ncmark wrote:

With regards to radeon 9600, I am not really building this to be a gaming box. My primary concern is to be able to run Canon Digital Photo Studio and to be able to use external drives ..... neither of which I can do with my current win 98 boxes.

What sort of external drives can you not use with your Windows 98 boxes? Are you talking about eSATA? Beacause there are definitely drivers for external USB drives. Granted, if they're particularly large, you'll either need an NTFS driver (such as http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-win98/ ), or you'll need to re-format them to FAT32.

I'm not sure what's so great about Canon Digital Photo Studio, but I would have thought there'd be something with equivalent functionality in some other package. Perhaps it works with KernelEx?

There seem to be some auctions on US ebay right now where some lower end cards are being sold as 7800 GTXs 🤣 not sure what that even is, but a 7800 GTX with DDR2 and without 6-pin connector would be rather hilarious 😀

Radeons, well; in general they don't seem to hold their value as well as Geforces, I see plently of X1950 Pros for reasonable prices. Though I just had one of these fail on me, and it was a nice one with an Accelero X2...

What I don't like about Radeons though is that ATi didn't bother including an option to alter settings on a per-game basis, which I always found very annoying. They had some profile thing going on but it was too cumbersome for my taste. I'm not quite sure if this is fixed nowadays since I don't use any of the newer Radeons.

I've run both Radeon and GeForce, and still do across various rigs, and really don't think one is all that much superior to the other. There does seem to be more vocal support for the GeForce, but honestly I've always been happy with the Radeon as well; 9700 Pro, HD 5770 & HD 7870 were and are great cards. Backward compatibility was more of an issues with a 7800GT I had if anything - new drivers were always breaking older games, though that may have been an issue particular to the 7800. Either way I wouldn't make a choice based solely on manufacturer.

Jorpho wrote:

ncmark wrote:

With regards to radeon 9600, I am not really building this to be a gaming box. My primary concern is to be able to run Canon Digital Photo Studio and to be able to use external drives ..... neither of which I can do with my current win 98 boxes.

What sort of external drives can you not use with your Windows 98 boxes? Are you talking about eSATA? Beacause there are definitely drivers for external USB drives. Granted, if they're particularly large, you'll either need an NTFS driver (such as http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-win98/ ), or you'll need to re-format them to FAT32.

I'm not sure what's so great about Canon Digital Photo Studio, but I would have thought there'd be something with equivalent functionality in some other package. Perhaps it works with KernelEx?

well.... I once tried a generic USB driver - made my system unstable. I didn't even know there *was* a NTFS driver for win98. As far as kernel ex, I am sure someone will jump on me for saying this but that always seemed like a "hack" at best.... I figured it would be easier/better just to set up XP

I have USB 2.0 running on my W98se rigs and use an external USB drive for data transfer. Don't have the notes in front of me, but I think I patched via the Unofficial SP v201a [IE6 core upgrade], then the nUSB3 patch. It's offline but needs IE6 to manage the USB upgrades.

I got some cheap 7 series cards recently. They all went for minimum bid. I have two 7800GT cards (one with 512 MB), one 7800GTX and a 7600GT. Anything newer and the price quickly goes up.

d1stortion wrote:

There seem to be some auctions on US ebay right now where some lower end cards are being sold as 7800 GTXs 🤣 not sure what that even is, but a 7800 GTX with DDR2 and without 6-pin connector would be rather hilarious 😀

🤣 Got a link so we can join you in pointing and laughing?

What I don't like about Radeons though is that ATi didn't bother including an option to alter settings on a per-game basis, which I always found very annoying. They had some profile thing going on but it was too cumbersome for my taste. I'm not quite sure if this is fixed nowadays since I don't use any of the newer Radeons.

ATi stated sometime around 2009 that they explicitly avoid this feature in their drivers for various reasons. I'm not sure if the very newest cards support it via drivers, but that would be somewhat irrelevant for an X800 or X1800 due to their legacy support model. 😵

Personally it isn't a feature I've ever used over the years (I've owned and used many an nVidia card that provides this capability through drivers), so it's not something I keep track of. I can take a look (if I remember) at my Radeon's drivers (it uses Catalyst Legacy) the next time I have a chance and tell you what I find if you're interested. I do not think it supports per-application settings though (but again, it isn't something I've ever really wanted as a feature *shrug*).

What do you guys think about this case?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16811163202

Okay, I know it is overkill - but it is one of the few I have seen that is big enough that I actually like

ncmark wrote:

What do you guys think about this case?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16811163202

Okay, I know it is overkill - but it is one of the few I have seen that is big enough that I actually like

I really like SilverStone and the FT-02 is one of the newer/nicer looking designs. Note that it is kind of an odd layout on the inside - they go into detail on their site: http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=242&area=en

Also note that as with all higher-end SS cases, you can get a windowed or non-windowed version, in silver or black. 😀

If you want a big conventional tower, look at their TJ series of cases or the competitor models from Lian-Li.

obobskivich wrote:

🤣 Got a link so we can join you in pointing and laughing?

Here you go: http://www.ebay.com/itm/261424748836

ATi stated sometime around 2009 that they explicitly avoid this feature in their drivers for various reasons. I'm not sure if the very newest cards support it via drivers, but that would be somewhat irrelevant for an X800 or X1800 due to their legacy support model. 😵

That is interesting, haven't heard about that. Yeah they have a track record of cutting off support for old cards quickly. Though with Nvidia cards I'm not sure if it makes sense using the newest drivers for some old cards...

Personally it isn't a feature I've ever used over the years (I've owned and used many an nVidia card that provides this capability through drivers), so it's not something I keep track of. I can take a look (if I remember) at my Radeon's drivers (it uses Catalyst Legacy) the next time I have a chance and tell you what I find if you're interested. I do not think it supports per-application settings though (but again, it isn't something I've ever really wanted as a feature *shrug*).

I find this feature useful because I like to crank up AA/AF for older titles. I don't really buy new high end cards so for the rare instances of playing a new game I usually turn it off there. Of course it's not a big deal doing that change manually, I just find the Nvidia approach more convienent 😀

It appears that with Catalyst 12.1 they incorporated the profile thing into the driver settings themselves, which was about time. But yeah too bad the old cards won't see any of this. The old version of it was something with shortcuts and I found that way too clunky for my liking.

d1stortion wrote:

Here you go: http://www.ebay.com/itm/261424748836

BWAHAHAHA! 🤣

Looks like a GT 630 or something...what a joke!

On the profiles thing: That usage makes sense to me; just isn't something I ever see myself using. *shrug* I'm guessing your primary usage is for games that don't let you make those settings from their own configurators?

Yeah why the heck would he list it as a 7800? Or it might be just a wrong picture, but who cares...

About the profiles: correct. Nowadays those settings are nearly ubiquitous ingame, but historically they weren't. Conversely, there is the odd case (e.g. some UE3 games) where forcing MSAA in the driver is pointless, so a different configuration is needed there.

Thanks for the suggestions and opinions here.

This all leaves me a little dubious, but since I already have he board and now the processor - I may as well go ahead and try it. If I am terribly disappointed with the performance I can always build a core2 system instead 😉

You shouldn't be disappointed with performance, especially if you stick to real XP era games, especially ones that won't even run on W7/8 - run *those* on your main rig. And XPs backward compatibility will let you have at pesky W9x games that get flaky on post XP rigs.

Well if anyone is interested the system is up and running with win98 - my copy of XP is not here yet. I thought long and hard and I really could not justify spending the money on that silverstone case for what is an older system. So I did some system shuffling - eliminated an old p3/450 that was not being used at this point, moved a p3/1000 into that case (an Antec Nsk4482) and out the Asus AVV600 in the old Enlight 7250. I would rather have had the newer board in the newer case, but A7v600 is NOT going to fit in that Antec case. I love everything about that case - except it needs to be about 2-3 inches deeper. The A7V600 and 7250 are a good match - I already have two similar setups. Man I wish they still made those old Enlight cases.

Nice!

Well if anyone is interested.... I got my copy of XP and it is up abd running!!!!!!!!!

This was my first experience with XP. I did have some trouble - it did not want to boot from the XP CD, nor did it want to install from my win98 boot disk. I had to install it from win98 itself.

Actually I am very pleased with the performance - it is running very well - on "only" 512 MB of RAM. I do plan to increase the RAM.

Now that I think about it most of this stuff is from about the same era - 2002-2003 - Athlon XP, 40-gigbyte drives, the Enlight case, - even XP itself