You said "best". Either GF6800something. or Radeon X800something. Gonuts

leileilol wrote:

You said "best". Either GF6800something. or Radeon X800something. Gonuts

Like this one?

That's a 6800 XT. You can see the differences between the 6800 variants here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_6_serie … 0_chipset_table

The 6800 Ultra is the fastest. However, I prefer the 6800 GT cards for a few reasons:

- It has both VGA and DVI ports
Ultra models have two DVI ports

- Runs cooler

- Uses only one PCI slot
Ultra takes up two PCI slots due to its larger heatsink

- Uses only one extra power connector
Ultra requires two molex power connectors

The 6800 GT and Ultra cards are the fastest you can get for Win9x, but I don't think they're the best choice. The GeForce 4 Ti4x00 series cards are the best choice for their greater overall compatibility. Use driver v45.23 and you won't go wrong.

KT7AGuy wrote:

The 6800 GT and Ultra cards are the fastest you can get for Win9x, but I don't think they're the best choice. The GeForce 4 Ti4x00 series cards are the best choice for their greater overall compatibility. Use driver v45.23 and you won't go wrong.

^ This. If you're building a win98 machine for 1996 to 2002 games I'd stick with a Geforce 4 Titanium. Believe it or not it's fast enough for 1920x1080 gaming (tested with Homeworld, Dungeon Keeper II and Black & White) and unlike the 6xxx series it has no compatibility issues with old dx5 / dx6 games or old AGP 2x mainboards. The FX5900XT would be something in between the GF4Ti and the GF 6xxx compatibility-wise BUT in DX8 and lower it's only marginally faster then a 4600Ti, harder to find, and really not worth the bother unless you want to do DX9 gaming - for witch I don't recommend win98.

kanecvr wrote:

KT7AGuy wrote:

The 6800 GT and Ultra cards are the fastest you can get for Win9x, but I don't think they're the best choice. The GeForce 4 Ti4x00 series cards are the best choice for their greater overall compatibility. Use driver v45.23 and you won't go wrong.

^ This. If you're building a win98 machine for 1996 to 2002 games I'd stick with a Geforce 4 Titanium. Believe it or not it's fast enough for 1920x1080 gaming (tested with Homeworld, Dungeon Keeper II and Black & White) and unlike the 6xxx series it has no compatibility issues with old dx5 / dx6 games or old AGP 2x mainboards. The FX5900XT would be something in between the GF4Ti and the GF 6xxx compatibility-wise BUT in DX8 and lower it's only marginally faster then a 4600Ti, harder to find, and really not worth the bother unless you want to do DX9 gaming - for witch I don't recommend win98.

The motherboard is agp8x 1.5v.
In my country i did not find any GF 4 TI, neither FX5900XT, neither 6800 GT, neither radeon.
However i found some Radeon 9600 Pro, GeForce FX 5500, GeForce 7950 GT, Ge Force 6800 XT
I have plans to run Unreal tournament, quake 3 arena, lego racers, star wars racer, sim city 3000, diablo 1
The rig itself is one Pentium 4 3.0 , ASUS P4P800-VM, 256 MB DDR 400.

Is that 7950GT the AGP version? If so, it generally won't work in Win98. However, user tincup was able to use some hacked drivers to get his working in Win98. You should contact him for tips on how to make it work.

Your 6800XT is the best choice for performance. If you experience any compatibility problems, you could try using the FX5500 instead. The earliest driver available for both of those cards is v61.76.

The Radeon 9600 Pro isn't a bad card. In fact, it runs extremely cool and uses very little power considering the performance it delivers. Unfortunately, it lacks fog table emulation and doesn't support 8-bit paletted textures. If it weren't for those two drawbacks, it would be one of my favorite cards. Well, and the Catalyst drivers suck too, but that's another story.

FYI:
The 6800XT also lacks support for 8-bit paletted textures.

The 9600 pro will work great. It's a marginally slower then a 5900xt but that doesn't matter for what you're playing. I recommend catalyst 4.2 - maybe even 4.0 + directX 8.1. Try to avoid installing dx9 on win98 - it seems to break compatibility with some older dx5 and dx6 games.

Radeon cards are underrated on this forum but the 8500le, 8500, 9000, 9100, 9500 non pro, 9700, 9600 and 9800 are all great cards to have. On the newer cards front, the X800XT (XL/PRO/GTO work as well) AGP has batter backwards compatibility then the 6800 so older games run w/o issues. It's also a marginally faster then the 6800.

The 6800 is too fast for what you want to play and can be buggy in dx6 and older games. The 7950 does not have win98 drivers (and is that even AGP? I think it only comes in PCI-E flavours sans the 7800 witch has an AGP version but it's pretty rare).

The games you plan to play are dx6/7 and openGL titles. Frankly a P3 + geforce 3 or radeon 8500 should run everything quite nicely. If the P4 has HT disable it in BIOS. It's worthless in 98 anyway since it does not support multi-cpu or multi-threading.

6800XT tend to be the AGP PCIe bridged variety. Might be troublesome for that reason.

Yah, believe it or not, there was an AGP version of the 7950GT. They're somewhat rare. They're also known to suffer failure due to overheating, which is probably why they're rare. 🤣

Ok i will grab the 9600 pro.
Thank you all for the advice.

KT7AGuy wrote:

Yah, believe it or not, there was an AGP version of the 7950GT. They're somewhat rare. They're also known to suffer failure due to overheating, which is probably why they're rare. 🤣

That's actually really cool - now I want one - even if I'm probably never going to use it (I prefer the X1950pro). I didn't know they had heat issues. I've been using a pair of these XFX 7950 512MB cards for a while now, and I noticed they get hot, but they are passively cooled. Simply slapping a 120mm fan on top of the pair makes them run at 56-57 celsius witch is not bad. Guess the AGP version had a shittier cooler.

.legaCy wrote:

Ok i will grab the 9600 pro.
Thank you all for the advice.

glad to be of assistance.

kanecvr wrote:

Guess the AGP version had a shittier cooler.

The 7950GT and 7900GS AGP cards used coolers similar to the 6800 and 6800GT. I had one of the 7900GS AGP cards for a few years and can confirm that they run extremely hot. Worse still, due to the goofy position of the HSI bridge chip, there is no bolt-on aftermarket cooler available for either of those cards. If you want to improve cooling you'll need to get creative with some thermal epoxy.