i think that part of the issues that you have are because the hardware you are using is not particularly good, specially the processor and the chipset
i have a similar motherboard. but it has a core 2 duo e4400 and 2gb of ram, also has a geforce 210, and is very suggish in xp, 7 and even lubuntu

I was going to wonder if the Via chipset is the fault. The CPU isn't great (planning on swapping it) but the gap between OS's makes me think the chipset is really at fault.

well, i think that is a big part of the fault, yours is the via p4m890
I've used the p4m800, and it was practically crap under 98se both with and without drivers
windows 2000 and xp are very similar at the core, so the drivers are almost the same for the most part. that makes it more compatible and more powerful with this kind of hardware

I would recommend the 56.64 drivers instead of the 66.64 version. Earlier drivers are better for 98.

I would also make sure you have any chipset, IDE, and/or RAID drivers installed, and DMA enabled on your drives. Otherwise, all drive access is limited to about 3mb/s, and it sucks away all of your CPU cycles to do it.

Finally, windows 98 runs much better on less RAM. 512mb or less is recommended. I would say a dual channels kit of 256mb is probably your best bet.

EDIT: One more thing, windows 2001 requires dx 8.1 or 9.0... with windows 98, you really want to stay on dx 7.0a for the best compatibility. Probably won't effect performance, but just so you know. For benchmarking, 3dmark 99 (freely available) is good to use.

I have everything installed for SATA and IDE drivers (similar performance with installs on SATA and IDE drivers, SATA is in RAID mode), DMA enabled.
My board doesn't have dual channel support because of its awful chipset, so that's probably impacting a fair bit. Might track down some smaller sticks of ram.

The 56.64 doesn't officially support the FX1300 or any of the other PCI-E cards. I'm sure I can probably get it hacked in though since I can get agp cards drivers to load.

Also running 9.0c in both environments, though obviously I'm seeing similar gaps in OGL titles (Q3A)

kpmgeek wrote:

I have everything installed for SATA and IDE drivers (similar performance with installs on SATA and IDE drivers, SATA is in RAID mode), DMA enabled.
My board doesn't have dual channel support because of its awful chipset, so that's probably impacting a fair bit. Might track down some smaller sticks of ram.

The 56.64 doesn't officially support the FX1300 or any of the other PCI-E cards. I'm sure I can probably get it hacked in though since I can get agp cards drivers to load.

It looks like you are right about the drivers. The earliest support I can find for the card is 61.76. It is worth a try at any rate, you can find them on Phil's websiste

https://www.philscomputerlab.com/nvidia-9x-gr … cs-drivers.html

I setting up a socket 478 machine with a p4 3.0ghz and an FX 2000. It is a bit different from your machine, but probably share a similar chipset. I scored 11,999 in 3dmark 99 and 247fps at 1024x768 with Quake III.

win9x can be finicky though. My previous build was a athlon 3400+ on a socket 754 machine. Despite the 3400+ being significantly faster, I actually scored worse in 3dmark 99 and in all of my benchmarks compared to this machine. I think I maxed out at 200fps in quake III, and probably 11,000 points in 3dmark.

Yeah, the key tell that something was very odd was the fact that I was getting the same score roughly no matter what I clocked the GPU too or what the resolution was.
I'm less concerned with the speed in 3dmark than I am with the game performance and the overall PC just feels slow, slower in normal desktop operations than my P3 933mhz with a Riva TNT and 128mb of ram.