Bought this recently:

Voodoo3 3500 TV boxed. Only V3 + CD + cable + box through... no other accessories

Asus PCH-DL - i875P based dual socket 604 board

Lukeno94 wrote:

My case cooling isn't epic, but the GTX 670 really doesn't get that hot (particularly not in triple-fan Gigabyte form). I've never noticed it having any problems with a DX9 game, but then, it is so much more powerful than any DX9-era card that it really wouldn't matter!

oh yeah , in terms of hardware, hardware from even 1 or 2 years ago still works fine with DX8/9 era games, the problem is mainly software based, my old 6870 could not play Max Payne 1 or 2 due to a driver issue in Win7. When I tried the same drivers in XP , the games worked fine. The question then is how long is XP going to be supported by chipsets or GPU makers? Im not sure my current GF770 has XP drivers available (and I can imagine the next one after that certainly wont). Hence why I wanted a good DX9 native system.

Anyway , I took obobskivich's advice and replaced the thermal pads on the RAM chips with Arctic Silver 5, also reapplied it to the GPUs of course. Another thing I did was finally replace the USB bay at the top of the case with a fan.

current temperatures are in the low 50s when idle, and about 67-69 after about an hour of running Hitman Blood Money and 3DMark05.

retrofanatic wrote:

Thanks for the info...my plan was to use gpu z as you mentioned to figure out if it's the extreme 6800 that I have or not. Either way I think I'll be happy with it. Great to hear you picked one up too. What motherboard did you buy to use it in?

D'oh! 🤣

I ordered an Asus PC-DL Deluxe and some 604 Xeons - I figure my P4 is as good as I'm gonna get for Win9x, so why not take it a few steps further for XP? 😎 I also snagged a Silverstone RL-01 on "sale" on Amazon to put it all in, assuming this board comes in working order (I've had awful luck with motherboards recently, so I'm hoping this one breaks the trend).

As for the 9800GX2. ..I figured that the dual gpus would give me some problems with some games from some of the reviews I have read but I am going to see what it can do with photoshop and autocad as well as with some older xp games. I do have 2 hd6870 s as well but I do prefer nvidia over ati for the most part.

If I remember right Photoshop won't "see" the second GPU. But maybe that's changed with newer versions (I know they've done a lot with GPGPU features since CS3).

Darkman wrote:

Im guessing the room temprature is about 20C. I will admit the case Im using this PC in isn't the greatest in terms of cooling. […]
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Im guessing the room temprature is about 20C. I will admit the case Im using this PC in isn't the greatest in terms of cooling. Im using a Cooler Master Wave case, exactly the same one as this case, but a solid black colour

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cases/2004/1 … 3/wave_master/1

it looks brilliant but the cooling isn't quite as good as on my Lian Li PC60 (there aren't as many vents on the front, and the fans are smaller, also no top fan unless I take out the USB bay)

that said its still a very good case, so I don't think it would cause a heat issue. One thing Im trying to do is get a hold of SATA hard drives & DVD drive, this PC has plenty of SATA ports but due to what I had laying around, I ended using IDE, not the best choice obviously.

and I think the earlier driver comment is true , Ive tried a bunch of drivers from the 93.xx to the much newer 301 drivers offered on EVGA's website (the card is an EVGA card) and the 93.81 seem to work the best in terms of stability , but I lost a big chunk of performance (the Doom3 benchmark lost about 15 frames) maybe I haven't got it set up right, dual GPU mode is enabled.

EDIT : Nevermind regarding the framerate, for whatever reason , reinstalling the drivers fixed that.

I know if you go older than the original QuadSLI build the drivers seem to have some trouble with SLI performance/features even though they technically support the card/SLI configuration.

Very cool case (I remember those!), but no side ventilation - which IME is a problem for the GX2s. I'd try it with the side panel off and see if anything improves or not; it's not a condemnation of the case, just that different setups have different cooling needs.

Darkman wrote:

oh yeah , in terms of hardware, hardware from even 1 or 2 years ago still works fine with DX8/9 era games, the problem is mainly software based, my old 6870 could not play Max Payne 1 or 2 due to a driver issue in Win7. When I tried the same drivers in XP , the games worked fine. The question then is how long is XP going to be supported by chipsets or GPU makers? Im not sure my current GF770 has XP drivers available (and I can imagine the next one after that certainly wont). Hence why I wanted a good DX9 native system.

GeForce GTX 770 has current WindowsXP drivers - 344.48 has an XP release. The GTX 980 ("the next one after that") does not have XP drivers currently posted on nV's website, and it's likely they won't change that. But I do agree with sticking to a more native solution - they've broken some things in old/early DX9 games since 320.xx (which affects GeForce 7 and above, but GeForce 7 isn't required to use such new drivers). GeForce 8 will have some pretty big advantages in terms of performance for later DX9 titles (say 2008 or newer), but I've had no issues running those on Windows 7 + Kepler, so I wouldn't be too worried about that. 😀

current temperatures are in the low 50s when idle, and about 67-69 after about an hour of running Hitman Blood Money and 3DMark05.

Sounds closer to what my cards do while cased (especially the idle temps). 😀

Darkman wrote:

oh yeah , in terms of hardware, hardware from even 1 or 2 years ago still works fine with DX8/9 era games, the problem is mainly […]
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Lukeno94 wrote:

My case cooling isn't epic, but the GTX 670 really doesn't get that hot (particularly not in triple-fan Gigabyte form). I've never noticed it having any problems with a DX9 game, but then, it is so much more powerful than any DX9-era card that it really wouldn't matter!

oh yeah , in terms of hardware, hardware from even 1 or 2 years ago still works fine with DX8/9 era games, the problem is mainly software based, my old 6870 could not play Max Payne 1 or 2 due to a driver issue in Win7. When I tried the same drivers in XP , the games worked fine. The question then is how long is XP going to be supported by chipsets or GPU makers? Im not sure my current GF770 has XP drivers available (and I can imagine the next one after that certainly wont). Hence why I wanted a good DX9 native system.

Anyway , I took obobskivich's advice and replaced the thermal pads on the RAM chips with Arctic Silver 5, also reapplied it to the GPUs of course. Another thing I did was finally replace the USB bay at the top of the case with a fan.

current temperatures are in the low 50s when idle, and about 67-69 after about an hour of running Hitman Blood Money and 3DMark05.

Fair enough on that front - I've not been running XP regularly on my main system since about 2006/2007, so the driver support issue isn't something I ever think about. I've not really noticed my graphics drivers causing issues anywhere (344.11 is the version I have right now, and I possibly should look at updating them soon), to be honest - hell, I can still run Jazz Jackrabbit 2 perfectly on this rig, assuming I don't try and play in 256 colour mode! Let's hope that the new thermal compound will help prolong the life of that card.

Lukeno94 wrote:

Darkman wrote:

oh yeah , in terms of hardware, hardware from even 1 or 2 years ago still works fine with DX8/9 era games, the problem is mainly […]
Show full quote

Lukeno94 wrote:

My case cooling isn't epic, but the GTX 670 really doesn't get that hot (particularly not in triple-fan Gigabyte form). I've never noticed it having any problems with a DX9 game, but then, it is so much more powerful than any DX9-era card that it really wouldn't matter!

oh yeah , in terms of hardware, hardware from even 1 or 2 years ago still works fine with DX8/9 era games, the problem is mainly software based, my old 6870 could not play Max Payne 1 or 2 due to a driver issue in Win7. When I tried the same drivers in XP , the games worked fine. The question then is how long is XP going to be supported by chipsets or GPU makers? Im not sure my current GF770 has XP drivers available (and I can imagine the next one after that certainly wont). Hence why I wanted a good DX9 native system.

Anyway , I took obobskivich's advice and replaced the thermal pads on the RAM chips with Arctic Silver 5, also reapplied it to the GPUs of course. Another thing I did was finally replace the USB bay at the top of the case with a fan.

current temperatures are in the low 50s when idle, and about 67-69 after about an hour of running Hitman Blood Money and 3DMark05.

Fair enough on that front - I've not been running XP regularly on my main system since about 2006/2007, so the driver support issue isn't something I ever think about. I've not really noticed my graphics drivers causing issues anywhere (344.11 is the version I have right now, and I possibly should look at updating them soon), to be honest - hell, I can still run Jazz Jackrabbit 2 perfectly on this rig, assuming I don't try and play in 256 colour mode! Let's hope that the new thermal compound will help prolong the life of that card.

well it started going downhill again.... took it a long time but it did, corruption and a failure to boot into normal Windows , even though it will boot into Safe Mode just fine.....starting to give up on this card. Might just end up going for a card like a GF7900 GTX or a 1900XT/XTX, won't be as fast but it should have less issues (and if the harshest game Im playing on it is Hitman Blood Money or Oblivion they should do the job)

The x1900 series are great cards if you can master them cooling wise but the drivers can be annoying when you try newer games. Performance wise they can be beastly but tweaking the memory yields a nice boost. As for the 7900 GTX you will be getting a lot for the money considering it will run modern games that were optimized on the PS3.

nforce4max wrote:

The x1900 series are great cards if you can master them cooling wise but the drivers can be annoying when you try newer games. Performance wise they can be beastly but tweaking the memory yields a nice boost. As for the 7900 GTX you will be getting a lot for the money considering it will run modern games that were optimized on the PS3.

as I said about the newest game Im playing on this PC is Oblivion , I did run Bioshock on it too just to see how well it ran (unsurprisingly it ran decently) , but otherwise nothing newer.

Darkman wrote:

The question then is how long is XP going to be supported by chipsets or GPU makers? Im not sure my current GF770 has XP drivers available (and I can imagine the next one after that certainly wont). Hence why I wanted a good DX9 native system.

The latest Intel chipsets don't have XP anymore. I was looking at using that anniversary Pentium for a XP machine but it doesn't work. Now using a H61 board and that works fine.

Not sure about AMD, my current gear all works, the latest one has a 880 chipset. Checking on the Asrock site, their 990FX boards support XP so do their AM1 and FM2+ boards.

It will be interesting to see if the next round of graphics cards will support XP or not.

But really this only affects games up to around 2006/2007 when many started receiving DX10 patches or had DX10 support out of the gate.

Nvidia 7 series is great for Doom 3, Far Cry and FEAR. I didn't try Oblivion because of lack of benchmarking features. Things get a bit slower with HL2 Lost Coast, Company of Heroes and Lost Planet 2, but the latter 2 are really DX10 games through patches. Bioshock is a DX10 game as well.

Don't forget the 8800GT! Very powerful card and it's many variations such as the 9800GT, GTX, GTX+, 250 GTS, GTS 512...

Honestly, you're wasting any of the new GPUs if you're coupling them with XP - or new motherboards and CPUs for that matter. You CAN use the GTX 970/980 with the 344.11 XP driver apparently, but I don't think they publicly advertised it. And I've not seen that many XP games that don't run on Vista or 7, apart from those that have dirty programming (ToCA Race Driver 2 and GTR 1, I'm looking at you!)

I don't see it that way. You can waste a lot of money and time on period correct hardware that arrives DOA or has other issues or go with something that's newer, has less issues and often cheaper than period correct hardware.

Lukeno94 wrote:

Honestly, you're wasting any of the new GPUs if you're coupling them with XP - or new motherboards and CPUs for that matter. You CAN use the GTX 970/980 with the 344.11 XP driver apparently, but I don't think they publicly advertised it. And I've not seen that many XP games that don't run on Vista or 7, apart from those that have dirty programming (ToCA Race Driver 2 and GTR 1, I'm looking at you!)

Yeah. And you can run Radeon R9 series on XP I think.
AMD updates their XP driver and not their Vista driver!! (but I hacked the 7 driver to work on Vista)

But I agree using DX11 HW on a DX9 OS seems silly

Darkman wrote:

as I said about the newest game Im playing on this PC is Oblivion , I did run Bioshock on it too just to see how well it ran (unsurprisingly it ran decently) , but otherwise nothing newer.

My 7900GS never had issues with Oblivion, Hitman 4, or Bioshock (never tried it at massive resolutions + IQ though); I'd assume 7900GTX would be a fine choice too (there are videos on YouTube showing them running Skyrim and other later DX9 games). You may also look at the Quadro FX 5500 (7900GTX-based with 1GB of RAM).

obobskivich wrote:

Darkman wrote:

as I said about the newest game Im playing on this PC is Oblivion , I did run Bioshock on it too just to see how well it ran (unsurprisingly it ran decently) , but otherwise nothing newer.

My 7900GS never had issues with Oblivion, Hitman 4, or Bioshock (never tried it at massive resolutions + IQ though); I'd assume 7900GTX would be a fine choice too (there are videos on YouTube showing them running Skyrim and other later DX9 games). You may also look at the Quadro FX 5500 (7900GTX-based with 1GB of RAM).

I actually tried Bioshock on an x1950 Pro (which uses the weaker R570 chip , as opposed to the top of the line R580 used in the X1900 versions) with the same A64 X2 4400 CPU , and it actually ran Bioshock surprisingly well.
full detail at 1280X1024 , and it generally ran in the 40-50fps range. maybe not too amazing, but not bad for an upper mid-range card from a year earlier.

Im still not sure what the heck is wrong with that 7950 . the corruption is visible during the boot up sequence, but Windows Safe mode will load just fine , as will normal Windows if I uninstall the drivers. I am using the latest BIOS and chipset drivers (this is a compatible board, according to ASUS) The only other card in this PC is an SB X-fi , so I can't imagine that causing the issue. the PSU is an Antec TP-550 , which should be more than capable too.

Darkman wrote:

the corruption is visible during the boot up sequence, but Windows Safe mode will load just fine , as will normal Windows if I uninstall the drivers.

Unfortunately this means the card is defective. Most likely the BGA joints between GPU and PCB are broken - because of ROHS solder. 😠 All VGAs made in 2006 and later are prone to this failure.
You can try the "owen trick", it might fix the card... but not for long - time varies from days to months.

Btw. for newer games using SM3 (DX9c) Radeon X1900 series GPUs are much faster than GF7. In Bioshock for example single Radeon X1900 XTX is as fast as GF 7950 GX2. And when massive microstuttering of the GX2 is taken into account, the XTX (and basically any Radeon X1900) runs the game much smoother.
http://hw-museum.cz/data/benchmark-3/data/BS_max_1280.png

Do you think that it could be a RAM issue on the card? I have heard of people with Geforce 6 and 7 series relating tales of underclocking their video ram and core clocks to fix graphical issues. Never really gave those stories much credit but it might be worth a shot. Especially if you have no problems in safe mode, where Windows might be loading a default video driver that would not utilize the card to its full potential.

Well it is RAM issue, sort of. Underclocking might help but possibility of solving the problem is very slim imho. I'm 99% sure the connection between RAM and GPU is damaged - artifacts and BSOD (with driver installed) occurs because of this.

I have many VGAs suffering from this problem in my collection (7950 GX2 included). Windows safe mode or normal mode without drivers doesn't use full potential of the card - all acceleration functions are disabled (even 2D) and amount of video RAM used is low. When you install the drivers, then GPU try to access whole video RAM and that usually results in BSOD.

philscomputerlab wrote:

I don't see it that way. You can waste a lot of money and time on period correct hardware that arrives DOA or has other issues or go with something that's newer, has less issues and often cheaper than period correct hardware.

Perhaps, but when the newer hardware is optimized for a different system setup anyway, then you potentially get some issues creeping in regardless, particularly when the drivers for older OSes will sometimes be half-hearted efforts. I certainly see no point in putting a brand-new, top-of-the-range GPU into a XP machine (like people are talking about with the GTX 900 series, or the GTX 770); it simply will have no way of utilizing it all, due to the OS being restricted to DX9, and it certainly won't be cheaper than period-correct hardware in that case (get a GT 730 for DX9 games, rather than spunking a huge amount of money on a 760 or higher). On the CPU/motherboard front, well, you can still find LGA 775 stock brand new with little effort, and without it being insanely priced either.

havli wrote:

Unfortunately this means the card is defective. Most likely the BGA joints between GPU and PCB are broken - because of ROHS sold […]
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Darkman wrote:

the corruption is visible during the boot up sequence, but Windows Safe mode will load just fine , as will normal Windows if I uninstall the drivers.

Unfortunately this means the card is defective. Most likely the BGA joints between GPU and PCB are broken - because of ROHS solder. 😠 All VGAs made in 2006 and later are prone to this failure.
You can try the "owen trick", it might fix the card... but not for long - time varies from days to months.

Btw. for newer games using SM3 (DX9c) Radeon X1900 series GPUs are much faster than GF7. In Bioshock for example single Radeon X1900 XTX is as fast as GF 7950 GX2. And when massive microstuttering of the GX2 is taken into account, the XTX (and basically any Radeon X1900) runs the game much smoother.
http://hw-museum.cz/data/benchmark-3/data/BS_max_1280.png

well I managed to find an HIS branded X1900XT 512MB so we will see when I get the card, what drivers are the best in terms of stability/performance for it? the latest ones on AMD's site are the 10.2 I believe.

weird thing I noticed about the GX2 , is that while in some games like Quake4 , the GX2 was significantly faster than the X1950 Pro (that engine apparently really likes the Nvidia cards) , in Hitman , the maximum frame rate was almost the same, although there were less instances of slowdown during the most demanding parts of the game.

I just bought a Gravis UltraSound Max rev 2.1

A bare card for ~59 Euro but with the original Gravis MIDI and joystick dongle. Not that I am going to use the dongle with the GUS but it will be useful for other cards.
The card was sold as "in great condition" but not used the last 15 years or so, I really hope it works.

These cards were much much cheaper a few years ago but I thought that I might as well grab one now as they wont get any cheaper in the future...

Darkman wrote:

well I managed to find an HIS branded X1900XT 512MB so we will see when I get the card, what drivers are the best in terms of stability/performance for it? the latest ones on AMD's site are the 10.2 I believe.

Catalyst 10.2 is ok. I have tested many games with that driver and all of them were running fine.