For a little while now, the insane person in me has wanted to do a 1998 Intel build with an i740... and a 2022 Intel build with their new Alchemist GPU.
Mom bought a family computer from Home Shopping Network channel in 1998 with an i740+P2-350. I was very impressed by the graphics and tech demos it shipped with. Prior computer has 1MB trident so yeah it was amazing. Thanks Mom... all the 'school' work I'll get done.
Back in 1998, a friend of mine in college had an i740 with his Pentium II desktop that he had built over the summer. I had a Dell OEM Riva 128 ZX (the 8 MB AGP version) and an older 3dfx Voodoo 1. At the time, we were unimpressed by the i740. It ran Half-Life and Rainbow Six OK at 640x480, but it had problems with the water textures in Half-Life. The Riva 128 ZX had "cracks" between all the textures, and the Voodoo 1 was showing its age, but had better image quality. In the end I thought the Riva 128 ZX was the better of the 3 cards when it comes to frame rates, but the Voodoo still had an edge with games like Wing Commander Prophecy, which ran in Glide and had extra effects. By the next school year, we had ditched all of our graphics cards and got Voodoo3's.
The "cracks" visible on RIVA128 was sue to missing sub-pixel precision support -- a calculated tradeoff in the architecture to gain performance and keep the transistor budget low.
Imagine building a highly priced gaming pc around a Riva 128 in late 1997, only to get a circa 100% more performance for about the same money when going with a Riva tnt 6 months later....
Phil, I updated the bios on my I740 a while back and went through the same pain as you regarding the "unsupported flash device". I remember reading the documentation of the different bios versions and noted that the older flash tool versions had way more support that was later removed for whatever reason. So here's what I did: I took the latest bios and used an older version of the tool to flash it. I think it had 5 or 6 flash chip options and I tried all of them until one of them worked. The card flashed and worked perfectly after that. Hope that helps.
Well, the Pentium III 1000mhz is from 2001. So you are kind of helping this poor card a bit. With a cpu from 1998 I guess its performance would be notoriously worse. Besides, in 1998 the Rage 128, Riva TNT, Savage 3D and Matrox G200... all of them would be more attractive than Intel´s offer. Still, it is good that it existed and I am hoping Intel success with their upcoming GPUs. If they are good enough (especially in the middle range segment) we all will benefit.
At its time this gpu was ruining the market. Once the drivers were properly installed (aka no via chipset + k6-2) this was a beast. All the games ran smooth and you could actually turn everything to the max. Was really hot but all GPUs were hot at that time ('98-'00). The TNT was depressing, Riva TNT and the VooDoo 3D 2/3000 were scorching the pcb. The Matrox card's pcb was T H I C C so it was absorbing more heat from the GPU but they were also more as a package.
I remember when I used Intel 740 with Celeron 300 without L2, it worked good for me with older games. Thank you very much for testing that card. On that card I even tried GTA Vice City and it ran.
Likewise, this was my first ever AGP card bought to go with my Original Celeron 266 (although overclocked to 400 on my Abit BH6 (440BX) motherboard). Price - performance was incredible, coming from a P166MMX. Same motherboard lasted me through a two significant CPU updates - 2nd Gen Celeron 300 (with 128MB L2) @450 MHz, Celeron 600 @900 MHz and countless GPUs inc. S3 Savage, Voodoo 1, Voodoo 2, Voodoo 2 SLI, Geforce 256 DDR! A true golden era of upgrading!
I had a 233mmx and it was magic when I first got my 16mb 3dfx voodoo banshee.. It made star trek armada look impressive, especially coming from some 4mb card I originally had. Which would only render small dots for a nebula. I even got gtaiii to load and run for a short time.. but it would usually crash when you looked at the broken bridge... great times
I went from an integrated ATI Rage II with add-on PowerVR PCX2 to a Riva TNT. This video shows how magical the Riva TNT was when it came out. It blew me away and lasted years for me. With the i740, I'd really like to see how it scales on systems with faster memory. Would it see a big improvement?
No. It doesn't, at all. All that promises that "AGP will now allow us to access system memory to store textuers" were all bollocks. Actually, there are some PCI versions of the i740 and they are even faster than their AGP counterparts. As weird as that sounds.
@@ccanaves The Riva 128 can also pass textures across the PCI bus like AGP can do. That was a selling point of the card at the time that it was somewhat competitive with AGP, but over a much slower interface.
Are you sure that Ati was integrated? Back then you couldn't really find an igpu outside of sis boards, at least on the Intel side of things. I too had a rage 2 on my pentium 133, it was a pci card.
I remember this thing being mostly as being the butt of many jokes back then. It wasnt too slow, but it often produced a glitchy mess. When ST came out with the Kyro GPU that had this "hidden surface removal" technology to make it faster, it was said to be a big improvement over intels "Visible Surface Removal" in the i740.
@@metalmusic1401 I was on a 200MMX still 😂. Eventually went Voodoo3 years later, then Radeon 9700 after that. Since 2005 I only use IGP, loving my current Ryzen7 4750G. Those old cards bring back a lot of memories.
I had the same SiS6326 AGP 4MB which could not run opengl games like quake iii, to i was looking to upgrade to i740, but i waited a little longer and instead went for a TNT2 M64 for my PII 350MHz machine and I was blown away. Nice video Phil 😀
I worked for a local computer store back in the day. My boss has a penchant for buying cheap parts, so of course the i740 came across my workbench. It was truly awful, and I'm not sure the i740, combined with the cheap Super 7 motherboards that he ordered, helped my first impressions of AGP. (I don't remember when this was, so it is quite possible I first saw the i740 after better cards had surpassed it, and I will also admit those cheap motherboards probably didn't help.)
@@stonent I wouldn't have "crossed the streams", either, but that was kinda hard to avoid when you were just a high school student and your boss ordered otherwise.
@@flasha29 yeah it ran great on my super 7 MSI board at the time never had issues but again i used it only for 2d and had Voodoo2 12MB card for 3d work
The Intel 740 has an interesting history, involving GE, Lockheed Martin, and SEGA. It took years of research and development to get that card out, and what killed it more than its design failures, was the hype built up around it after Intel’s success in the Real3D partnership and the power of the SEGA Model 3.
Indeed. The graphics IP in the i740 came from Real3D. What Intel added was full-spec AGP support, emphasizing AGP Texturing from the system memory. That's why the card didn't need much on-board memory. Intel simply used the product as a practical showcase of the then new AGP standard, how it can maintain decent performance and low production cost. Rendering quality was very good as well, particularly compared to RIVA128.
I fell for this because real3d was making the card. It was called the starfighter when sold by real3d. I couldn't believe the card was average at best but little less than one year later it was crushed by the competition as this video shows. It was so bad that intel sold all of the stock at low price and stopped making discrete cards only doing motherboard chip gpu and eventually integrated graphics.
Nice to see you back testing some classic pc hardware. Your videos are very helpful for old pc enthusiasts. Thanks! By the way I'm impressed by the performance of this i740. Serious Sam at 640*480 quite playable: who would have thought that?
Ahhh yes. The much marketing hype from Intel for their new GPU. I've seen most people having them with cheaper systems in the past and didn't enjoy them to their full potential. But it was great help for the push towards AGP adoption
This brings back memories of my first PC: Pentium 2 @350MHz, 64MB RAM, an 8MB Intel 740 AGP, Sound Blaster PCI 64 and a 6.4GB HDD (which I think was a Seagate). Sadly I don't remember what the motherboard was. Even though I didn't have much to compare it with at the time, since owning a PC in the late 90s was still pretty rare around here, I was very happy with it. I remember what I really wanted was a Voodoo2, but ended up with the 740. Ultimately it didn't matter much to me because the stuff I was playing ran well on it as far as I remember, plus it did have the bonus of being able to do some pretty high resolutions for the time (up to 1600x1200!) which was great because I often helped my dad with graphics stuff in Corel Draw and all the extra real-estate was great. I think I only pushed it once to 1600x1200, but that was far too much for the 17in CRT I had. I admit a lot of the games I played were 2D (Starcraft, Age of Empires, Heroes of Might and Magic 2/3, Alpha Centauri, Civ 2, SimCity 3000), but I also played a lot of racers including NFS3 Hot Pursuit and NFS High Stakes plus an assortment of 3D games from various genres like Heretic 2, Thief, X-Wing Alliance, Falcon 4.0, Flanker 2.0. I don't remember having many problems with it, or games that wouldn't run. Admittedly I wasn't much into first person shooters back then and I didn't play most of the games you had problems with, though I'm pretty sure I played Quake 2 on it (I don't exclude that it may have been on the software renderer though). Also I'm sure my tolerance for lower framerates was much higher back then 😄
I remember the i740. Was my first AGP graphic card on super socket 7 motherboard. It was cheap and not that bad. Spicy drivers were the bests with some performance increase (especialy with benchmarks...Cheating inside ?). Great video Phil, thanks !
i740 was an interesting card a proof of concept that agp texturing could be used instead of using dedicated texture ram. If vram prices were high it was a great idea but cards with 32mb or more of vram weren't far away and textures in vram were much faster. It also suffered from not having 32 bit colour and could only single texture. Cards like the TNT that had lots of vram, could also agp texture , had 32 bit colour and multitexture made the i740 obsolete pretty quickly.
I had a K6/2-500 with an S3 for 2d, and added 1 then 2 Voodoo2 cards for Quake and especially Quake2. I remember it being a little faster than a P3 of the same speed using the AMD-supplied 3DNow! version of Quake2. When I upgraded to an Athlon 700MHz(Slot A!), the Voodoo cards turned out to be incompatible somehow, so I got a TNT2 and started playing Quake3. Didn't know Intel had a dedicated GPU back then. I thought all they had was the i810 integrated graphics, which now I know were not really all that bad. Keep up the good work and preserving computer history for us all to share in :)
Around that era. My PC was a Soyo 6BA+3 motherboard. It went though quite a few upgrades. Starting at a Celeron 300a OC to 450MHz and eventually topped out with a P3 1.4Ghz. I was in the Matrox camp back then, Went though several Matrox cards with that PC. Matrox Millennium 2, Matrox G400 Max, and finally ending with a Matrox Parhelia in it. Still have the PC, just sitting in my closet. Also did the Promise Ultra66 to Fastrack66 hack to run 2 HD in RAID 0. Hack was fairly simple. The two cards were essentially the same. Desolder the BIOS chip and under it was a resistor "jumper" move the resistor to the other jumper location, then you could flash the Fastrack66 BIOS on it and have a RAID card for a quarter of the price.
I had one of these in my (family's) first computer which we got back in April '99 and was responsible for getting me addicted to computers 😁 It surprises me that the performance wasn't regarded as very good, since I had several other cards in the following years and the i740's performance impressed me given it's small vram (8MB, which I think is more than the usual 4?), however perhaps that was down to using system ram. Little did I know that was to be Intel's only dedicated GPU for 20+ years. Looking forward to seeing what Alchemist brings in 2022
I am going to wait and see how that hardware does before I run out and buy one. Maybe doing that I won't be able to get one? If that's the case no biggie.
Oh wow! Coverage on a graphic card I once owned. An i740. I actually bought this card from a local Best Buy store as my very 1st 3D video card. I quickly noticed something unwanted and odd about its RGB output connected to my Sony Multiscan 15sf1 monitor. The whole screen was dimmer in contrast to my Diamond Speedstar 24 1MB ISA non-accelerated card. No amount of gamma adjustments could compensate for the entire RGB output being dimmer than I liked. I suspect the analog voltage drive output was insufficient. I promptly returned it to Best Buy and went looking at the same store for another very 1st 3D graphic card. I liked the box appeal and specs of a Diamond Viper V330 Riva 128 4MB PCI card and purchased it. Yeah! Screen is bright again, back in the game, and happy with it for several years. My most beloved games at the time was Myst, Riven, and Myst III: Exile. And simply loved April's troubles in Funcom's The Longest Journey. For me the Intel i740 was a disappointment output wise.😉 Nice review Phil.
I remember when it came out. It was like "Erm we think it's quite good...isn't it?" Iirc I was running a Matrox Mystique 4MB with a Matrox M3D at the time but swapped to a Banshee later. Never saw one of these in the wild here in the UK.
Great video on this card Phil! In late 1998, had a Pentium II Compaq Presario PC, that had an ATI Rage LT Pro graphics card in it. It actually came with the game Moto Racer. My parents got a similar Compaq Presario in January of 1999 and that came with Incoming, which blew me away with it's graphics at the time.
Thanks for the Friday video Phil!!...i never knew Intel made a dedicated GPU in the 90s. was the AGP slot first generation?....meaning 2x 4x 8x...were all the cards of the similar AGP standard?.....Lastly how you setup win98 or 95 is to copy the install over to the hard drive?..do you have a video showing this? Again....Thanks for the vid....its always nice to see you put up new content on Fridays
Awesome video as usual. Interesting GPU but like you said, mostly for collecting. At the time I had a Voodoo 2, I knew little about hardware acceleration and back then, I didn't know of the existence of other options for it. Anyway, thanks for another one!
With the i740, Intel's showing was quit normal for newcomers in a tech area, taking 2-3 generations to catch up with the established producers, but the money masters at Intel didn't like thee lackluster showing and cut off support for continuing the line. So, they never did get the chance they should have to produce a great video card. Today, Intel is looking like they'll reproduce this process, being a generation behind the competition in their initial offerings. However, I can't say if the money masters will maintain support for the GPU division and allow them to catch up. With the way things are in the GPU market today, it may take Intel 4 generations to catch up to AMD and Nvidia, and longer to gain market share to make the whole division profitable. So, I think it is unlikely, but I'm not in their shoes. Who knows? It might be fun to watch how it progresses.
My Motherboard did not have a AGP slot BUT I found a PCI (non express) graphics card and wow!!! Even at the same 320x240 resolution the graphics were awesome. 640x480 was absolutely incredible!
Thanks so much for posting. Windows 98 is my favorite time in computing. It was so much fun trying to get the most out of hardware and I even enjoyed tweaking dial up internet .. good times. In 1998 I has a Ati All in wonder pro with 4m on card and the expansion 4m for a total of 8m.. loved that care because of all the things it could be used for, I remember capturing television shows and burning them to cd long before the general public new it was even possible , plus gaming..
Interesting thing I figured out with an Intel 740 when they came out. It uses a Chips & Technologies 2D core. Intel had bought that company within a year or two of the card coming out, so I had a computer once I put the card in but didn't have the drivers so I went into device manager and forced in the newest chips and technologies PCI driver that was in windows and it worked in windows 95 in 16 bit color 2D. Device manager wasn't complaining either. The 3D core was developed by Real3D, a division of Lockheed Martin. The Real3D core was used in many sega 3D arcade games of that area such as Daytona USA 2.
I got into pcs in 1999, i740 was considered a really decent card for the price back then - or at least that is what people told me back then. My card was an Ati Rage 3D 2MB, the next one was tnt 2 pro 32MB - about as fast as GF2 MX when overclocked, but much cheaper. Nice to see I'm not the only one who remembers this gpu and those Intel 810 and Intel 815G igpus, really enjoyed this blast from the past!
I was using a Matrox M3D paired with a Matrox Millennium. The former uses a PowerVR PCX2 chip, and has no video output. It draws directly to the graphics card frame buffer (4MB), meaning all the onboard memory (4MB) is used for textures. You could play a game at 1024x768 with 24-bit color. Support for the card was somewhat limited, but it ran reasonably well, and was inexpensive. It wasn't that long after, however, that I upgraded to a Millennium II AGP with an 8MB frame buffer, to support 1600x1200 with 24-bit color on the desktop, and swapped out the M3D for a Voodoo2. That had a 4MB frame buffer and 8MB of texture memory. I later added a second one for SLI, which made for a pretty fast setup at the time.
I had an i740 borrowed for months because I bought a P3-500 without knowing it had AGP interface... So I needed something while I saved for a MX200. It was a fine card for what it was, the stuff it could run, it ran fine a lower resolutions. A shame it seemed to lack some D3D instructions that would prevent it from booting more modern games, as they just kicked me to the desktop with no error message.
Thank you for the video! As for the quality of graphics in games on Unreal, UT engines, everything is the same in Direct3D, I found my old records (low quality of textures, textures disappear, no colored lighting, etc.), so fans of Unreal would not like the card from Intel). The demo-level run in Serious Sam is very indicative, as far as the i740 did not reach some 3D technologies. P.S. i740 can still be made to display the image normally in Unreal by forcing it to work in OpenGL with a loss of about 30% of the already low speed, but the image is very dark.
I remember the i740 was destroyed by reviewers on launch with one place it was considered to do okay was in the PCI version with 12MB of VRAM. If I remember right I had a Matrox Mystique + 3dfx config at the time on the PC and ATI 3D Rage something + 3dfx on the Mac.
I remember having lots of driver installation and chipset compatibility issues. I had access to many different motherboards at the time. Returned it within a week.
win95-2000 all had serious compatibility issues with everything. lol - and things randomly started/stopped working constantly (COMx/memory). winXP was good for everyone's sanity!
Most people don't know about the Intel 740 because Intel has selective memory and has scrubbed many references to the card out of existence. The 740 wasn't a bad chip/card when it was first released but it did end up being released in the later parts of the wild west days (95-98) for 3D cards on the PC. The 740 did had some issues working properly on many non-Intel chipsets which basically meant every Super Socket 7 board. Also, as you found out game compatibility wasn't awesome. Most importantly it was destroyed in the benchmarks by the Nvidia Riva TNT & TNT2 and 3dfx Voodoo 3 cards later in 98 & 99. In 1999 740 was even squeezed out of the "low end" 3D card market by cards like the 3dfx Velocity 100 (a cut down Voodoo 3 card,) ATI 3D RAGE XL (die shrunk and cost reduced RAGE Pro) and Nvidia TNT2 Vanta (memory bus cut down to 64 bit) cards which were cheap for OEM's like Dell, HP, Compaq, etc. to toss in a desktop and market as having a "3D accelerator."
I've always been trying to get a 740, as I already have a Riva 128ZX and a ViperV550. The closest I've gotten is one of SiS's video cards - an Asus card based around the SiS 300/305 (can't remember the bus width). Still can't run Halo however unlike the SiS chipset in my old Celeron D desktop. Either the 740 or 300/305 would have been far better than what I had when they came out. I had been given my mum's old late 80's/early 90's 386 PC - no idea the VGA card, no sound card but it did have a dual gameport card for multiplayer games.
these cards were cheap and plentiful as 2d cards . the drivers were rock solid back in the days where driver and chipset compatibility issues were still a headache
It's interesting how Intel's use of system memory is STILL in use. In Task Manager you can see what dedicated video memory you have, and below it you can see the "shared video memory". This is why games don't crash when you run out of VRAM, but the framerate tanks. VRAM has just about always been MUCH faster than system memory, but the game can only run as fast as the slower memory. It's interesting.
Great video! Though do you think it would be possible to apply a reverb filter or something to the audio? I don't know if it's just me but it's kinda distracting
I bought into the hype and this was my first dGPU. Unfortunately young me couldn't get it to work with Motocross Madness and some Star Wars demo. It was eventually replaced with a Voodoo 2 SLI setup so I coul play Jane's AH-64D Apache Longbow naxed out. I told my dad though that we needed SLI to run VB Studio 5 so I could code programs better :)
interested in per-instruction (8(i)-8(a)-8(b)-16(r)bit) pre-cached memory juggler processing system, all internal operations pre-cached in fast-rom, 8-bit system is the example system
Tbh I never had a Dedicated Intel GPU, I only had integrated GPUs from them on the laptops. From GMA 950 to Intel HD Graphics 4000. But in terms of today for these dedicated ones... I don't think Intel would to be on the level of GPU performance with RTX and Radeon Cards... I think a lower end for their cards would be my best bet. Unless they will do something miraculous.
I have a Rise MP6 iDragon CPU (MP6 @250MHz) PC with this Intel 740, Nvidia Riva 128, and ATi Rage AIW card in one system, I purposefully built it with three GPU because the case has a clear window and I use it to play Koei's Romance of Three Kingdom games.
I remember the main plus of the i740 over 3dfx was that... you could see the dashboard in NFS3. I keep the i740 in my museum only as a "first of" kind of card.
My 1998 PC Specs: Intel Pentium MMX 266Mhz, some Generic Motherboard with Intel Chipset support SDRAM, 128Mb sdram, nvidia RIVA TNT, 4Gb HDD, creative cd room, creative sound card. i was fun era for PC Gaming.
Well, in reality the gaming card you actually wanted to have in 1998 was the voodoo1 (voodoo2 once it has been released and you could afford it). The i740 and Riva 128 were great on paper, but the game support really SUCKED for both. The other problem that no one seems to remember nowadays with early cards combining 2D & 3D graphics in a single design was the fact they needed really powerful CPU. The performance with voodoo 1&2 cards was more flat and not scaling that much with the CPU (meaning they were excellent with anything). Back in 1998 it was great news for the majority of people, as gaming PCs were usually using Pentium/PentiumMMX or AMD equivalents, not Pentium 2 (certainly not Pentium 3 from 1999), so yeah until the voodoo3/TNT2 generation, 3dfx was the way to go.
There is a Czech guy on youtube that has a ton of videos on old cards and compares them all. He has insane strange stuff like permedia, cirrus logic, paradise tasmania and many others. Forgot the name
Yes, I was alive and kicking and in college, PC gaming on Tandy 1000 since 12 (though I did have a Ti-994a before that) I never knew Intel made a graphics card. Because of covid and having to make room to work at home, I've had to sell a lot of my retro stuff to make room including Voodoo 3's. I've focused on mostly modern gaming. Got a 3070 Ti, 1440p monitor, mostly for DOSBox in 1600x1200. I've been paying attention and the Intel cards might be more expensive at MSRP than options from NVIDIA and AMD probably to help cover R&D costs. Intel is not restricting hashrate for mining so that won't help what retailers will end up charging. I'm thinking they will be scalped at $1300-$1500 for the lower end models if nothing else than being Intel's first high performance dedicated GPUs. If they do have a GPU that can match 3080 Ti or 3090, those are going to be some expensive cards. I do love the cool naming of the Arc GPUs but they still won't have features NVIDIA has brought to the table. Yes they will have their own DLSS and ray tracing but just how competitive will those features be?
1440p is nice for older games, 1600x1200 with center scaling. Especially if you have high refresh rate screen :) Sorry to hear you had to sell Voodoo 3 though 😔
@@philscomputerlab I've learned to live with it. With using DOSBoxECE and GOG w/ SondCavas VA, MUNT, etc, many games just run better. For example, I did hours of comparison running KQ8 from original CD on a P3 1.4GHz and a Voodoo 3 against my modern PC and the GOG version using dgvoodoo2 and the GOG version performed so much better. That P3 and Voodoo card should have been more than enough. I know many here are die-hard original hardware but there are so many ways to get those old games working as they did before. I did get an Sound BlasterX AE-5 for Alchemy. I did still keep a P3 1.4GHz with Quadro FX 3000 and Aureal Voretx2 and a Phenom II X6, 750 Ti and Titan X-Fi for ridiculously high-end Win98 and XP gaming. I do have an Athlon64 and P4 for Win98 too but I have to keep them is motherboard form in an air-tight container with a few spare Vortex2 and SB Audigy cards.
This was my first "GPU" paired with a Pentium II 350Mhz, not that bad, my only complain at the time was the poor performance in 1024x768, only 20 fps most of the time. Later upgraded by a GF2MX, what a difference!
Hi. My experience is similar to yours at XGA resolution (1,024 x 768). Many of those 1st generation 4 - 8 MB 3D graphic cards had too slow rendering speed at XGA. Today, my retro DOS gaming machine is using a Geforce 2 Ti 64MB AGP card. Now 1,024 x 768 runs pretty good for Indiana Jones and the Inferno Machine and Earthworm Jim 3D.😊
Remember these cards be cheap. They launched at a high MSRP but they very quickly dropped and I was a little surprised they want more popular as a result. By the time they come down in price I already had a voodoo Rush (which in hindsight is a silly purchase given how crazy expensive it was back in the day)
I wasn't sure I had one, so had to search through two large plastic containers and there it was. At first the machine didn't post and m heart sank. But I removed it, cleaned it, put it back in and then the machine POSTed 😀
I´ve used a Dell Optiplex GX110, with an Intel 8010 and a 1GHz Coppermine (at least I tink so), It run a lot of games really good at 1024x768. I definitly want to revisit this PC, due to its very nice formfactor.
Fantastic video I've built so many slot One machines and still run one right now I had no idea about this Intel GPU memory sharing always learning something keep up the great work
I had one of these many years ago paired with a voodoo 2 12meg card. The i740 had fantastic 2d quality, and windows acceleration. It was on a k6-2 with 256meg of ram. That all got moved over to a katmai 450mhz P3 overclocked to 500mhz with 512meg, it ran quake3 arena very well and since i had the fastest pc at the time me and my mates would use my machine as the server. I ended up getting rid of the 740 and moving to a riva tnt2 ultra running windows 2000. That was when i also first started to play with watercooling, back in those days it was just holes bored into aluminium blocks sealed with silastic and using plastic hose from hardware stores haha.
Watching this video I was a bit surprised how “well” your i740 was performing compared to my experience back in the day, but then I remembered I had a pentium 2-266mhz lol. Still, the “starfighter” was my best video card up to that point, and I was just in grade school at the time on a shoestring budget.
Shared memory was like an insult back then. Especially since RAM was also expensive I saw many shelf PCs sold with a huge "Pentium 2" label but only 16 MB RAM inside. Even my old Pentium 1 my brother shoeboxed together had 64 MB RAM which I highly appreciated.
Interesting to see what they managed to do for their first attempt. While I've had to get rid of a good amount of my computer collection over the past couple years, I still have a pile of older video cards (including both the Riva 128 and at least one Riva TNT). It looks like I may have to add an Intel 740 to the collection if I ever get the chance to get a couple more older cards, good or not.
Intel used this as the IGP for their 810 and perhaps the 815 chipsets should anyone be interested in experiencing should this card become hard to find. Fun fact that some boards did have dedicated memory for the IGP without using the system ram while there was in ad in vram module that plugged into the agp slot though rarely encountered these days.
Well, the first thing to mention is that i740 was developed by Real3D and marketed by Intel. This was my first GPU and it's still "the GPU" for me. You couldn't beat it for the price and the 3D image quality was outstanding for the time. The DNA lives on in all Intel's GPUs, not even Raja Koduri had been able to change it so far.
For a little while now, the insane person in me has wanted to do a 1998 Intel build with an i740... and a 2022 Intel build with their new Alchemist GPU.
Not insane. An enthusiast.
Those piles of 440LX boards have to be good for something!
Mom bought a family computer from Home Shopping Network channel in 1998 with an i740+P2-350. I was very impressed by the graphics and tech demos it shipped with. Prior computer has 1MB trident so yeah it was amazing. Thanks Mom... all the 'school' work I'll get done.
My Grandma had this GPU in her PC back in 1998. AMD-K6 350MHz with 64MB RAM and this Intel i740. It was a good PC. All games back then were playable.
AMD CPU and a Intel GPU
Back in 1998, a friend of mine in college had an i740 with his Pentium II desktop that he had built over the summer. I had a Dell OEM Riva 128 ZX (the 8 MB AGP version) and an older 3dfx Voodoo 1. At the time, we were unimpressed by the i740. It ran Half-Life and Rainbow Six OK at 640x480, but it had problems with the water textures in Half-Life. The Riva 128 ZX had "cracks" between all the textures, and the Voodoo 1 was showing its age, but had better image quality. In the end I thought the Riva 128 ZX was the better of the 3 cards when it comes to frame rates, but the Voodoo still had an edge with games like Wing Commander Prophecy, which ran in Glide and had extra effects. By the next school year, we had ditched all of our graphics cards and got Voodoo3's.
The "cracks" visible on RIVA128 was sue to missing sub-pixel precision support -- a calculated tradeoff in the architecture to gain performance and keep the transistor budget low.
man.. I remember this, I had an i740 with a Pentium II 300 Mhz and underwater it was impossible to see anything on Half Life... HAHAHAHHA
Ah.. the old Pentium 2 Memories.
These days were gold, plenty of competition between the companies, also big improvements were made between "generations".
The downside to that was that hardware went obsolete quicker, too.
Imagine building a highly priced gaming pc around a Riva 128 in late 1997, only to get a circa 100% more performance for about the same money when going with a Riva tnt 6 months later....
Such a treat to see videos about the 90s era in 2021. Thank you Phil!
Phil, I updated the bios on my I740 a while back and went through the same pain as you regarding the "unsupported flash device". I remember reading the documentation of the different bios versions and noted that the older flash tool versions had way more support that was later removed for whatever reason. So here's what I did: I took the latest bios and used an older version of the tool to flash it. I think it had 5 or 6 flash chip options and I tried all of them until one of them worked. The card flashed and worked perfectly after that.
Hope that helps.
Awesome, that gives me something to try :D
@@philscomputerlab Great. Keep us updated if you find the way to flash it. Mine was a QDI card though, with a different eeprom.
What a walk down memory lane. Makes me want to break out my old Win98 machine.
Well, the Pentium III 1000mhz is from 2001. So you are kind of helping this poor card a bit. With a cpu from 1998 I guess its performance would be notoriously worse. Besides, in 1998 the Rage 128, Riva TNT, Savage 3D and Matrox G200... all of them would be more attractive than Intel´s offer. Still, it is good that it existed and I am hoping Intel success with their upcoming GPUs. If they are good enough (especially in the middle range segment) we all will benefit.
Ran quite well on my old k6-2 300 mhz many fond memories of playing monster truck madness on it
I have Intel 810e chipset that uses this GPU as integrated onboard graphics.
At its time this gpu was ruining the market. Once the drivers were properly installed (aka no via chipset + k6-2) this was a beast. All the games ran smooth and you could actually turn everything to the max. Was really hot but all GPUs were hot at that time ('98-'00). The TNT was depressing, Riva TNT and the VooDoo 3D 2/3000 were scorching the pcb. The Matrox card's pcb was T H I C C so it was absorbing more heat from the GPU but they were also more as a package.
Oh sh!t, an i740!!! Way to go Phil, props for getting one 🥳
I remember when I used Intel 740 with Celeron 300 without L2, it worked good for me with older games. Thank you very much for testing that card. On that card I even tried GTA Vice City and it ran.
Likewise, this was my first ever AGP card bought to go with my Original Celeron 266 (although overclocked to 400 on my Abit BH6 (440BX) motherboard). Price - performance was incredible, coming from a P166MMX. Same motherboard lasted me through a two significant CPU updates - 2nd Gen Celeron 300 (with 128MB L2) @450 MHz, Celeron 600 @900 MHz and countless GPUs inc. S3 Savage, Voodoo 1, Voodoo 2, Voodoo 2 SLI, Geforce 256 DDR! A true golden era of upgrading!
I had a 233mmx and it was magic when I first got my 16mb 3dfx voodoo banshee..
It made star trek armada look impressive, especially coming from some 4mb card I originally had. Which would only render small dots for a nebula. I even got gtaiii to load and run for a short time.. but it would usually crash when you looked at the broken bridge... great times
It's cool that Intel is now doing a big comeback to the dedicated GPU business.
I went from an integrated ATI Rage II with add-on PowerVR PCX2 to a Riva TNT. This video shows how magical the Riva TNT was when it came out. It blew me away and lasted years for me. With the i740, I'd really like to see how it scales on systems with faster memory. Would it see a big improvement?
No. It doesn't, at all. All that promises that "AGP will now allow us to access system memory to store textuers" were all bollocks. Actually, there are some PCI versions of the i740 and they are even faster than their AGP counterparts. As weird as that sounds.
@@ccanaves The Riva 128 can also pass textures across the PCI bus like AGP can do. That was a selling point of the card at the time that it was somewhat competitive with AGP, but over a much slower interface.
Are you sure that Ati was integrated? Back then you couldn't really find an igpu outside of sis boards, at least on the Intel side of things. I too had a rage 2 on my pentium 133, it was a pci card.
in 2020?
My self the rage Fury Maxx . Cheap card nobody whant it. Really gast card in that time of IT works
I remember this thing being mostly as being the butt of many jokes back then. It wasnt too slow, but it often produced a glitchy mess. When ST came out with the Kyro GPU that had this "hidden surface removal" technology to make it faster, it was said to be a big improvement over intels "Visible Surface Removal" in the i740.
I'm happy to see you're back. I missed your videos!
At the time I was in high school and I remember saving enough to buy a cheap SIS 6326 4MB AGP. It could play NFS 4 in 512x384 - well almost.
Nice!
I remember those cards I used to have an intel celeron 300 it wasn't the best but it was better than nothing
@@metalmusic1401 I was on a 200MMX still 😂. Eventually went Voodoo3 years later, then Radeon 9700 after that. Since 2005 I only use IGP, loving my current Ryzen7 4750G. Those old cards bring back a lot of memories.
Wow, I didn't even know SiS made dgpus. OK so there were some graphic adapters years later, but this is new to me.
I had the same SiS6326 AGP 4MB which could not run opengl games like quake iii, to i was looking to upgrade to i740, but i waited a little longer and instead went for a TNT2 M64 for my PII 350MHz machine and I was blown away. Nice video Phil 😀
I worked for a local computer store back in the day. My boss has a penchant for buying cheap parts, so of course the i740 came across my workbench. It was truly awful, and I'm not sure the i740, combined with the cheap Super 7 motherboards that he ordered, helped my first impressions of AGP. (I don't remember when this was, so it is quite possible I first saw the i740 after better cards had surpassed it, and I will also admit those cheap motherboards probably didn't help.)
I tried to avoid mixing the 740 with non-intel based boards back then, it just seemed glitchy when I did that.
@@stonent I wouldn't have "crossed the streams", either, but that was kinda hard to avoid when you were just a high school student and your boss ordered otherwise.
I worked for a local shop as well..Omg..trying to get an I740 stable with a K6-2 platform in Windows 98se ..Good luck.😆...those were the days.
i740 did have was great color and 2d output for DIRT CHEAP. so it paired well with Voodoo 1 or Voodoo 2
@@flasha29 yeah it ran great on my super 7 MSI board at the time never had issues but again i used it only for 2d and had Voodoo2 12MB card for 3d work
About time you did this video mate, I think it is quite a good card to match up to two V2s SLIed too.
The Intel 740 has an interesting history, involving GE, Lockheed Martin, and SEGA.
It took years of research and development to get that card out, and what killed it more than its design failures, was the hype built up around it after Intel’s success in the Real3D partnership and the power of the SEGA Model 3.
Is this the same SEGA as the videogame technologies company?
@@thatguyalex2835 Of course.
Indeed. The graphics IP in the i740 came from Real3D. What Intel added was full-spec AGP support, emphasizing AGP Texturing from the system memory. That's why the card didn't need much on-board memory. Intel simply used the product as a practical showcase of the then new AGP standard, how it can maintain decent performance and low production cost. Rendering quality was very good as well, particularly compared to RIVA128.
I fell for this because real3d was making the card. It was called the starfighter when sold by real3d. I couldn't believe the card was average at best but little less than one year later it was crushed by the competition as this video shows. It was so bad that intel sold all of the stock at low price and stopped making discrete cards only doing motherboard chip gpu and eventually integrated graphics.
@@aceofhearts573 They later bought the Real3D division and spent the next three years fighting in court with nVIDIA, SGI and ATi over patents.
Nice to see you back testing some classic pc hardware. Your videos are very helpful for old pc enthusiasts. Thanks!
By the way I'm impressed by the performance of this i740. Serious Sam at 640*480 quite playable: who would have thought that?
Ahhh yes. The much marketing hype from Intel for their new GPU. I've seen most people having them with cheaper systems in the past and didn't enjoy them to their full potential. But it was great help for the push towards AGP adoption
Reminds me of Intel's "Extreme" Graphics IGPs which were no more pathetic than a typical IGP of that era.
This brings back memories of my first PC: Pentium 2 @350MHz, 64MB RAM, an 8MB Intel 740 AGP, Sound Blaster PCI 64 and a 6.4GB HDD (which I think was a Seagate). Sadly I don't remember what the motherboard was. Even though I didn't have much to compare it with at the time, since owning a PC in the late 90s was still pretty rare around here, I was very happy with it. I remember what I really wanted was a Voodoo2, but ended up with the 740. Ultimately it didn't matter much to me because the stuff I was playing ran well on it as far as I remember, plus it did have the bonus of being able to do some pretty high resolutions for the time (up to 1600x1200!) which was great because I often helped my dad with graphics stuff in Corel Draw and all the extra real-estate was great. I think I only pushed it once to 1600x1200, but that was far too much for the 17in CRT I had.
I admit a lot of the games I played were 2D (Starcraft, Age of Empires, Heroes of Might and Magic 2/3, Alpha Centauri, Civ 2, SimCity 3000), but I also played a lot of racers including NFS3 Hot Pursuit and NFS High Stakes plus an assortment of 3D games from various genres like Heretic 2, Thief, X-Wing Alliance, Falcon 4.0, Flanker 2.0. I don't remember having many problems with it, or games that wouldn't run. Admittedly I wasn't much into first person shooters back then and I didn't play most of the games you had problems with, though I'm pretty sure I played Quake 2 on it (I don't exclude that it may have been on the software renderer though). Also I'm sure my tolerance for lower framerates was much higher back then 😄
Fyi, there is a tool available that allows you to patch affected Award BIOSes to support hard drive sizes up to 128GB.
I remember the i740. Was my first AGP graphic card on super socket 7 motherboard. It was cheap and not that bad. Spicy drivers were the bests with some performance increase (especialy with benchmarks...Cheating inside ?). Great video Phil, thanks !
i740 was an interesting card a proof of concept that agp texturing could be used instead of using dedicated texture ram. If vram prices were high it was a great idea but cards with 32mb or more of vram weren't far away and textures in vram were much faster. It also suffered from not having 32 bit colour and could only single texture. Cards like the TNT that had lots of vram, could also agp texture , had 32 bit colour and multitexture made the i740 obsolete pretty quickly.
I had a K6/2-500 with an S3 for 2d, and added 1 then 2 Voodoo2 cards for Quake and especially Quake2. I remember it being a little faster than a P3 of the same speed using the AMD-supplied 3DNow! version of Quake2. When I upgraded to an Athlon 700MHz(Slot A!), the Voodoo cards turned out to be incompatible somehow, so I got a TNT2 and started playing Quake3. Didn't know Intel had a dedicated GPU back then. I thought all they had was the i810 integrated graphics, which now I know were not really all that bad. Keep up the good work and preserving computer history for us all to share in :)
Around that era. My PC was a Soyo 6BA+3 motherboard. It went though quite a few upgrades. Starting at a Celeron 300a OC to 450MHz and eventually topped out with a P3 1.4Ghz. I was in the Matrox camp back then, Went though several Matrox cards with that PC. Matrox Millennium 2, Matrox G400 Max, and finally ending with a Matrox Parhelia in it. Still have the PC, just sitting in my closet. Also did the Promise Ultra66 to Fastrack66 hack to run 2 HD in RAID 0. Hack was fairly simple. The two cards were essentially the same. Desolder the BIOS chip and under it was a resistor "jumper" move the resistor to the other jumper location, then you could flash the Fastrack66 BIOS on it and have a RAID card for a quarter of the price.
I had one of these in my (family's) first computer which we got back in April '99 and was responsible for getting me addicted to computers 😁
It surprises me that the performance wasn't regarded as very good, since I had several other cards in the following years and the i740's performance impressed me given it's small vram (8MB, which I think is more than the usual 4?), however perhaps that was down to using system ram. Little did I know that was to be Intel's only dedicated GPU for 20+ years. Looking forward to seeing what Alchemist brings in 2022
Can't wait to see what Intel can bring with Alchemist GPU.
It sounds very promising. The top end card should be around 3070/3080 levels of performance.
I am going to wait and see how that hardware does before I run out and buy one. Maybe doing that I won't be able to get one? If that's the case no biggie.
Oh wow! Coverage on a graphic card I once owned. An i740. I actually bought this card from a local Best Buy store as my very 1st 3D video card. I quickly noticed something unwanted and odd about its RGB output connected to my Sony Multiscan 15sf1 monitor. The whole screen was dimmer in contrast to my Diamond Speedstar 24 1MB ISA non-accelerated card. No amount of gamma adjustments could compensate for the entire RGB output being dimmer than I liked. I suspect the analog voltage drive output was insufficient. I promptly returned it to Best Buy and went looking at the same store for another very 1st 3D graphic card. I liked the box appeal and specs of a Diamond Viper V330 Riva 128 4MB PCI card and purchased it. Yeah! Screen is bright again, back in the game, and happy with it for several years. My most beloved games at the time was Myst, Riven, and Myst III: Exile. And simply loved April's troubles in Funcom's The Longest Journey. For me the Intel i740 was a disappointment output wise.😉 Nice review Phil.
I just happened to notice you got an entire archive for GeForce drivers on your web page which actually helps me out in my hunting for drivers.
I remember when it came out. It was like "Erm we think it's quite good...isn't it?" Iirc I was running a Matrox Mystique 4MB with a Matrox M3D at the time but swapped to a Banshee later.
Never saw one of these in the wild here in the UK.
Great video on this card Phil! In late 1998, had a Pentium II Compaq Presario PC, that had an ATI Rage LT Pro graphics card in it. It actually came with the game Moto Racer. My parents got a similar Compaq Presario in January of 1999 and that came with Incoming, which blew me away with it's graphics at the time.
Incoming is a very nice looking game. One of the first to benefit from 32 Bit colours, a hot topic because 3dfx didn't support it for a long time.
ELSA... now there's a name I've not heard in a long time.
Thanks for the Friday video Phil!!...i never knew Intel made a dedicated GPU in the 90s. was the AGP slot first generation?....meaning 2x 4x 8x...were all the cards of the similar AGP standard?.....Lastly how you setup win98 or 95 is to copy the install over to the hard drive?..do you have a video showing this? Again....Thanks for the vid....its always nice to see you put up new content on Fridays
I believe the card in the video was running with AGP 2x.
Awesome video as usual. Interesting GPU but like you said, mostly for collecting. At the time I had a Voodoo 2, I knew little about hardware acceleration and back then, I didn't know of the existence of other options for it. Anyway, thanks for another one!
Whoa! You mentioned my old TNT 2 M64, from back in the day. That little GPU was used a lot because it kept going, while other GPU's failed.
With the i740, Intel's showing was quit normal for newcomers in a tech area, taking 2-3 generations to catch up with the established producers, but the money masters at Intel didn't like thee lackluster showing and cut off support for continuing the line. So, they never did get the chance they should have to produce a great video card.
Today, Intel is looking like they'll reproduce this process, being a generation behind the competition in their initial offerings. However, I can't say if the money masters will maintain support for the GPU division and allow them to catch up. With the way things are in the GPU market today, it may take Intel 4 generations to catch up to AMD and Nvidia, and longer to gain market share to make the whole division profitable. So, I think it is unlikely, but I'm not in their shoes. Who knows? It might be fun to watch how it progresses.
My Motherboard did not have a AGP slot BUT I found a PCI (non express) graphics card and wow!!! Even at the same 320x240 resolution the graphics were awesome. 640x480 was absolutely incredible!
Thanks so much for posting. Windows 98 is my favorite time in computing. It was so much fun trying to get the most out of hardware and I even enjoyed tweaking dial up internet .. good times.
In 1998 I has a Ati All in wonder pro with 4m on card and the expansion 4m for a total of 8m.. loved that care because of all the things it could be used for, I remember capturing television shows and burning them to cd long before the general public new it was even possible , plus gaming..
Glad you enjoyed it!
Interesting thing I figured out with an Intel 740 when they came out. It uses a Chips & Technologies 2D core. Intel had bought that company within a year or two of the card coming out, so I had a computer once I put the card in but didn't have the drivers so I went into device manager and forced in the newest chips and technologies PCI driver that was in windows and it worked in windows 95 in 16 bit color 2D. Device manager wasn't complaining either. The 3D core was developed by Real3D, a division of Lockheed Martin. The Real3D core was used in many sega 3D arcade games of that area such as Daytona USA 2.
The intel 740 is not even close to the real3d pro-1000 graphics board on the Sega model 3 which was capable of hardware T&L .
I got into pcs in 1999, i740 was considered a really decent card for the price back then - or at least that is what people told me back then. My card was an Ati Rage 3D 2MB, the next one was tnt 2 pro 32MB - about as fast as GF2 MX when overclocked, but much cheaper. Nice to see I'm not the only one who remembers this gpu and those Intel 810 and Intel 815G igpus, really enjoyed this blast from the past!
I was using a Matrox M3D paired with a Matrox Millennium. The former uses a PowerVR PCX2 chip, and has no video output. It draws directly to the graphics card frame buffer (4MB), meaning all the onboard memory (4MB) is used for textures. You could play a game at 1024x768 with 24-bit color. Support for the card was somewhat limited, but it ran reasonably well, and was inexpensive.
It wasn't that long after, however, that I upgraded to a Millennium II AGP with an 8MB frame buffer, to support 1600x1200 with 24-bit color on the desktop, and swapped out the M3D for a Voodoo2. That had a 4MB frame buffer and 8MB of texture memory. I later added a second one for SLI, which made for a pretty fast setup at the time.
I had an i740 borrowed for months because I bought a P3-500 without knowing it had AGP interface... So I needed something while I saved for a MX200. It was a fine card for what it was, the stuff it could run, it ran fine a lower resolutions. A shame it seemed to lack some D3D instructions that would prevent it from booting more modern games, as they just kicked me to the desktop with no error message.
Thank you for the video!
As for the quality of graphics in games on Unreal, UT engines, everything is the same in Direct3D, I found my old records (low quality of textures, textures disappear, no colored lighting, etc.), so fans of Unreal would not like the card from Intel).
The demo-level run in Serious Sam is very indicative, as far as the i740 did not reach some 3D technologies.
P.S. i740 can still be made to display the image normally in Unreal by forcing it to work in OpenGL with a loss of about 30% of the already low speed, but the image is very dark.
REEEEEEEva . sorry couldn't resist :) . Great video - love seeing the 740 here as that was the Real3D product originally from Lockheed Martin.
Soundblaster sound card...
That brings me back...
I remember the i740 was destroyed by reviewers on launch with one place it was considered to do okay was in the PCI version with 12MB of VRAM.
If I remember right I had a Matrox Mystique + 3dfx config at the time on the PC and ATI 3D Rage something + 3dfx on the Mac.
hey buddy , Good job , has been looking forward to see your videos
Hey, thanks
1998... if i recall correctly i was sporting a Voodoo 1 and Matrox Mystique 220 Combo.
Nice vid as always Phil :)
I've one (8MB model) in my Super Socket 7 baby AT rig, I really liked the visual quality !
Thanks for sharing
I remember having lots of driver installation and chipset compatibility issues. I had access to many different motherboards at the time. Returned it within a week.
win95-2000 all had serious compatibility issues with everything. lol - and things randomly started/stopped working constantly (COMx/memory). winXP was good for everyone's sanity!
Most people don't know about the Intel 740 because Intel has selective memory and has scrubbed many references to the card out of existence. The 740 wasn't a bad chip/card when it was first released but it did end up being released in the later parts of the wild west days (95-98) for 3D cards on the PC. The 740 did had some issues working properly on many non-Intel chipsets which basically meant every Super Socket 7 board. Also, as you found out game compatibility wasn't awesome. Most importantly it was destroyed in the benchmarks by the Nvidia Riva TNT & TNT2 and 3dfx Voodoo 3 cards later in 98 & 99.
In 1999 740 was even squeezed out of the "low end" 3D card market by cards like the 3dfx Velocity 100 (a cut down Voodoo 3 card,) ATI 3D RAGE XL (die shrunk and cost reduced RAGE Pro) and Nvidia TNT2 Vanta (memory bus cut down to 64 bit) cards which were cheap for OEM's like Dell, HP, Compaq, etc. to toss in a desktop and market as having a "3D accelerator."
Yea it doesn't surprise me that the 740 has issues with Socket 7 boards. They are super picky with AGP.
I've always been trying to get a 740, as I already have a Riva 128ZX and a ViperV550.
The closest I've gotten is one of SiS's video cards - an Asus card based around the SiS 300/305 (can't remember the bus width). Still can't run Halo however unlike the SiS chipset in my old Celeron D desktop.
Either the 740 or 300/305 would have been far better than what I had when they came out. I had been given my mum's old late 80's/early 90's 386 PC - no idea the VGA card, no sound card but it did have a dual gameport card for multiplayer games.
This was my first in a long line of GPU's, and still is rocking in my Abit dual celeron box. The giving tree of Intel silicon 😆
And that's an Intel GPU you can buy right now!
Hehe :D I wonder if History will repeat itself...
So I will wait until year 2040 to buy Intel GPu In 2022 😂
these cards were cheap and plentiful as 2d cards . the drivers were rock solid back in the days where driver and chipset compatibility issues were still a headache
Glad to have you back! I remember the dreaded intel 900, coudn't no anything with it
It's interesting how Intel's use of system memory is STILL in use. In Task Manager you can see what dedicated video memory you have, and below it you can see the "shared video memory". This is why games don't crash when you run out of VRAM, but the framerate tanks. VRAM has just about always been MUCH faster than system memory, but the game can only run as fast as the slower memory. It's interesting.
Great video! Though do you think it would be possible to apply a reverb filter or something to the audio? I don't know if it's just me but it's kinda distracting
One day I will move and do acoustic treatment to my lab, but can't do that at the moment.
I bought into the hype and this was my first dGPU. Unfortunately young me couldn't get it to work with Motocross Madness and some Star Wars demo. It was eventually replaced with a Voodoo 2 SLI setup so I coul play Jane's AH-64D Apache Longbow naxed out. I told my dad though that we needed SLI to run VB Studio 5 so I could code programs better :)
Glad to see the retro content again.
I don't even remember this card, I thought they only did onboard
that would be the i810 chipset :)
drivers are a curse of computers, consoles are a blessing in this regards, disregarding all other disadvantages
console can be fully custom, does not need to support anything
nice echo bro
interested in per-instruction (8(i)-8(a)-8(b)-16(r)bit) pre-cached memory juggler processing system, all internal operations pre-cached in fast-rom, 8-bit system is the example system
I plucked one from a computer I salvaged, and I had no idea what it was.
Tbh I never had a Dedicated Intel GPU, I only had integrated GPUs from them on the laptops. From GMA 950 to Intel HD Graphics 4000.
But in terms of today for these dedicated ones... I don't think Intel would to be on the level of GPU performance with RTX and Radeon Cards... I think a lower end for their cards would be my best bet. Unless they will do something miraculous.
Lessons from the past: beware Intel graphics drivers
My very first card was a TNT1 PCI version....amazing to see GL Quake 1 and 2 for the first time....
I have a Rise MP6 iDragon CPU (MP6 @250MHz) PC with this Intel 740, Nvidia Riva 128, and ATi Rage AIW card in one system, I purposefully built it with three GPU because the case has a clear window and I use it to play Koei's Romance of Three Kingdom games.
the 90s called they want their GPU back
I remember the main plus of the i740 over 3dfx was that... you could see the dashboard in NFS3.
I keep the i740 in my museum only as a "first of" kind of card.
My 1998 PC Specs: Intel Pentium MMX 266Mhz, some Generic Motherboard with Intel Chipset support SDRAM, 128Mb sdram, nvidia RIVA TNT, 4Gb HDD, creative cd room, creative sound card. i was fun era for PC Gaming.
Well, in reality the gaming card you actually wanted to have in 1998 was the voodoo1 (voodoo2 once it has been released and you could afford it). The i740 and Riva 128 were great on paper, but the game support really SUCKED for both. The other problem that no one seems to remember nowadays with early cards combining 2D & 3D graphics in a single design was the fact they needed really powerful CPU. The performance with voodoo 1&2 cards was more flat and not scaling that much with the CPU (meaning they were excellent with anything). Back in 1998 it was great news for the majority of people, as gaming PCs were usually using Pentium/PentiumMMX or AMD equivalents, not Pentium 2 (certainly not Pentium 3 from 1999), so yeah until the voodoo3/TNT2 generation, 3dfx was the way to go.
Dos compatibility is actually pretty great. Overall feels ok for 3d games from 97 on down.
I recently sourced an engineering sample of a i740 AGP Card. Thanks about your Video, its not that worse as i thought
Can you do a comparison video of multiple 3D cards from this era? I I would love to see the difference in progress that was made in just a few years.
There is a Czech guy on youtube that has a ton of videos on old cards and compares them all. He has insane strange stuff like permedia, cirrus logic, paradise tasmania and many others. Forgot the name
The name of the czech guy with a ton of old card reviews is vlaskcz. His youtube channel is a treasure trove of old graphic accelerators from the 90s
This PC is as old as me 😄
The intel 740 used to crash when playing solitaire till Intel released a patch.
Yes, I was alive and kicking and in college, PC gaming on Tandy 1000 since 12 (though I did have a Ti-994a before that) I never knew Intel made a graphics card.
Because of covid and having to make room to work at home, I've had to sell a lot of my retro stuff to make room including Voodoo 3's. I've focused on mostly modern gaming. Got a 3070 Ti, 1440p monitor, mostly for DOSBox in 1600x1200. I've been paying attention and the Intel cards might be more expensive at MSRP than options from NVIDIA and AMD probably to help cover R&D costs. Intel is not restricting hashrate for mining so that won't help what retailers will end up charging. I'm thinking they will be scalped at $1300-$1500 for the lower end models if nothing else than being Intel's first high performance dedicated GPUs. If they do have a GPU that can match 3080 Ti or 3090, those are going to be some expensive cards. I do love the cool naming of the Arc GPUs but they still won't have features NVIDIA has brought to the table. Yes they will have their own DLSS and ray tracing but just how competitive will those features be?
1440p is nice for older games, 1600x1200 with center scaling. Especially if you have high refresh rate screen :) Sorry to hear you had to sell Voodoo 3 though 😔
@@philscomputerlab I've learned to live with it. With using DOSBoxECE and GOG w/ SondCavas VA, MUNT, etc, many games just run better. For example, I did hours of comparison running KQ8 from original CD on a P3 1.4GHz and a Voodoo 3 against my modern PC and the GOG version using dgvoodoo2 and the GOG version performed so much better. That P3 and Voodoo card should have been more than enough. I know many here are die-hard original hardware but there are so many ways to get those old games working as they did before. I did get an Sound BlasterX AE-5 for Alchemy. I did still keep a P3 1.4GHz with Quadro FX 3000 and Aureal Voretx2 and a Phenom II X6, 750 Ti and Titan X-Fi for ridiculously high-end Win98 and XP gaming. I do have an Athlon64 and P4 for Win98 too but I have to keep them is motherboard form in an air-tight container with a few spare Vortex2 and SB Audigy cards.
This was my first "GPU" paired with a Pentium II 350Mhz, not that bad, my only complain at the time was the poor performance in 1024x768, only 20 fps most of the time. Later upgraded by a GF2MX, what a difference!
Hi. My experience is similar to yours at XGA resolution (1,024 x 768). Many of those 1st generation 4 - 8 MB 3D graphic cards had too slow rendering speed at XGA. Today, my retro DOS gaming machine is using a Geforce 2 Ti 64MB AGP card. Now 1,024 x 768 runs pretty good for Indiana Jones and the Inferno Machine and Earthworm Jim 3D.😊
I remember this launched around the first celerons.. It was a great option at the time for me compared to my s3 trio+ haha
In it's day... this matched or slightly bettered the Voodoo 1 in a lot of games. It played Tribes and Half-life 1 without problems.
Remember these cards be cheap. They launched at a high MSRP but they very quickly dropped and I was a little surprised they want more popular as a result. By the time they come down in price I already had a voodoo Rush (which in hindsight is a silly purchase given how crazy expensive it was back in the day)
YAY! Always look forward to your videos. Excellent video as always.
Yay! Thank you!
Nice one Phil - Ive been looking for my old i740 for months :)
I wasn't sure I had one, so had to search through two large plastic containers and there it was. At first the machine didn't post and m heart sank. But I removed it, cleaned it, put it back in and then the machine POSTed 😀
There are already several articles out on where the new intel GPUs next year will fall on the power spectrum of current GPUs....
I´ve used a Dell Optiplex GX110, with an Intel 8010 and a 1GHz Coppermine (at least I tink so), It run a lot of games really good at 1024x768. I definitly want to revisit this PC, due to its very nice formfactor.
Fantastic video I've built so many slot One machines and still run one right now I had no idea about this Intel GPU memory sharing always learning something keep up the great work
Great to hear!
My first graphics card was the Diamond Stealth II G460 that used the Intel i740 graphics chip. It was an AGP card and had 8MB of graphics memory.
didn't even care about the components at that time. just love playing that tomb raider game. great video.
I had one of these many years ago paired with a voodoo 2 12meg card. The i740 had fantastic 2d quality, and windows acceleration. It was on a k6-2 with 256meg of ram. That all got moved over to a katmai 450mhz P3 overclocked to 500mhz with 512meg, it ran quake3 arena very well and since i had the fastest pc at the time me and my mates would use my machine as the server. I ended up getting rid of the 740 and moving to a riva tnt2 ultra running windows 2000. That was when i also first started to play with watercooling, back in those days it was just holes bored into aluminium blocks sealed with silastic and using plastic hose from hardware stores haha.
Watching this video I was a bit surprised how “well” your i740 was performing compared to my experience back in the day, but then I remembered I had a pentium 2-266mhz lol. Still, the “starfighter” was my best video card up to that point, and I was just in grade school at the time on a shoestring budget.
Back then, I had a RIVA TNT 2. Loved it!
I hope we go back to an era of a lot of Companies making GPUs, CPUs etc for computers. It looked more fun.
Shared memory was like an insult back then. Especially since RAM was also expensive I saw many shelf PCs sold with a huge "Pentium 2" label but only 16 MB RAM inside. Even my old Pentium 1 my brother shoeboxed together had 64 MB RAM which I highly appreciated.
Another great video! Thank you so much, Phil.
Interesting to see what they managed to do for their first attempt. While I've had to get rid of a good amount of my computer collection over the past couple years, I still have a pile of older video cards (including both the Riva 128 and at least one Riva TNT). It looks like I may have to add an Intel 740 to the collection if I ever get the chance to get a couple more older cards, good or not.
Intel used this as the IGP for their 810 and perhaps the 815 chipsets should anyone be interested in experiencing should this card become hard to find. Fun fact that some boards did have dedicated memory for the IGP without using the system ram while there was in ad in vram module that plugged into the agp slot though rarely encountered these days.
So this is basically the same as 810 igpu?
Well, the first thing to mention is that i740 was developed by Real3D and marketed by Intel. This was my first GPU and it's still "the GPU" for me. You couldn't beat it for the price and the 3D image quality was outstanding for the time. The DNA lives on in all Intel's GPUs, not even Raja Koduri had been able to change it so far.
I want Intel and ARM to enter the video card market, the more the better. Competition drives the price down, always.