Not sure why u think a FX5500 is overkill....a 5950U makes a nice win98 gpu.

The 5950 Ultra is certainly a consideration, but it seemed very pricy when I first looked - not to mention, there aren't any available on eBay at the moment domestically. I'm a bit leery about ordering from overseas right now, due to complications with international shipping during the pandemic.

EDIT: The motherboard also lacks an AGP slot, and I don't believe there's a PCI variant of that card. It seems like the 5500 is probably the best I can do without losing any compatibility; disregarding that, however, I could go for the GeForce 6200 instead.

Not if you want the table fog/paletized textures. And poor driver support/gpu compatibility does not really make it ultimate for win98. Personally I think the p4 northwood 3.4ghz with a 5950U is pretty ultimate for win98. Sound is good choice tho 😁

Why dont you use pcie? Alot of people here have used pcie cards with 9x and you can get cards like Geforce FX series and 6 series for cheaper in pcie than in their AGP flavors. Pci is a pretty severe bottleneck for graphics chips.

You can't get the best FX cards in pcie. Win98 doesn't need the power of this platform. Agp is fast enough. I like to be able to install chipset drivers on a build.

kolderman wrote on 2020-06-03, 03:14:

You can't get the best FX cards in pcie. Win98 doesn't need the power of this platform. Agp is fast enough. I like to be able to install chipset drivers on a build.

I swear there are versions of the top end FX chips in the form of Quadro's in pcie, I cant remember the models for the life of me (forgive me if Im wrong) But in this case the motherboard has pcie and pci and is also matx. Thus OP saying that the FX 5500 should be good enough in PCI flavor. I just thought id throw out that pcie isnt off the table for a 9x GPU if something with more graphical horsepower was wanted. With the e5800 and 4gb of ram it would also make a great XP setup.

Only overkill part of the build is the RAM and CPU which is going to held back by the graphics card anyway.
It'll be much more fun then an overkill system anyway. My "overkill 98 box" with a 6800 Ultra never gets much use anyway.
Older games have compatabiity issues and work fine on order hardware, newer games work better in my XP build with PCIE and rest of it.

Think it'll do you just fine.