sorry to post this but i cant seem too find the spec's anywhere on here..

mainly the gfx side or it...


whats the min that will still allow smooth gfx.. would a 32 mb pci card be any good.

Try this.

But I wouldn't hold out too much hope for a 32MB card of any kind.

my system ran on a 64mb agp card happily enough. i think LFS uses about 36mb of graphics, so id say 64 meg minimum.

Old pci is slow and, well... old. I have onboard ATI chip sharing 256 mb of system ram (1 gig total system). I play just fine. I had an older ATI 256 mb pci (old) card that I tried and the onboard just smokes it. I would not have been able to play it with the old pci card even with it being 256 mb.

My brother-in-law plays with a laptop that has an nVidia onboard 32 mb shared graphics. His total system memory is 512 if I'm not mistaken. He plays just fine as well.

Both of us play at 1024x768, though I am capable of 1 resolution step higher. Since he plays just fine with 32 mb and I couldn't play with dedicated 256 mb card, but old pci interface, I'd say that the pci would be your limiting factor, not the memory size.

By saying we play fine, I'm talking 40-50 fps. If you don't care that it looks completely like crap, perhaps you could play at 640x480 or something. My other computer, a Celeron 667 mhz that is now using that pci card I mentioned runs with 1 other car at 35ish fps. But I highly doubt we could play with more than 1 car on that PC. It is my daughter's (6) and we race together networked.

well what im wanting to do is run 3 monitors in lfs.. my main card is a ati x800 pro ran runs all day long through 2 monitors at 120fps.. im wanting to find a cheap way of adding a 3rd monitor, so all that card would be doing is making it possible to split 3 ways making me able too have the middle of the car (main view) on the middle monitor.. (you get what im trying too do..)??

iv got 2gb of ram so stick a bit extra on the 32 will be no problems what so ever...


will it still be ok... ??


i dont want too spend hundreds on the triplehead2go unit and buying a sli board is a nono too as my cpu isnt compatable with them...

pick yourself up a 6200 or similar, anything PCI wouldn't work well, does your mobo have a PCI-e slot?

and i asure you, your PC could have a SLi board, what CPU do you have?

Not that SLI runs 3 monitors with games at a decent (ie over 10) fps, but still!

Quote from Jakg :

pick yourself up a 6200 or similar, anything PCI wouldn't work well, does your mobo have a PCI-e slot?

and i asure you, your PC could have a SLi board, what CPU do you have?

Not that SLI runs 3 monitors with games at a decent (ie over 10) fps, but still!

my mobo is agp mate.... and my cpu is a 478 intel pentium 4. 3.0ghz.

but in sli if you have 2 gfx cards thats 4 slots so surely in theory you could have 4 monitors set up....

oh, agp, so you would need a new gfx card, and you would need two IDENTICAL cards = pricy

Google says they do make mobo's with socket 478 with SLi.

I used to have SLI (2x 6600GT's), afaik when SLi is enabled you can only have 2 monitors, for me SLi caused a LOT of instability, so i disabled it and messed around with a few spare CRT's, ran with 2 CRT's, but i found that it only likes to run a 3D app across two monitors from the same card, when you start running an app across two graphics cards (which you have to do for more than 2 montors) the FPS DIES.

EDIT - the same happens with two monitors across 2 cards - i would've spent more time messing about with out, but i was pissed off with having a £60 paperweight sitting in my second slot so i got shot of it and traded up to my 7950GT

iv been googling all day about 478 with sli and all i get is forums saying they dont have one.. but maybe they willl make one.. show me the link where i can buy one please

ill be using the softTH program too run it all.. been reading up on it today...

moneys tight really so thats a major thing about me not going down the sli road, well with me having too get 2 new gfz cards and cpu... :doh:


it must be possible too do this.... other than buying that triplehead2go thingy.. which is abit over priced i think..

1st link from google for "Socket 478 SLi" threw up a page from Epox - :google:

Using SoftTH is the best idea (SLi wouldn't even do what you want), don't know that much about it, researching now...

BTW - the SoftTH site says

"While it is technically possible to use it on a AGP/PCI card, only PCI Express has the required bandwidth to get good framerates."

TBH, i'd like to know what kind of power SoftTH wants, as the CPU and GPU Kegety's used in conjuction with his 6200Lame Edition were rather good!

did you actually read that webpage, you will find that all google has done is not give a proper search.. that webpage shows 478 boards but also the sli boards which are socket 939

can i ask you a question, what card you got in yours and say playing online in a server of 15 what fps you get??? iv been getting between 40 and 70 fps... but sometimes only for a split second it drops below 20's.. usually on a corner too LOL

back when i had a 4000 running at 2.7 GHz i used to get 40 at the start of a FULL grid, 4xAA, 16xAA, everything on max in LFS and the drivers, and with tons of custom textures, when just me or another car is on track it would punch through 130 fps, it seemed that although my card bottlenecked my CPU with 4xAA, it was the CPU that had the biggest effect on my FPS due to the no. of cars on track.

Yet to test my new CPU @ 3 GHz (BTW, its an AMD, so although you have a 3 GHz P4, my CPU is like a 5 GHz P4), as my mobo is playing games with me

My PC's specs are in my sig, and my graphics card, CPU and memory are overclocked, although the gfx card isn't overclocked much due to me not wanting to vmod

nothing is overclocked on mine no more.. just havent got round too tweaking since i set it all to stock again.... with just my self on track i get 120 fps and i get what i get as said above....

iv only played with the AA and AF a little as i dont know much about it.. i set it all too ful.. AA-6, and AF-16 or visa versa.illepall and when playing with a full grid i only for 20fps.. i dint like that so its all back to default LOL

the original question about the 32mb was will it run lfs.. its only a £10 and i though its worth the gamble just too see if it works... cause im still not sure it will work.. guess trying is the only way really...


imy settings are also all on full in lfs its self..

If you can wait a bit I'll test LFS on my P3 850 and 32MB TNT2.

iv just been out and got the TNT2 mate, its all fitted and it works i can move my mouse over too the other monitor... but when i use the softTH setting to play lfs is comes up with an error saying "cannot retrieve monitor info" illepall

Dunno about that software or what its suposed to do, but a TNT2 should work fine. Seriously cpu limited on a p3 850. Avg 20 fps single player at 640x480 and 1024x768. With 4 AI it was 6fps starting grid and about 13 throughout the race. Didn't bother trying with more but it's all cpu limited so the TNT2 shoud work fine with a P4.

im wondering if the 2 cards are conflicting....

ones a ati and the others an nvidia...

Anything from the original GeForce 256 and up will work fine, but DX8 cards (GF3, Radeon 8xxx) and up are prefered. LFS ran fine on my GF 4600 but I couldn't run AA without a huge drop in framerate. When I got a 6800GT, I could run 4x AA and 16x AF without any performance hit on an Athlon XP 3000+ (2.1GHz).

Also I'm not sure it's possible to use 2 different video cards (let alone from different manufacturers) in a system.

Why you running 2 cards? No chance you'll be able to run lfs across both cards. Two cards should work in your system, but only 1 will be used for 3d.

Quote from Davo :

Why you running 2 cards? No chance you'll be able to run lfs across both cards. Two cards should work in your system, but only 1 will be used for 3d.

so i can run 3 monitors in lfs mate... im using softTH program that allows you too do that... i just need to get my 3rd monitor LOL

Kegetys says it won't work properly because PCIe is different to PCI hope you know. But if you get it working great. Hope you've got a beefy primary card to run the hi res.

iv got a ati x800 pro its not bad LOL


ill find out tmz when i get another monitor...

Quote from Davo :

Kegetys says it won't work properly because PCIe is different to PCI hope you know. But if you get it working great. Hope you've got a beefy primary card to run the hi res.

It should work with AGP+PCI cards, but PCI has such a low bandwidth so that the framerate will be really low. A 1024x768 @ 16bit colors image could be sent through PCI slot 12 times per second if I calculated it right.
So yeah, SoftTH requires 2 PCIe cards to work good.

SoftTH works by rendering the image on the main graphics card and it is only sent through the other card. So it does not matter how powerful the other graphics card is, just get the cheapest one.

Quote from Forbin :

Also I'm not sure it's possible to use 2 different video cards (let alone from different manufacturers) in a system.

you can, but 3d apps will be limited to a single monitor. 2d apps will be able to span both monitors though.

Quote from robt :

my system ran on a 64mb agp card happily enough. i think LFS uses about 36mb of graphics, so id say 64 meg minimum.

i don't use half size textures or texture compression, and i'm around 80mb for video memory...although, i am using a bunch of custom, high-res textures.