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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."
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.
That's not legacy. This is legacy.
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.
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.
Woo!
Neither fish nor foul nor good red herring!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
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.
Well, this doesn't help my Win98 retro gaming tower at all then, does it.
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!
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Naw, we need a S100 version.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
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.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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.
We like stories about blinkie things that cost money, what isn't a Slashvertisement, then!?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
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).
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.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
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.
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...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
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.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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...
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
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
how long until
I wonder how my 486VIP motherboard can take this up in 3DBench.
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...)
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
One word... BITCOIN!
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 :)
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.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
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.
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.
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.
Unless you overclocked your PCI bus a lot.
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.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
Have a nice time.
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?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
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.
C - the footgun of programming languages
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)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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...
C - the footgun of programming languages
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.
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.
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.