for a wireless card.

Haven't seen a price, but I've heard "October" for a release date. No reason it shouldn't hit soon, as they have all the packaging and drivers done for it when I checked their web site. Personally I'm hoping for that $49.99 price point...

Cool

[Hsien-Ko]

I wonder how my 486VIP motherboard can take this up in 3DBench.

Re:Oh, SO going into my Alpha Personal Workstation

[david.given]

Been there, tried that --- this was on an old CATS ARM box. Turns out that there's a lot of ia32 code in ROM on the graphics card which, of course, ARMs and Alphas are totally unable to run.

The CATS box managed to at least initialise the card into text mode by running the graphics card ROM via the world's slowest ia32 emulator; the keyboard lights would flash for ten seconds on bootup and then you'd get the graphics card's POST message. I don't know what Alpha boxes do.

I have tried to make PCI graphics cards work on an embedded system that didn't have such an emulator, and discovered that xorg relies heavily on the BIOS having initialised the card to a sane state on startup. Without that initialisation you're pretty much out of luck (particularly since it's all undocumented). That said, if you're already using an ATI card on the Alpha then there must be some mechanism to make it work, so... good luck!

(Come back, Open Firmware. All is forgiven...)

lo-pro P4s

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see this rebreathing some life into a lot of those IBM 240/260 lo profile series desktop PCs that only came with PCI slots. Before you poo-poo me, I have a 2.8 ghz P4 with a gig of ram that has an AGP slot with a 7800GS card in it that I still use on a regular basis to run older games on the living room TV. (Including Warcraft..)

Mini-ITX

[owlstead]

I've got two Mini-ATX boards lying around with a fully functional PCI slot. The PCI board is fanless as well, so that might make an interesting media playback device for sure. And it has HDMI. I'm already sold, this baby could hook up my VIA Mini-ITX to my full HD TV (that, unfortunately, does not do VGA in). Happy thoughts. Shame it is not half height, I'll have to saw my wine-box in two :)

Re:Mini-ITX

[rickatnight11]

Judging by the ribbon on the VGA port and the height of the board, I'd say this IS a half-height card. You just need to swap out the IO panel.

Indeed, I run XBMC on a PIII with HDMI-out

[Phil Urich]

Back when the development branch first added VDPAU support, I got a cheap passively-cooled GeForce 8400GS PCI card and slapped it into an old PIII 600-mHz (overclocked to 733, yeeeaahhhh boyyy!), booting directly into XBMC without any desktop environment. Runs like a charm, outputting 720p over the DVI output fed into the HDMI input on my projector (which is natively 720p, hence no higher res used), the only annoying bit was that at first I was having to compile it from source, which believe me, takes quite a long time on a PIII, haha. Luckily these days it's all packaged in the official PPA.

cool... but...

[smash]

For the cost of the card, i reckon you could almost build a cheap atom/similar based system with onboard graphics that will kill the machine as a whole in performance.

If you're stuck with PCI, you're also probably stuck with some tiny amount of slow RAM, parallel ATA, a BIOS that can't read hard drives bigger than 500 meg, etc.

Not exactly a gaming/video machine there...

If its just to play HD content on TV, then an appleTV or boxee box will probably be cheaper and perform better, also.

Re:cool... but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got an Atom 330 with an nVidia 8200 in a PCI slot for a HTPC, does an excellent job of everything I throw at it. I kinda question whether or not an Atom is capable of h264 1080p decoding, though.
I tried running the card in a 100MHz P1, just to see if it truly did offload all the processing onto the card (Atom runs at about 7%, am assuming it's AC3 decoding), but the motherboard was incapable of supplying enough power to the PCI slot to run the car.

Just use a bridge board and half height video card

[fragMasterFlash]

There are plenty of bridge boards available that will accept a half-height x16 PCIe card and plug into a 32-bit PCI slot. The PLX PEX8112 bridge chip makes this type of bridge card fairly cheap to produce. I think I paid approximately 34 USD for one earlier this year that works well with a Radeon 6450 for multimedia applications.

Re:Oh, SO going into my Alpha Personal Workstation

[RR]

Been there, tried that --- this was on an old CATS ARM box. Turns out that there's a lot of ia32 code in ROM on the graphics card which, of course, ARMs and Alphas are totally unable to run.

Actually, the Alphas have a basic x86 emulator in their massive ROMs, so they're able to initialize standard VGA cards. Note that derinax has an ATI Radeon 9000, which certainly did not come in an Alpha version.

I don't know whether this card will work, though.

Volaris

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer to have Volari Z7 and Z11 on a mass scale production (as extension cards) for PCI/PCIe instead of proprietary GPUs. And yes hardware 3D is not something I like in the form it is sold today.
Please Zotac........pleeeeease.

Might be useful for dual-head

[Anonymous Coward]

This sort of card might be useful for those of us with modern systems who dual-head (or tripple-head). I like to watch movies on my second monitor while I game fullscreen on my primary - Unfortunately this sometimes destroys my gaming performance. I just recently (days ago) upgraded my video card to try and boost performance, but when I was shopping I did very seriously consider finding an old PCI card to throw my second monitor on as a stopgap option.

Anyone have experience with those kinds of setups? Running multiple cards (of different makes) for different monitors?

Using old PCI card.... laggy desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

I had an old Sparkle 8500GT PCI card. Considering the specs it was meant to be reasonably powerful however due to the exceptionally slow PCI bus when I put the resolution of my desktop to anything 1920 x 1080 and up it became a lag fest when I was moving icons around or doing pretty much anything...

This was running on reasonably fast Q6600 at the time and both XP and Windows 7 yielded the same results...

So this card is a big fat pointless waste of money. As someone said above get an entry level sandy bridge based system which will cost around the same, bring you in to the modern era *and* give you access to big tasty upgrades for a reasonable price.

KGPU?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like this could really speed up ancient Linux boxes if they use KGPU.

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?51240-Speeding-Up-The-Linux-Kernel-With-Your-GPU#post205509

More Passmark scores

[Lonewolf666]

Lets have a closer look at that 866 Passmark points.

Compared to a single AMD Athlon XP 2400+ with 431 points, it looks a bit suspect but possible (I'd expect less than perfect scaling when going from one to two processors).

The AMD Athlon X2 Dual Core BE-2300 (2 cores at 1.9 GHz) comes in at 1033 points. Seems plausible by comparison, considering the improvements in AMD's technology since the XP.

You are right about the Core, if you used the Core Duo (without the "2") as basis for comparison. That was the Yonah (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonah_(microprocessor)) laptop processor by the way. But for a "fair" comparison, the Core 2 Duo, built for the desktop, is the better basis. If we pick the Core2Duo E4300, the very first (and weakest) Core2Duo that went to market, it has 1056 passmark points. Later models were better of course.

Getting back to Hairyfeet's idea of using a Pentium D, the fastest in the Passmark list (the Extreme Edition 965 @3.73 GHz) has 1318 points. The Celeron E3400 that I suggested as alternative gets 1711 points.

Considering tech dumpster diving, I like that sport :-)
But even so, the minimum I'm looking for is AMD64 X2 and Core2Duo. Refurbishing old P4 machines is simply not worth my time anymore, unless I have a bunch of parts that are known to be OK. Stuff from dumpsters needs triage, because some of it got there for being defective ;-)
BTW, the machine I'm typing this post on has an Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4600+ (2 cores at 2.4 GHz), 2GB RAM, a NVidia 8600GT and 1266 Passmark points. Perfectly good for surfing, office stuff and older games. But it tends to have problems with new games, so an upgrade is on the way...

Re:More Passmark scores

[jawtheshark]

Compared to a single AMD Athlon XP 2400+ with 431 points, it looks a bit suspect but possible (I'd expect less than perfect scaling when going from one to two processors).

Look at other CPUs where you can check Single versus SMP configurations. They pretty much all scale in that way. The CPU mark is really just the CPU "strength" measured, and not overal system performance, where "rest" weights in too. I suspect the algorithm used to test the CPU performance scales exceptionally well with more cores. It's a design flaw, I suspect is mitigated by the other tests.

You are right about the Core, if you used the Core Duo (without the "2") as basis for comparison.

I admit, that I've been a bit unfair because I compared it to Core 2 Duo laptop CPUs. I did see that the desktop CPUs beat the crap out of it. Laptops CPU's didn't: Look at the Core 2 Duo T5300 which is from Q1 2007, according to wikipedia. You caught me... :-P Still, do remember we are talking here about a machine that is 8 years old, for which I find the results still quite impressive. The thing is, how soon until Atoms catch up with those early Core 2 Duo laptop CPUS, and given their power use, it is entirely fair to compare them to (old) laptop CPUs. The CPU power of even these crappy-low-end-cheap Atoms beat most P-IV CPUs for which this PCI card would be interesting, and as a bonus you'd get pretty capable integrated graphics.

Funnily enough, my former desktop was a AMD X2 4200+/4GB. Nifty machine, but I "upgraded" my moms machine (Socket 754, AMD64/2GB RAM) using that hardware when I got the Atom D525 for 199€. For me the space it used trumped the fact that it was less powerful than the X2. There is something to be said for a machine as tiny as a consumer-router which can be mounted on the back of an (old 19") LCD.

Refurbishing old P4 machines is simply not worth my time anymore, unless I have a bunch of parts that are known to be OK. Stuff from dumpsters needs triage, because some of it got there for being defective ;-)

I just recently stopped with dumpster diving. The P-IV class machines simply aren't worth it at all. (I bought the MP new, it's harder to part with it, than anything you take out of a dumpster) However, most of the "being defective" really seems to be completely screwed up Redmond Installations. It is actually very rare that the hardware itself is defective. Well, there are foul batches. For example, you can't trust any PATA harddisk in the range of 160GB. Back then, the quality with all manufacturers dropped significantly. Too many returns made them get their act together again. That said, you don't find them often, as they are usually already gone for a long time. Also, people have become more savvy: often they destroy the disks before disposal.

Similar for some motherboards around that period (2.4/2.6GHz P-IV). They tend to have bad caps. All in all, the most common problems with dumpster sourced computers are in order: Windows hosed ... and far beyond that, Powersupply hosed, bad caps, defective harddisk... I think I'd look at the occasional X2 or Core2Duo, but I have a really hard time giving them away, even after I checked them on functionality and reinstalled the system (Preferably Ubuntu, but I've done XP too) Given the time it takes to refurbish them, it is economically non-viable in any scenario. I do/did it for the fun, but I end up with 20 (functional) computers without a use and without anyone wanting them.

Re:More Passmark scores

[Lonewolf666]

The CPU power of even these crappy-low-end-cheap Atoms beat most P-IV CPUs for which this PCI card would be interesting, and as a bonus you'd get pretty capable integrated graphics.

I'm a bit skeptical here, after I compared a Lenovo Netbook (low end Atom, 1.6 GHz, Windows 7, 1GB RAM) to an old P-IV (2.4GHz, XP, 1GB RAM).
Test application was an in-house piece of code I'm writing for my employer, single threaded, minimal disk I/O, no swapping on both machines thanks to modest memory use. Where the P-IV needed around 400ms for one calculation, the Atom needed around 600ms. A Core2Duo I also tested was far superior...

However, most of the "being defective" really seems to be completely screwed up Redmond Installations. It is actually very rare that the hardware itself is defective.

Around here (Germany), people seem to be a bit more parsimonious. While the P-IV generation is gradually thrown out for being obsolete at my place of work, a fair percentage of dumpster content is actually broken at the hardware level.
Newer generations are still rare as throwaways. So far I got one Core2Duo, without RAM and with an incomplete case. If I find more of these (with not the same parts missing) there might actually be a free PC in it ;-)

Re:More Passmark scores

[jawtheshark]

Keyword here is "Netbook". Look at the "desktop" Atoms, they are really, really different. You don't get dual cores at all in Netbooks (They almost all are Hyperthreaded, but that's not a second core. However so many people mistake it for one.). This is mainly due to how Microsoft sells 7 Starter, which comes with most, if not all, netbooks. So you most likely tested an N270 (Most common Atom in low-end netbooks).... Look the passmark up for that one. I also said "future" Atoms, currently we're not there yet.

If it weren't for the artificial limitation that Microsoft put on 7 Starter, I could easily see a D525 in a netbook. There were some Atom 330 netbooks with ION chipsets too.

Around here => Luxembourg. We are known to have more money, which explains the difference.

Re:More Passmark scores

[jawtheshark]

Sorry, for the double post. I see now why you pitted a Netbook against a P-IV which vastly outclassed it. This stems from my statement:

The CPU power of even these crappy-low-end-cheap Atoms beat most P-IV CPUs

That statement was pretty clumsy. I actually meant that all current Atoms are crappy-low-end-and-cheap (compared to anything else you can buy these days), not that the crappiest Atoms would match a P-iV. They definitely can't, especially not the single-core ones present in Netbooks. My mistake for stating it that way.

As for my "desktop", I bought it in Germany: Alternate ECO-BOX 320/2G. Luxembourg is one of the worst EU countries to buy stuff online, so I usually resort to Germany but many companies don't ship to us. Oddly enough, some tech companies have their HQ here but still don't ship here. *sigh*

Re:Just use a bridge board and half height video c

[toddestan]

There's a good chance that's exactly what this card is, just in one convenient package. Just like the slow trickle of modern AGP cards tend to be PCIe chipsets with a AGP to PCIe bridge. I haven't played around with the PCI to PCIe bridges but the AGP versions never seemed to work quite right, especially on AMD machines.