I don't personally overclock, but I just discovered that MSI Afterburner 2.0.0 works with Windows 2000. I think I might use it to underclock the GTX 480 I just purchased from eBay to control temperatures.
I can now confirm that the Nvidia 400-series GPUs function with Vanilla Windows 2000. I just received my second GTX 480, and this one works.
I haven't done extensive testing yet because I used a damaged motherboard for the initial boot, but the drivers installed properly with the exception of the Control Panel application. Otherwise, OpenGL and Direct3D run as expected.
I'm going to thoroughly clean the card this week and re-paste the cooler. I'll then re-test with a series of benchmarks to compare against my GTX 285. This is still good news for folks looking for other compatible cards. So far, so good.
One last update. I did some benchmarking to compare my GTX 285 against my (new to me) GTX 480. I got some interesting results:
System:
Intel Xeon E3-1275v2 (3.5 GHz, 4 Cores, 4 Threads-HT Disabled)
Asus P8B75-V Motherboard (Intel B75 Chipset)
8GB DDR3-1600 (XMP Mode, 3.6GB Addressable)
Creative Audigy 2ZS (Dell OEM Version)
Reatek RTL8139 Network Card
Windows 2000 Advanced Server SP4
DirectX 9.0c
BFG GeForce GTX 285 Benchmark Results:
Final Reality:
41.43 Reality Marks
3DMark99:
57,233 3DMarks
117,879 CPU 3DMarks
3DMark01:
75,074 3DMarks
3DMark03:
62,379 3DMarks
3DMark05:
28,243 3DMarks
Return to Castle Wolfenstein (1280x1024, Max Details):
3-run Average: 452.40 FPS
Crysis (1080p, All High, AA Off):
3-run Average: 55.39 FPS
EVGA GeForce GTX 480+ Benchmark Results:
Final Reality:
38.68 Reality Marks
3DMark99:
57,416 3DMarks
119,846 CPU 3DMarks
3DMark01:
75,876 3DMarks
3DMark03:
90,281 3DMarks
3DMark05:
30,861 3DMarks
RTCW (1280x1024, Max Details):
3-run Average: 440.63 FPS
Crysis (1080p, All High, AA Off):
3-run Average: 69.36 FPS
Final Reality, 3DMark99, 3DMark01, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein show that I've reached the point of diminishing returns. I think both cards are CPU bound in those benchmarks. The DirectX 9 benchmarks, on the other hand, show that the GTX 480 gets between a good to great performance improvement over the GTX 285. Shoot, I got just over 58 FPS in Crysis with 1080p/High/4x AA settings using the GTX 480.
I'm not sure that a GTX 480 is worth it if you already have a GTX 280 or 285 card and only plan to run DX 8 or earlier titles. DX 9 does seem to benefit from the extra performance at the cost of a bit more power and a whole lot of noise.
TheFighterJetDude wrote on 2024-09-12, 02:17:I installed a GTX 460 on vanilla 2000, with the 258.96 xp geforce driver. Everything works except for the hd audio driver. Even the dualview works and the control panel works. Said system has an i3 9100f, and the only reason I had to install the extended kernel was because of the lack of good web browsers for 2000. Although at some point when I can afford it and someone *finally* ports a firefox based browser to vanilla 2000, I would love to build a vanilla 2000 rig as well, maybe with a 4790k and 2 480s in SLI (I am assuming if the xp driver supports 2 way sli it probably would also work in 2000). Maybe when I make this build I could use it for video editing, and maybe play some Doom 3 on it 😉
Hi, I'm trying to launch the Nvidia Control panel on stock Windows 2000 SP4 with .Net Framework 2.0 installed but it's complaining about gdiplus.dll missing. So I copied it over to where the control panel exe is and then it complained about a missing WTS function or something. Is there something I'm missing to get the control panel working? Perhaps some Windows Updates post-SP4?
Driver installed was 258.96.
I'm trying to force AA on with my 7600 GS but the systray utility icon does nothing when I select Antialiasing settings.
Edit: I fixed the WTS issue with an XP wrapper for the wtsapi32.dll but it wants MSVCR71.dll which is from the 2010 version of Visual C++ Redistributable which doesn't install on 2000... How did you make this work!?
