Pentium 4... did you make sure the thermal grease on your CPU is fresh? Old grease dries out over time and loses its thermal conductivity.
Pentium 4s react to high temperature by clock throttling.
You also made sure your heatsink + fan is attached properly too?

Eep386 wrote on 2021-03-09, 23:50:

Pentium 4... did you make sure the thermal grease on your CPU is fresh? Old grease dries out over time and loses its thermal conductivity.
Pentium 4s react to high temperature by clock throttling.
You also made sure your heatsink + fan is attached properly too?

Hey thanks for your response, I actually rubbed a lot of it off because I didn't know what it was (and to read the model of the processor). I'll try cleaning the old stuff off and applying new grease.

That could make a BIG difference if it's throttling. Another possibility (but far less impacting) is no chipset drivers installed. That would result in no DMA for HDD transfers, which give a very bad performance hit in anything loading.

dionb wrote on 2021-03-10, 00:13:

That could make a BIG difference if it's throttling. Another possibility (but far less impacting) is no chipset drivers installed. That would result in no DMA for HDD transfers, which give a very bad performance hit in anything loading.

I did enable DMA for each hard drive but whether or not it actually did activate or the box just ticked is uncertain. I'll try hunt down some chipset drivers but I don't think I had much luck last time I tried. Any particular driver I should be looking for? I'm getting varied results.

Edit: All I could find was an IDE Driver and a "HFDrive" driver do you think either of those will help?

Eep386 wrote on 2021-03-09, 23:50:

Pentium 4... did you make sure the thermal grease on your CPU is fresh? Old grease dries out over time and loses its thermal conductivity.
Pentium 4s react to high temperature by clock throttling.
You also made sure your heatsink + fan is attached properly too?

I cleaned it and applied new grease, how to I actually diagnose if it's throttling? I checked the temperature in the BIOS and it says 38c which is quite low but the games are still lagging.

Tyrant wrote on 2021-03-09, 23:07:

I'm on a 98Se setup with over 700mb of RAM

Don't use more than 512 MB RAM when running Win98. You will experience all kinds of stability issues.

There are third party patches which can remedy this, but I haven't personally used them. See here: Best way to bypass the 512mb ram limit of WIN98SE

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-03-10, 04:29:

Don't use more than 512 MB RAM when running Win98. You will experience all kinds of stability issues.

Yeah that's why I limited the virtual usage to that setting but I think the workaround you speak of is in the unofficial service pack. Because before I used that the computer would give me the "windows protection error" when I went to install the graphics card drivers.

Tyrant wrote on 2021-03-10, 04:41:

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-03-10, 04:29:

Don't use more than 512 MB RAM when running Win98. You will experience all kinds of stability issues.

Yeah that's why I limited the virtual usage to that setting but I think the workaround you speak of is in the unofficial service pack. Because before I used that the computer would give me the "windows protection error" when I went to install the graphics card drivers.

AFAICR, you can also use Himemx.exe , which has an option to limit XMS memory, instead of Himem.sys . The option to limit it to 511MB XMS would be /MAX=532264

I have noticed one thing if I turn the hardware acceleration to basic accelerator functions games like Doom will run really smoothly whereas they won't on full but games like Battlefield 1942 won't even launch which I think has to do with the fact that in basic mode the computer doesn't launch the nVidia Desktop Manager. So I'm thinking that the nVidia drivers are the cause my issues.

Edit: I have the latest driver installed and it's still doing it. I'm almost certain then that it's this. Anyone know any workarounds? My card was released Mar 17th, 2004 so I don't think I can use any older driver than then.

Tyrant wrote on 2021-03-10, 06:16:

I have noticed one thing if I turn the hardware acceleration to basic accelerator functions games like Doom will run really smoothly whereas they won't on full but games like Battlefield 1942 won't even launch which I think has to do with the fact that in basic mode the computer doesn't launch the nVidia Desktop Manager. So I'm thinking that the nVidia drivers are the cause my issues.

Edit: I have the latest driver installed and it's still doing it. I'm almost certain then that it's this. Anyone know any workarounds? My card was released Mar 17th, 2004 so I don't think I can use any older driver than then.

Geforce FX 5500 is basically the same card as FX 5200, so you can use drivers which provides support for FX5200 only modifying .inf file in one place (well, in two places if you want card name to be displayed as FX5500).
To avoid big memory problem you can use excelent R. Roelw's PATCHEM - I'm using it successfully with 2GB of ram.

One more thing comes to mind. Is your DirectX release date >= than Nvidia drivers release date ? Just to be sure, that everything is supported.

zyga64 wrote on 2021-03-10, 06:44:

Geforce FX 5500 is basically the same card as FX 5200, so you can use drivers which provides support for FX5200 only modifying .inf file in one place (well, in two places if you want card name to be displayed as FX5500).
To avoid big memory problem you can use excelent R. Roelw's PATCHEM - I'm using it successfully with 2GB of ram.

One more thing comes to mind. Is your DirectX release date >= than Nvidia drivers release date ? Just to be sure, that everything is supported.

The driver is 2008 I think and the newest directx you can get is 2006 but I heard directx 9.c is notorious for instability. I want to try your idea on the fx5200 driver but I can't uninstall the current one (forceware 81.98), it won't let me. Any ideas?

Edit: I managed to get rid of it. Will try now to install the fx5200 driver. Do you know which exact one it is? (eg. 50.21)

Have you tried running Doom from pure DOS? That might help determine if it's a hardware issue or something with Windows/drivers.

Oetker wrote on 2021-03-10, 07:04:

Have you tried running Doom from pure DOS? That might help determine if it's a hardware issue or something with Windows/drivers.

Thanks, it definitely is the crappy nVidia drivers

Use this to uninstall the drivers https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/driv … ofessional.html
Then get an earlier driver for Your card, maybe 45.23 works?

Don't get any idea Doom 3 will work acceptably on that system, it won't. Older games from 2001 and earlier should be ok.

https://download.cnet.com/NVIDIA-Forceware-45 … 8_4-102706.html

Tyrant wrote on 2021-03-10, 06:58:

The driver is 2008 I think and the newest directx you can get is 2006 but I heard directx 9.c is notorious for instability. I want to try your idea on the fx5200 driver but I can't uninstall the current one (forceware 81.98), it won't let me. Any ideas?

Edit: I managed to get rid of it. Will try now to install the fx5200 driver. Do you know which exact one it is? (eg. 50.21)

Earliest with FX5200 support is 43.45 (a least on Phil's Computer lab site) https://www.philscomputerlab.com/nvidia-9x-gr … cs-drivers.html
But people are recommending 45.23 as least troublesome. Iv'e used 45.23 with FX5500 AGP on Intel BX with Pentium 3 450 without any problems.

zyga64 wrote on 2021-03-10, 07:18:

Earliest with FX5200 support is 43.45 (a least on Phil's Computer lab site) https://www.philscomputerlab.com/nvidia-9x-gr … cs-drivers.html
But people are recommending 45.23 as least troublesome. Iv'e used 45.23 with FX5500 AGP on Intel BX with Pentium 3 450 without any problems.

Man my comp really isn't liking this. I'm not sure if I'm doing it right but it's giving me all sorts of grief I think it's mixing up files. I don't think I properly removed all the nVidia files first from the older version first. What's the file I'm supposed to find when I hit have disk?

Edit: I was right I just had to properly remove all the old files and it's working now. Also what version of directx are you running? Also I checked directx I'm only getting half my available VRAM working through this driver. Is there a way to fix that or is that plenty?

Get the display driver uninstaller I linked to above.

Imperious wrote on 2021-03-10, 07:49:

Get the display driver uninstaller I linked to above.

Yep I got all through that well. Just while I'm here are there any BIOS settings I should change to optimise my system?

Tyrant wrote on 2021-03-10, 00:34:

dionb wrote on 2021-03-10, 00:13:

That could make a BIG difference if it's throttling. Another possibility (but far less impacting) is no chipset drivers installed. That would result in no DMA for HDD transfers, which give a very bad performance hit in anything loading.

I did enable DMA for each hard drive but whether or not it actually did activate or the box just ticked is uncertain. I'll try hunt down some chipset drivers but I don't think I had much luck last time I tried. Any particular driver I should be looking for? I'm getting varied results.

Edit: All I could find was an IDE Driver and a "HFDrive" driver do you think either of those will help?

You don't say exactly which board and chipset you have (961 is the southbridge, used by multiple northbridge chipsets), but this should be the IDE driver in any event, needed for proper DMA:
https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/misc/ide/siside204a.ZIP

You may also need a USB patch:
https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/misc/usb20/patch_98me.zip

Potentially there's also LAN, audio and AGP (your board doesn't have an AGP slot but probably does have integrated VGA on an internal AGP interface), but that depends on the exact board and full chipset.