Lum

My system is getting on a bit now, and I finally decided on a quick cheap upgrade after getting a single figure FPS on the later levels of Doom 3.

So I replaced my GeForce3 with an FX5700VE which should do me until I can afford an Athlon64

I'm not having much joy with it, when start a 3D application, even a simple one such as GLXGears the system will appear to crash, and I have to SSH in and reboot it remotely.

I'm running Gentoo Linux and have tried kernels 2.4.27 2.4.28 and 2.6.9-ck3 with nvidia driver versions 6111 and 6629 all of which work perfectly with the GeForce 3

I have tried another 5700 (an LE this time), I have removed all non-essential PCI cards, I have dragged out an old AT power supply and run all my drives off that, still no joy, I suspect the problem may be hardware.

Do I have any hope of running a modern-ish graphics card on this system, or should I just give up now. Would I be better off buying a card with a molex connector so I can feet it straight off the PSU?

My current system:
Asus A7N266-C nForce1 chipset (no onboard VGA, disabled onboard audio)
Athlon XP2000+
2x 512MB DDR266 sticks
Asus GeForce3 Deluxe (with TV-in and useless 3d glasses) or el-cheapo Peak FX5700VE
bt878 based TV tuner
Intel 536EP based modem
3Com 3c905 Network
CMD680 based IDE controller
CS46xx based sound card (Videologic Sonic xPlosion I think)
3x 120gb Western Digital Caviar SE HDs in software RAID5
LiteOn 48x40x12 CDRW
Matsu****a 1x DVD-R/RAM