Hmm, good question. I just acquired one of these at a surplus place for a dollar and found there were no XP drivers. Grrr. Thought it was Vortex2, but I'll have to check, again.

soviet conscript wrote:

just recieved a diamond monster mx300 off ebay and noticed something. I thought the mx300 used the vortex 2 chip but mine has a vortex 1 (apperently)

I looked up a few images and the monster mx300 i found looked exactly like mine except it has a 2 after vortex on the chip. the number below on the chip though was identical (AU8830A2)

so i'm guessing early MX300's used the V1 chipset and was later replaced by the v2? or early V2 chips simply left the "2" off? the chip number seems to corispond with it being a V2

No, as far as I know every Diamond Monster MX300 uses the Vortex 2 chipset. What you are talking about is the chipset revision. Most Vortex2 cards, such as yours came with the AU8830A2 chipset, which is the first revision and has slighty higher cpu usage, but some of the latest made cards included the newer AU8830 chipset, which reduced it, thus helping frame rate a bit, most noticeably when playing games with A3D 2.0 (wavetracing) support, like Halflife. Anyway, if you have a fast cpu, I think the frame rate decrease would be almost non existant 🤣

ah, I never knew that. its going in a rig with a Voodoo 5500 and a AMD 1700+ CPU

Yes, I'm pretty sure the MX300 is Vortex 2. It wouldn't make sense to use the same model name for the previous model as well..

Vortex 1 is AU8820.

I suppose in the chip revision they decided to finally stick the "2" on there then.

soviet conscript wrote:

ah, I never knew that. its going in a rig with a Voodoo 5500 and a AMD 1700+ CPU

Good combination. Heres mine:
Re: Retro Rig Photo Thread

If you need them, I was able to find what seems to be the last release of the Vortex 2 drivers with the sound demos included. They have been added to the Vogons driver page.

thing is I cant get the mx300 to run on the machine. Ive used every driver i could find including the one on the Vogons site. when i have the drivers for the mx300 installed the computer freezes right after the win 98 start up sound plays.

What motherboard are you using? I know back in the day I had issues with a couple of Socket A motherboards and a Vortex card I used to have. I'd google your motherboard model along with "Vortex issue" or something similar and see what pops up.

pretty sure i've had this problem but unfortnately the only scenario i can recall was when i was running it with a yamaha 724 sound card in the same box. i eventually managed to get them set up to work properly [using different hardware profiles to avoid conflicts] but in the end i just gave up, because some reboots later the probem returned. I removed the yamaha and reinstalled windows [98 first edition]. No problems since.

Not completely conclusive but it could be some card compatibility or similar resource issue? Try moving it to a different slot? Any other soundcards installed?

using A tyan s2390 motherboard

soviet conscript wrote:

using A tyan s2390 motherboard

Looking up, I only found one post on a forum concerning your board having issues with a Vortex, but it also had issues with a Sb Live also. Other post I read people had no problems as far as sound card compatibility goes.

hmmm, well thanks for looking.

i'll try reinstalling windows (i just installed it anyways so i won't lose anything) followed by installing the official drivers from the site here and see if that works. if not i may just try my alternate win 98 setup (sb audiology and a geforce 3) and find a diffrent board for my glide setup.

Try installing the PCI Latency patch first since you have KT133/686A.
http://www.georgebreese.com/net/software/

No luck, completly reformated and reinstalled win98, installed the latency patch. didn't install any other drivers not even video drivers for fear of a wierd conflict and i get the same issue. right after the initial windows startup chime the pc completly locks up.

looks like it may be easier just to hunt down a diffrent MB.

Maybe try disabling ACPI in the BIOS and making sure Windows doesn't try to use it either? Perhaps reserving an IRQ for that pci slot in the BIOS?