• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Gateway E-3200 horizontal PC AGP riser part number?

C

computerdude92

Veteran Member
Joined
Dec 10, 2014
Messages
1,232
Location
Alaska
Hello,

Are any of you familiar with the Gateway E-3200 corporate horizontal desktop?

(Same body as the newer E-1400)

My E-3200 has an AGP slot on the mobo, which given the era is AGP 2X.

By the odd way the card would mount inside, It looks like it's missing a riser cable or board. Do any of you have one handy? My other plan is to design my own metal card fastener with a Dremel and use a low-profile AGP card.

The sys looks just like the one in this Ebay listing but with a PIII 450CPU:



Thanks!
 
AGP is AGP. There is no motherboard form factor specific version of it. The only thing that looks to be different about this card is the rear I/O shield is short and in a non-standard position. The header on the card is a VESA feature connector, unless you have a TV card or MPEG decoder board, there's really nothing that uses it.

That card looks beat to hell. The VESA feature connector is all mangled and the ASIC looks like it has scratches and scrapes on it. I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't recovered from some scrap bin. You'll need to check for damage like cracks, scrapes and missing components if you buy the card.
 
I have this same machine with that Rage Pro installed. I too would like to do a little better than that for some windows games. I have a stack of agp cards I plan on trying out.
 
Thanks for posting! My Gateway E-3200 was manufactured in July 99. I tuned this machine up for my best friend; yesterday I put a new install of Windows XP SP1 on it. (Was SP2 when we found it, but we thought it was a little bit too much on the slow side haha)

We're about to try out a Matrox G400 (16MB) on Fri. (Xmas present!) This is one of the best AGP cards that was made to fit the NLX bracket, and was actually the first to support 3D water reflection effects! I'd love to see some pics lanmangler of some AGPs you managed to fit in the slot with any bracket mods. (y)

Here's some eye candy, a video of all the retro PC hot-rod mods I've made to the machine so far:


New CMOS battery, 2004 Sony DVD-RW drive, and modded USB front ports, (also for a nice black/white two-tone look) plus a Katmai 550 CPU upgrade. (Over the original 450)

In another video I put in a new Silverstone 92mm fan. Original was working just fine, but when you have money and imagination, why not? The new fan even has rubber pads on the corners to help with vibrational noise.


Before the aforementioned OS reinstall, it was so slow the CPU would hang at times but it played DVDs excellent with just the 4MB Rage Pro and PowerDVD XP 4.0 (2002)

My system also has 256MB RAM and a 20GB IDE drive. The manual claims it supports only up to 384MB of RAM in 3 DIMM slots, despite the chipset being the legendary 440BX. Unfortunately I'm short on DIMMs lanmangler, but it would be awesome if 768MB can be achieved by one of us someday!

Here's a link to the official manual:


I'm sure you guys would be yelling at us across the street to please put 98SE on it, but we're sorry but we just really love having WinXP on this machine. It even has the XP badge affixed now with a new PIII sticker... 😎
 
Last edited:
Here's my little beast, complete with an LS120 susper-drive, 40GB hard drive and PII 350 CPU. You are correct, I cannot conceive of switching to XP as my original sticker broadcasts the originally intended windows 98. I do want to work on a CPU upgrade tho.
 

Attachments

  • 20260105_185326.jpg
    20260105_185326.jpg
    1.8 MB · Views: 4
  • 20260105_185808.jpg
    20260105_185808.jpg
    1.5 MB · Views: 4
  • 20260105_190013.jpg
    20260105_190013.jpg
    1.2 MB · Views: 4
  • 20260105_190026.jpg
    20260105_190026.jpg
    1 MB · Views: 4
I think you might be able to sneak in a non-NLX card in like this Speedstar A90 when the VGA port lines up just right. I wont be trying it with this tho as I can confirm Speedstar drivers are a hot mess.
 

Attachments

  • 20260105_201633.jpg
    20260105_201633.jpg
    1.5 MB · Views: 8
Hey lanmangler! :)

Sorry I haven't posted in a while... But that's a nice system of yours! Are you keeping the rest of it stock or do you have more plans? Is that the original CD drive?


In my experiences, XP runs pretty good on a Pentium II as an offline system if you speed things up by using the less-demanding XP SP1, and have at least 128MB+ of RAM. (OEM XP machines actually came with as little as 128MB from factory upon the OS's release in 2001)

Don't forget the "XP performance tab" fixes too!

www.groovypost.com

How-To Improve Windows Performance By Disabling Windows Visual Effects

The problem: 1. Your computer runs sluggish when opening multiple windows. (This is especially true for laptops.) 2. You run hardware-intensive applications (i.e., games/3D design) and want to get the most out of your system. 3. You simply don’t like the fancy themes look. Solution: The fix is...
www.groovypost.com www.groovypost.com


As for graphics cards:

To my observation - based on trying out my Matrox G400, I don't think the Speedstar A90 card you showed me will line up in the AGP slot. Try it, the lower part of the PCB will bump against the back mobo connectors before getting a chance to fit straight in the slot. My G400 has a notch cut out of the lower PCB for this reason.

The Matrox G400 we had turned out to be defective, so we returned it and then soon upgraded instead to a PCI Nvidia GeForce4 MX4000 with 64MB video RAM. The Game-Genie of all upgrades! 😎 (Max turbo powered supreme godliness)


Now our Gateway E-3200 can even play 2005 games! We couldn't believe how smooth "The Movies Stunts & Effects" runs, even though the minimum CPU requirement is 800MHz. (Ours is 550MHz) Our RAM is also the minimum 256MB and we are using the lowest possible in-game graphics settings. We haven't torture tested it at step by step intervals just yet... but we'll see... 😈

Feeling pretty complacent with the build, but I'll still be on the lookout for a faster AGP card to dremel mod.

Cheers!
 
Last edited:
On just about any version of Windows from Win95 onward you are going to have performance issues if there isn't enough memory for the task you want it to perform.

If there is insufficient physical memory then Windows' virtual memory subsystem will get involved and that usually involves dumping under-utilized pages of memory out to the hard disk and pulling them back in again as needed.

How much that affects performance depends heavily on the speed of disk I/O which is affected both by the interface and the actual storage drive...
 
I wonder what is the largest size ATA drive this machine can recognize? It's really cool you got a 40 gig drive working without BIOS complaints, lanmangler.

Speaking of the BIOS, mine has it's original 1999 version and it can't recognize any RAM sticks larger than 128MB... I tried a couple 256MB sticks, but only 128MB of the capacity was reported on boot up.

Oddly, despite the 384MB max with 3 slots, It DOES have the 440BX chipset. Hopefully a BIOS update (If it still exists) can allow an upgrade of 768MB...
 
If 40 gig drives are okay then you're probably good right up to the 128 GiB limit imposed by ATA-5, LBA28.

In principle you should be able to use 256 MiB RAM modules as long as they are compatible with respect to the type and speed of supported by the memory controller (e.g. PC100 SDR SDRAM). However, there are some caveats related to the memory chips on used the module.


Low density ram is often required in that era of hardware. A good rule of thumb is that a 256 MiB RAM stick/module with 16 chips (8 on each side) is more likely to work than one
with just 8 chips wll on the same side.

Memory geometry - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top