* :

Here's a view: http://home.comcast.net/~g-abbey/drive_box.jpg

Hmm...a Dell Precision, nice machines, at that time we had several of
them in some departments.

I have something similar here from old days (HP Kayak XW, 2x XEON
550MHz/2MB, 2GB RAM, Geforce FX 5200). Was a nice setup in 1999, but
at that time it had a whooping ultra-expensive HP VisualizeFX10 gfx card,
the whole setup just kicked ass with WindowsNT 4. The HP gfx card is
still around here somewhere. The computer itself with the FX5200 now
belongs to my son.

What are you going to do with the HP card?

Don't know, maybe use it to replace the dead VisualizeFX10 in my Kayak
XU (2x P2-333). At that time these cards were just kicking ass in OpenGL
applications. Sadly, they only do that - OpenGL. No Direct3D. They were
good cards under WindowsNT but I wouldn't want to use them in W2k or
even Winxp.

I think you're right. I had a 64MB GeForce3 for about a week and was so
focused on frame-rate, and oblivious to scenery range detail, that it go
returned. No increase in framerate going from 32MB TNT2 to 64MB GF3.

Well, it's very likely that the rest of the system is the bottleneck
here. The memory bus is just painfully slow as are the CPUs. But then,
we're talking about a 1999 aera computer here.

Am going to a local computer `show and sale´ this weekend and next.
Please comment (serious now - no joke!!)
Serious? Go to a local computer store and buy a current low end gfx card
like a Geforce FX5200 or ATI Radeon 9250 or something like that. More
than sufficient for you dinosaur system.

Ok.. will be checking into that. And the AGP 1.0 slot will be ok?

Yes, sure. But I'd strongly recommend to buy there where you can return
the card for cash if you see no benefit from it.

As
stated, lots of VRAM may put a great load on the 500MHz CPUs.

No, it doesn't. But lots of VRAM doesn't help if the GPU (the gfx chip)
isn't fast enough. Gfx memory isn't the only variable that decides about
performance, indeed it's more the architecture of the GPU and the clock
rate of GPU and gfx RAM. And as always, a chain is only as good as it's
weakes part, so the fastest gfx card won't help if the system itself is
too slow.

Please comment further.

Honestly, it's probably time to move on to a better system.

Benjamin