Had some testing on this machine. Radeon-9600 is the most issue-free of the fastest cards, that I currently have.
So it is running that card right now. The FX-5200 that I have, are just on the virge of giving it's last breath.
It had so many issues, and I tested it with all the 40's drivers that I have and up to 56-something.

For the mouse part. Yes. It can be a bit buggy, just not in all games. Quake2 had mouse issues, UT99 and NFS-2K
had no issues whatsoever. I first saw it in Quake2, and swapping to USB solved that problem.
So yeah... Not all games have that, and no issues in Win98 it self.

Speaking of Quake2 and benchmarks. I could get some 74fps in 800x600 with the 9600 card.
If I get a 9800-Pro, I think that it can do better. Perhaps, perhaps not.
Been testing the whole evening. So no pictures or anything yet. Got the machine "Cased" though. 😜

74 fps? A TNT2 does 50 fps at 1024 x 768 32 bit. A 9600 should absolutely smash Quake II.

Hi brostenen

I think I have your exact motherboard (or a board very similar to yours).

I was building a new rig years ago (finally upgrading from my P3 Katmai so I really couldn't delay it anymore) and had already bought a cheap Athlon64 3500+ s939, but ordered a s754 board by accident instead. In the end I decided to just buy the correct board and get a cheap Athlon64 3200+ s754 for the board I had bought by accident and build a spare rig out of it.

I was lucky with both boards, the VIA chipset had a bug which caused them to not be able to recognize SATA2 drives (it was a hardware issue iirc), but both my MSI boards had the newer VIA VT8237R plus (the "plus" basically means it fixes the SATA2 bug) and as the s939 ended up as my main rig for 3 years, it ran a Samsung Spinpoint 400GB and later I added a 1TB drive without any issues and even after this rig was superseded by my Phenom II I kept it as my backup rig.

The s754 board ended up as my first main LAN rig.

Both systems had XP and my main rig (the s939 system) started out with a Geforce 7600GS (bought the card new at the time, it was sold as passively cooled, but it still overheated despite the 12cm case exit fan so I mounted a fan onto the large cooler and that fixed the overheating issues). The card ran fine

Later I downgraded to a Radeon 9600 made by Sapphire (the red version with 256MB RAM) which ran pretty much trouble free also. I downgraded as I needed the faster GF7600GS in another system and as this rig wasn't my fastest anymore, it didn't need a fast card anymore as it was only used for storing and managing data and for Virtual PC (and the Radeon 9600 ran a lot cooler too).

I had 2 x 1GB DDR-400 in both rigs, as I mentioned already the s754 board ran pretty much trouble free (that one either had another GF7600GS or a GF6800).

But you could have a look at the southbridge and see if the VIA chip has the word PLUS in it. If so, your options for mounting SATA drives will increase significantly.

edit: Both the s754 and s939 boards had basically the same VIA chipset, inclusing the same southbridge, which is why I mentioned the s939 board and the graphics cards I used in them 😀

philscomputerlab wrote:

I found that the mouse was not as smooth when playing FPS games with PS/2.

May ps2rate would help with setting ~200 Hz.

Tertz wrote:

philscomputerlab wrote:

I found that the mouse was not as smooth when playing FPS games with PS/2.

May ps2rate would help with setting ~200 Hz.

Thank you!

Hi tetrium...
Yeah. It has some plusses this board. It feels like a good solid one.
Nothing much to say about it. Just have to figure low fps out.

Phil...
I am running Win98se on it. Any suggestion on wich version of drivers to use?
And in such installation order?

Chipset / AGP driver, USB driver, IDE driver, graphics driver. That's the order I do it in.

74FPS could be attributed to V-Sync and your monitor running at 75Hz.

F2bnp wrote:

74FPS could be attributed to V-Sync and your monitor running at 75Hz.

🤣 Of course. Noob mistake 😊

Basically speaking. Vsync Off then?
Did a complete reinstall of the system, as all that nVidia driver testing somehow screwed up the operating system.
No loss at all. Just some more work. 🤣

Forgot some pictures of this build....

For the case, I have chosen a typical 00's Codegen cheap-ass case.
Nothing fancy. Just one I could not find any use for, as pre-00's computers need another kind of case, if you ask me.

The complete build is more or less just thrown in the case. I just did a low-quality job here.

And the newest 3D-Mark99 score. Need to fiddle around with the 3D-Settings a bit more.

Nice!

Yes for benchmarking always disable V-sync. The ATI drivers are great for this, perfect V-sync control in the drivers.

754's very high end for 98SE. 😀

I have one of that mobo too. Just wish I've found a Athlon 64 lying around somewhere to couple with it (currently it's equipped with a Sempron). Nice rig!

I was puzzled when I saw FX5200 outperforming 9600, but it turns out, you're using 9600SE, which is two times slower then the "true" 9600XT and three times slower than 9800Pro (at least in Q3)

RacoonRider wrote:

I was puzzled when I saw FX5200 outperforming 9600, but it turns out, you're using 9600SE, which is two times slower then the "true" 9600XT and three times slower than 9800Pro (at least in Q3)

Ahhh... That's explaining everything.
As I suspected... The card and all that in the first place. That low score compared to the CPU mark.
Well... Yeah. Have to get that 9800 or a true 9600, as I previously thought of.

Think I found a Radeon 9800 XXL or was it XLL (really have no clue) It is one of those Medion cards.
The price is cheap, 3,75 Dollars, so it is not really a loss if Medion is a shit-card.

Does anyone know anything about Medion Radeon 9800 cards?

I've got a XXL. Works fine, not sure what else there is no know 😁

philscomputerlab wrote:

I've got a XXL. Works fine, not sure what else there is no know 😁

Benchmarks? If you got any. 😀

Wouldn't mean much as it depends a lot on the processor. The XXL is somewhere between the 9800 and 9800 Pro I believe. At least it's not a gimped LE, SE version 😀