Win98 seems to be supported on that machine. You should not have any problems. Make sure to install 98SE for better USB support.

windows xp would be better suited for it.

Could run win 2000 possibly if you have specialised hardware needs (ie SB64/128 or ES137X sound) for the 8mb waveset and then run NTVDMS sound or even dosbox depending. But XP will do the same thing if you don't have certain hardware needs etc.

Being a faster machine you could run a few emulators on it. Of course pure dos mode will work a treat but It's not the same IMHO.

I just reinstalled XP on this one. I figure with it's 8x AGP slot I can drop a 7800 GS and maybe upgrade to the full max supported Barton 3200+. The only thing is since this is an OEM version of the base ASUS A7V8X, I don't think it can take more than 1gb of ram. The HP specs list 1 as the max, but the base board is supposed to be able to take 2.

What uh...what can I expect from this in terms of early 2000s game performance?

I'm actually rather curious about the UniChrome IGP in it. Does anyone know if it supports any of the S3D stuff from way earlier?

Barton 3200+/ 1gb DDR/ 7800GS equals everything up to 2005 maxed out. Most 2006 titles should run pretty good, with the exception of Oblivion.

Found a 1gb stick and dropped that in. BIOS and Windows both see 1.5g so I'm good to go to move it up to the max 2gb once I find a second 1gb stick. Only had a PC3200 so that mixed with the PC2100 512 makes for pretty slow RAM performance. The board can only go up to 2700 anyway.

15 rounds of Windows update later, I'm up to date on that part. Thing is, the drive is paging like a mofo the entire time it's on. Oh well.

disable indexing and any other useless services. you can find guides on the internet about what services to tweak

1.5GB RAM is far more than enough for XP so it shouldn't be paging.

On a fresh install XP might be doing file indexing, some basic app prefetch and perhaps even a defrag. It will pass. It will also stop doing its thing if you start using the machine.

Windows will always page unless you force it to use all your physical RAM first. Set DisablePagingExecutive to 1 in the registry to force paging off (it resides in HKey_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management).

filipetolhuizen wrote:

Windows will always page unless you force it to use all your physical RAM first. Set DisablePagingExecutive to 1 in the registry to force paging off (it resides in HKey_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management).

All that switch does is prevent the kernel from being swapped to disk.

It won't affect anything else.

Ordered a 7800 gs from eBay. $45 shipped.

Next question, is the onboard audio good enough for early 200s games, or should I look into a discrete sound card?

senrew wrote:

Next question, is the onboard audio good enough for early 200s games, or should I look into a discrete sound card?

Do yourself a favor and get a proper X-Fi card on the cheap; there's plenty of PCI cards on eBay. That counts double if you use headphones, since you'd benefit greatly from CMSS-3D Headphone.

Just steer clear of the XtremeAudio models since they're fakes without the proper DSP.

Necro...

So, I had stopped using this machine for a little bit, but it's time to resume it's usefulness. I had updated to SP3 awhile ago, and this thing is CRAWLING now.

Should I start over with one of the older versions of XP? Not quite sure if this thing can really handle being updated all the way.

I can't really think of why SP3 would be slower or why the machine would "not really handle being updated all the way", especially since you have 1.5 GB of RAM. Perhaps you should try to get to the bottom of what is going on. Does anything in particular show up in Task Manager?

senrew wrote:

I'm actually rather curious about the UniChrome IGP in it. Does anyone know if it supports any of the S3D stuff from way earlier?

The last chip to support S3D was Trio3D/2X so, no.

But UniChrome is a descendant of the Savage line so there is a chance it supports the MeTaL API. If you have an Unreal engine game available you could try.

senrew wrote:

Necro...

So, I had stopped using this machine for a little bit, but it's time to resume it's usefulness. I had updated to SP3 awhile ago, and this thing is CRAWLING now.

Should I start over with one of the older versions of XP? Not quite sure if this thing can really handle being updated all the way.

1.5GB and a CPU > 2GHz should be fine for XP SP3. I'd recommend to search for other causes, too. Perhaps the common "XP drops IDE transfer mode to PIO" problem? Really hurts for HDDs, boot time easily reaches 15 minutes.

idspispopd wrote:

The last chip to support S3D was Trio3D/2X so, no.

Have anyone tested this beside Putas? He said that the S3D compatibility was broken.

Another option to consider is installing a flavor of Linux and making it a WINE machine. Support for games from ~2000 should be pretty well-covered.

The HD is SATA so I dunno about the dropping to PIO thing.

The machine is really just sluggish with a few newer apps. I guess I'm just spoiled by my newer rigs and at work, the only machines running XP are some newer i5s and such, so...not sluggish with it at all.

This machine is intended for dx9 games that won't run well under windows 7 or 8. That's it. As long as it can handle up to about 2005, I'm happy.

Also, I stuck an old Audigy 2 ZS or something like that in it. I figure anything is better than the onboard audio. I'll be getting an X-FI soon enough and a Barton 3200+ and this thing will be pretty much maxed.

senrew wrote:

This machine is intended for dx9 games that won't run well under windows 7 or 8. That's it. As long as it can handle up to about 2005, I'm happy.

A more practical way would be to dual boot XP on your main machine, play those games in maximum quality/resolution and save yourself the trouble of having another machine. There is not that much value in a dedicated computer for DX9.