Zotac Releases GeForce GT 520 With Classic PCI Connector 199
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."
Performance (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I'd be more interested in seeing it in AGP myself.
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What about those of us with poor neglected VLB slots? Huh? Who's going to give us an upgrade?
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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)?
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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.)
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You have to have multiple drives in a RAFD array....
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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 [wikipedia.org], 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Yep, this is exactly what my MythTV HTPC does, only using an older PCI card.
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.
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Yep, this is exactly what my MythTV HTPC does, only using an older PCI card.
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 VDPA
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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.
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And subtitles? I understand there's a different surface used for that for VDPAU, though. DXVA, you'd be out of luck.
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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.
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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.
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Linux should work happily though.
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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.
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SERVERS!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
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I have an old ISA 10BaseT card if you are serious...
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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.
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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
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If you are doing bitcoin mining a better use of the card would be sharpening it and driving it into your skull.
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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
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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 [techpowerup.com] 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.
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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).
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this is why RMS started GNU in the first place...
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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.
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Mount um on the wall :)
Ideal for HTPC (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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".
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For HTPC purposes, Intel GPU's are good enough.
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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.
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PCI exists on more than just PCs as well.
Indeed, I run XBMC on a PIII with HDMI-out (Score:2)
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No, you put it in a system with AGP and PCI slots.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 [ibase.com.tw]
Internal combustion powered buggy whip for sale! (Score:2)
Woo!
Neither fish nor foul nor good red herring!
Oh, SO going into my Alpha Personal Workstation... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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
Sweet! (Score:2)
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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...
Mac Pro1,1 (Score:2)
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 res
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The 1,1 was '06 with EFI32, the '08 has EFI64. Lion can really make that work on the '06?
Graphics cards don't need PCI-E 16x (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
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?
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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.
Why does it need to be modern? (Score:2)
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.
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For FOLDING / Coin Mining on the side?
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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 use
No AGP? (Score:2)
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.
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CUDA farm? (Score:2)
Just what I've been looking for... (Score:2)
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.
Mini-ITX (Score:2)
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 :)
cool... but... (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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Naw, we need a S100 version.
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We like stories about blinkie things that cost money, what isn't a Slashvertisement, then!?
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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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
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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
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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-generati
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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 ou
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One word... BITCOIN!
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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.
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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.
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Problem disappeared when I switched from my 8800GT to a Radoen HD5870. A friend with a GTX280 had the same problem as me.