NVidia Quadro FX 5500 and others - your experience?

[ragnargd]

Hi,

has anyone working experience with Quadro FX 5500, or, given that, any other Quadro, esp. with the G7x chipsets?

The "patched" NVidia driver lists them, and for the FX 5500, i can imagine it may work, as it uses the G71 chip, which is i.e. the NVidia 7900GTX (which works well, i have two of them).

On Wikipedia, it is listed as 1024MB memory DDR2, but i can find PNY models listed with 1GB DDR3, which would be great for Dual-Boot (with XP and/or W10) scenarios with just one GPU, as there is a supported driver for Windows 8 64bit, which works well for Windows 10 64bit.

But before i sink some money into that, if you may offer your words of wisdom ... :-)

(The driver compiled my Maximus Decimus lists all kind of cards, of which some of them definitely are not working with that driver, i.e. i suspect the NVidia Quadro FX 5600, which is the G80, will not work).

Cheers,

Ragnar G.D.

P.S.: In two days, the ASRock 990FX Extreme4 will arrive. There is hope...

[Goodmaneuver]

Quadro FX5600 nearest equivalence is GeForce 8800GTX which is not compatible. I might be able to test a GeForce 7950 GX2 which would be the best card if it works. The bottom GPU suffers from heating too much though and I was going to modify the heat-sinking before testing.

Quadro FX 4500 X2 is similar both have G71 chip.
 

Edited March 11, 2020 by Goodmaneuver
Added Quadro FX4500 X2

[ragnargd]

2 hours ago, Goodmaneuver said:

Quadro FX5600 nearest equivalence is GeForce 8800GTX which is not compatible. I might be able to test a GeForce 7950 GX2 which would be the best card if it works. The bottom GPU suffers from heating too much though and I was going to modify the heat-sinking before testing.

Quadro FX 4500 X2 is similar both have G71 chip.
 

Thank you for your input!

I never bothered for the X2 cars of any kind, because they only profit from SLI-like scenarios, and have the same problems (you already mentioned heat, which already in engineering resulted in lower clockrates).

On W9x, i assume the 7900GTX will win, as the modded W9x driver does not support the second on-board GPU (SLI really is from the Windows XP age), and there never was an official driver for W9x.

Or am i wrong?

To see if XP or W10 profits from the second GPU in Dual-Boot scenarios where you cannot install a faster GPU in a second slot may actually be worthwhile.

Did you (or did anyone) have benchmarks for this? Links?

P.S.: Oh, well, i remember testing SLI with my two 7900 GTX on the MSI 970 Krait, and reviewed my mails - it didn't work, on no operating system, not XP, not W10, and neither MSI nor NVidia provided assistance... well...

[Goodmaneuver]

I have run the 7950 GX2 on Win7 and tested games against single models like GeForce 9800. It is a good video card and does not involve the external SLI hardware and so games do not seem to need be programmed for SLI to gain benefits. Here is a quote from WIKI. "The 7950 GX2 requires only a single PCIe power connector, in contrast to the twin-connectors of its predecessor; technically, this is understandable, as there is no need for a ring bus configuration – frames need only be passed on to the primary GPU". I think it is a good choice but I want to add water cooling blocks to the GPUs which I have none at the moment and this will take me some time but I might test it soon but not bench it just yet. It uses less power than Radeon X1900 XT.
 

Edited March 11, 2020 by Goodmaneuver

[0dium]

I've seen some info on this forum that 7950 will utilise only one GPU.

Yep, there it is, rloew states that w98 will use only one half of the card (one GPU)

 

[Goodmaneuver]

The 1GB memory might be a problem with the Quadro FX 5500 but the 7950 GX2 has 500MB each and works as though only 500MB. I use 500MB cards no trouble in WinME. A test will be made soon without the water blocks just hope it boots up again.

[ragnargd]

I doubt 1GB will be more of a problem than 512MB - W9x will crash in almost all cases (a very few exceptions on some specific NV 6200 exist, but they are what they are: exceptions).

rloew wrote a working patch to limit VRAM to 256MB, which always worked for me for W9x, while on every other OS, the amount of memory was unimportant (except, W10 needs 256MB, so 256MB is the lowest common denominator, so to say).

@Goodmaneuver: Using that patch of rloew is a good idea, just in case you didn't know of it...

[Goodmaneuver]

Yes but WinME made several important improvements and 500MB graphic cards are not a problem.

[ragnargd]

True, WinME is a different story. It's always good to point out that with all similarities, they (95, 98, ME) still do differ.

Edited March 12, 2020 by ragnargd

[farfigs11]

I tried to get the Quadro Fx cards to work on my Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop but they never did-not even the 256mb .  I even tried a 7950gtx but that didn't work either-with or without R Loew's patch  so I settled for the 7800GTX.

 I did experiment with SLI with two 7800GTX PCI-E cards on my desktop (Dell X8764)   Windows 98se detected the SLI link as a PCI to PCI bridge but there was no SLI benefit as the driver did not detect anything but another video card 
 

[Goodmaneuver]

I don,t hold much hope either. I think it is how lucky we are on getting a good card. My 7800GTX was damaged too much to work it just worked with a 32bit driver system :-Win7 but then could short out when getting hotter. I wasted money with the drivers listing that 8800GTX and other cards were installable. I guess a lot of other people did as well.

[pangoomis]

Quadro FX 5500 should work, it is from what I see, the same card as the 7900 GTX, just with a different BIOS and more VRAM.

I have a 7900 GTX and it works fine on 98SE. I don't think the extra VRAM would be actually usable on 98SE but could be an interesting alternative in case you can find the Quadro cheaper than the 7900 GTX.

I would suggest using the rloew NVIDIA patches no matter what though.

Edited March 15, 2020 by MrMateczko

[ragnargd]

Comparing it by this links... (always GTX vs. Quadro)

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-7900-gtx.c154

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/quadro-fx-5500.c1335

Memory clock: 800 MHz/1600 MHz effective vs. 505 MHz/1010 MHz effective, which will result in slightly better gaming benchmarks for the GTX.

VRAM: 512MB vs. 1GB, which favours the Quadro in some very few games on i.e. XP, but which will not offset the better memory clock of the GTX in benchmarks.

Power usage: 84W vs. 96W, which is slightly in favour of the GTX (the Quadro has a slightly better cooling for the VRAM on the backside of the card, though)

At the moment, the Quadro is much easier to get, and cheaper, but as we are talking about used GPUs here, that may change occasionally.

My budget is gone at the moment, and i already own two GTX, so i will not experiment here, but i'm pretty sure both GTX and Quadro are equally worth it, both being the fastest cards ever for W9x, and for sure both need rloews patch.

SLI is only an option on XP (and definitely NOT on W10), and there, only on certain MoBos that are not usable by W9x, with only certain old drivers, so all chaps here can safely ignore that. I tried that, but be my guest if you succeed none the less.

[Goodmaneuver]

I can confirm that the 7950 GX2 works good but not fully up to its best as the inner GPU had problems when on Win7 when testing with some modern games and I am not sure it is working properly but there are no artifacts or any display errors. I have modified the GX2 boards mechanical standoff construction so that it fits in my PC box. I have not placed in the water blocks yet though the inner GPU is not getting too hot. It installs an extra 3 standard PCI to PCI bridges and works showing 12000 MT/s with Everest. It would be best if I installed water blocks and exercise it out on modern hardware, OS and games to see if the card works properly. 

Edited August 16, 2020 by Goodmaneuver

[ABCDEFG]

7950GT is faster then 7800GTX.

7900GTO is faster then 7950GT.

7900GTX is faster then 7900GTO.

--------------------------------------------

7950 GX2 is a 2 x 7950GT but only one half is working in win98, so basically this is 1 7950GT with 50MHz lower core clock speed.

7950 GX2 is a good card but i think there is no benefits from GX2 cards for 9x users, but if you allready have one you won't have to puchase other card.