I wiped my win98 HDD and started again. This time, no mistakes! 😀 So, on to the HDD goes only the right stuff, and no additional crap. Now, things seem a little better. The "60 86" drivers still make the system report that the graphics card is a TNT. (I'll try the 71.89 drivers once I'm happy everything works OK.) 3DMark2001 gives me a score of about 14500 (sorry, can't remember exactly!) with all its settings set to their maximums: 1280x1024 32 bit, 4 AA, bla...

Regarding the stock heatsink, I would love to replace it with something chunkier, so that it mops up more heat.

I don't know if newer Nvidia cards play nice with Win98. With my 4200Ti, I tried MSI's own drivers, tweaked drivers, Nvidia drivers from the 20xx to 60xx range and still had system lock up issues. On Win 2000/ XP, pretty much any driver and game combination worked.

Just to verify it wasn't the card, I also tried an XFX 6200 using XFX's supplied drivers, and same thing, games locking up and all sorts of wierdness. Again, the card worked fine with Win 2000 or XP. 😕 After a few clean installs, I gave up and shoved in a Voodoo3 which worked right off the bat.

All the same, I would like to see which driver works on your build.

ATM, I'm getting weirdness with old D3D games. Jedi Knight and MotS don't launch with either the "60 86" or "61 72" drivers. However, I read on the net that this could be caused by an inadequate swap file. There may be something wrong with the way I prepared my HDD - I fdisk'd it using a Win98 boot disk, and it only made a 10GB (approx) primary partition, even though it's 80GB. Also, SeaTools for DOS cannot resize its capacity.

The only reason I've tried the "60 86" and "61 72" drivers so far is that they were available on AOpen's website, as it's an AOpen graphics card. For Windows XP, it lists R71.24 as the latest version to download. Perhaps AOpen realise that the best that will work with win98 is either the 60 or 61 drivers?

I've just reinstalled win98 + essentials to a different HDD, just in case the first HDD was not functioning correctly. All I installed was win98, chipset drivers, unofficial win98 service pack (main option only), dx9, basic sound card, and the 6800 drivers. Then I installed Jedi Knight. Launching the game, I get the same error message as before, roughly: "unable to open file - may be corrupt - ?????".

My conclusion is that it's most likely to do with the "60 86" drivers. But I think these "60 86" drivers are probably the best ones to use, because the "61 72" drivers made Quake 2, Quake 3 and Jedi Academy not run - and those were the only 3D games I tested! The problem with all of this is that the 6800 seems to be able to run more modern games on win98, but they run on XP anyway!

(Edited) I could try 3 other things: 1) Try the 71.89 drivers. 2) Remove the 6800, and put in a different graphics card, then relaunch Jedi Knight. 3) The only other thing I can think of is that this problem could be mobo related. If I have the time, I could set up the 6800 on a different mobo. Perhaps a "retro rocket" Epox mobo, the one with the 1 ISA slot.

I'll start with option 1) first - the 71.89 drivers...

Option 1) seems to work - I went to the nVidia website, and DL'd the archived 71.84 drivers. (I couldn't see 71.89.) Now Jedi Knight runs OK. Another interesting thing is that the GPU temperature is lower - it seems to idle at about 60C now.

Edit: I just noticed AvP2 doesn't work correctly with these newer drivers. The textures are missing on any objects that move.

Perhaps AOpen realise that the best that will work with win98 is either the 60 or 61 drivers?

Not likely. I never get drivers off the board manufacturers' sites, as they only ever bother to update for a couple releases, and they don't always wait until everything works properly before quitting with new updates. Get drivers directly from the chip manufacturer if you can.

I did a bit more looking, and I can't find anything about using the 71.89 drivers with Win9X, so maybe it was a different version I tried on that one machine. I did run across 77.72, which has quite a few fixes for the 6800, so maybe that one is worth a try.

Last year I was on a stereo LCD glasses kick and dropped a FX5200 in my win98 machine. The latest supporting diver I could find at nvidia was 61.76.
Goes up to the FX5800 for win9x. Pod Racer in stereo FTW!

You may want to try the 61.76 but the driver doesn't seem to be on nvidia's website anymore. If you can't find it anywhere i will put it up for yaz.

retro games 100 wrote:

Another interesting thing is that the GPU temperature is lower - it seems to idle at about 60C now.

Your post prompted to to blow the dust out of my 6800gt. I also removed the after-mark heat sink and fan and put new antec 5 on on the GPU and memory chips. Idling at 52 now. [Some of the drop from 71 is because I installed case fans since it was last in use.]

I'm using 94.24 in XP nowadays but I checked my driver archive - for 98 I used to use 61.76 and 77.72.

Amigaz wrote:

PowerPie5000 wrote:

My fastest Win 98se box consists of the following: […]
Show full quote

My fastest Win 98se box consists of the following:

Intel Pentium 4 - 2.66ghz CPU (socket 478 Northwood)
Asrock P4i65GV micro ATX motherboard (Intel 865GV chipset, socket 478).
2 x 256mb Hynix dual channel DDR400 (win98 does not like memory over 512mb!).
40gb WD IDE hard drive.
Pioneer slot loading DVD/CD drive.
Onboard C-media 9739A audio and Intel Extreme 2 graphics (will upgrade graphics to a low profile Geforce 6200 soon).
Generic low-profile Flex/Micro ATX case with 300W PSU.

I found that win 98se would not work with more than 512mb RAM.... even after i edited the Vcache setting in the system.ini file it would recognise the full 1gb RAM but was quite unstable! So i now just stick with 512mb for Win 98se which is more than enough.

Windows 98 unofficial service pack will solve your "above 512mb RAM problems"
http://exuberant.ms11.net/98sesp.html

do these updates go on after you get all the official ms updates?

Well Autopatcher for 9x includes them all so you don't need to bother with seperate. Been awhile since I installed the unofficial SP by itself.

cdoublejj wrote:

do these updates go on after you get all the official ms updates?

If you use the unoffical SP it's all you need 😀

Thanks! I'm going to reinstall the drivers - this time I will try the 77.72 download.

The 77.72 install went smoothly - I just ran the .exe and rebooted. All these apps worked OK -

3DMark2001 (max settings score = 14775)
Jedi Knight + MotS
Quake 2 + 3
Jedi Academy

But AvP2 demo showed moving things as "white textured ghosts" again. Doesn't matter - this game works great on XP anyway!

The photo below shows the 6800GT without its "heatsink shield thing", but with a 12cm case fan next to it. GPU idle temp is now 53C. Honestly, before I removed the shield and blew half a pound of dust out of it, the temp was reported as 124C. Also in the pic is a 80cm Noctua fan. It doesn't fit the heatsink, but that never puts me off. Everest Home edition says the CPU temp is 26C. Power is 450W, and the other card is just a basic soundcard.

Very nice cooling you have there. How did you mount the fans?

5u3 wrote:

How did you mount the fans?

Inertia! 😊 🤣 I'm afraid they're just sitting there. However, a couple of elastic bands should hold the 12cm fan in place. I've used this method before on various components, when I've put a mobo+all its bits inside a case.

i didn't know about the un official SPs and i already installed all the official updates

Have you seen this site?

http://www.mdgx.com/

It's mega. 😀

Fantastic site! It's almost too much 😁

retro games 100: please remove the dust from that fan. And perhaps clean it a bit. I think that could remove some of the heat from the PC. I actually remove dust from my pc, every 3 months or so.

WolverineDK wrote:

retro games 100: please remove the dust from that fan. And perhaps clean it a bit. I think that could remove some of the heat from the PC. I actually remove dust from my pc, every 3 months or so.

?I don't see any dust in that pic?

I clean my PC out every few months too, I have a Antec 900 case that moves a bunch of air. I've found whole kittens inside. 😀