Seems like what I saw when videocards were overheating, or had previously been overheated.

Probably overclocked to pieces by the previous owner

It was one of these cards I recieved dead that fried my Abit KT7A Raid

Stick your fingers on the capacitors and see if they wobble. That's how I figured out what was wrong with mine. Make sure your power supply has a rating of at least 300 watts. If all else checks out, it's likely the ram. It may still be salvageable if you lower the clock, which you can do with various utilities (I use Riva Tuner) or even by flashing the BIOS.

The capacitors look and feel OK, and the PSU is 450W. Everest Home edition reports 43C at desktop start up. I DL'd and ran RivaTuner, and lowered the default clocks, but no joy - the general image is still corrupted to various degrees on all games run. dxdiag.exe graphics tests worked once though, but on another occasion looked strange. I fear the worst.

prophase_j - is there a reason why you picked the XT over the Pro model?

retro games 100 wrote:

is there a reason why you picked the XT over the Pro model?

It's faster. 😀

Try downclocking the RAM and see if that fixes the problem. ATITool 0.24 should be able to change clocks (newer versions are troublesome with old cards). And you can edit the BIOS with the Rabit Bios Editor and flash with ATI Winflash or DOS ATIFlash.

I've had to do this to some 9700 cards.

You should verify that the BIOS isn't already overclocked too. You can find official clock speeds here: (412/365 look to be what XT should be at)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AM … rocessing_units

Thanks! - I've just DL'd those 3 progs, and will give them a go ASAP. Re: "412/365 look to be what XT should be at" - yes, I can confirm this to be the case with the graphics card, because RivaTuner showed me those values as defaults when I tried to lower them.

Well, all hope is not lost because the seller said "send it back for a refund". Also, I tried ATITool 0.24 but unfortunately it's 2000/XP only. I also tried ATI Winflash, but it complains about a missing non-win98 DLL called psapi.dll. I DL'd that too, and installed it in the system32 folder, but the Winflash prog still wasn't happy. I tried the DOS ATI flash program instead, at the C:\ "safe command prompt", and I was able to save the BIOS in to a file. Then, I used the Rabit windows program to read in this file, but I couldn't see how I could improve the situation, as the clock speeds seemed OK. Oh well. I did manage to get a Radeon 9800 Pro card working OK today, so that's some good news. 😀

You need to try reducing the RAM clock speed to below stock. That's what I've had to do with a few 9700 cards that developed image artifacts. I figure either the RAM chips or the GPU memory controller degrades over time on those cards.

I didn't consider that you would try those apps in 9x. 😀

I tried this a couple of times using RivaTuner - I adjusted the memory clock speed to much lower values, but unfortunately the problem persists. When I see the BIOS POST screen, the text is always corrupted, and then the Win98 splash screen is always corrupted too.

When the postman pushed the card thru the letterbox, there was a sickening thud as it hit the hard stone floor. Perhaps that's the reason why it isn't working properly? 🤣

What motherboard are you trying to use it in?

What motherboard are you using it with? I had an ATI 9800 Pro running on an Epox socket A board using a Via chipset (cant remember the exact one?) and the video output had lines and random green dots everywhere! It worked perfectly with an Intel 845g motherboard though 😕

Have you tried it with another mobo? (i'm sure you probably have 😎 )

Great minds think alike 😀 It could be that the motherboard is not providing enough voltage to the AGP slot (I'm assuming it's AGP?) because it was made for older generation AGP cards?

I know some older non-Intel boards had flakey AGP support (VIA, SIS, ALI). I found that i had no problems with low-end AGP cards... Just the high-end one's running on non-Intel boards 😖 (the Radeon 9800 was quite high-end at the time!).

If the 9800 Pro works, I doubt that it's AGP compliance probs...

There could be some missing surface mount components perhaps... Or a broken solder joint/ball.

I have used my 9800xt in a couple Via based boards, KT133a and KT333. I think they are getting enough voltage, the only adjustments I have made is to disable fast writes and setting the AGP Drive Strength to DC to make then work well.

However has far as rg100's case, I totally agree with swaaye on this one.

To me it also looks to be a defective card rather than mainboard compatibility problems. Two Radeon 9800 cards (XT and SE) went bad on me (with the same symptoms as yours) before I found one that worked reliably (a 9800 Pro). These cards always seem to run on the edge of instability.

I'm using this R 9800 XT AGP 4x/8x graphics card in this Gigabyte mobo: GA-K8NS socket 754 rev 2 mobo, as featured in this Vogons thread:

Building a really fast Win98 rig...

This mobo has an AGP slot (8x/4x AGP 3.0 compliant), which supports 1.5v display card only. Is this OK?
Also, it has an NVIDIA nForce3 250 Platform Processor (chipset).

I haven't tested the R 9800 in any other mobo yet. I've got an Epox "retro rocket" mobo that I could try, or an ABit mobo with a Pentium 4 CPU in it, but I think the AGP slot (2x/4x) is a bit crappy, and the 4x speed option doesn't work all that well.

The mystery deepens. I've just tested a GeForce FX5950 Ultra in the Gigabyte board, and noticed some unusual graphical glitches appearing on the screen. That was just running Duke Nukem 3D inside a "Dos box" in windows 98. Definitely looked like there was something wrong. I'm going to dig out another mobo to test these gfx cards - that is, the XT again and also the FX. I've got an Abit KT7A to hand - I think I'll grab that and give it a go...