first off, some really useful info for people running dual AGP / PCIe GPUs on these boards. I've found a monitor that will take both inputs simultaneously. It doesn't even switch between them, it's utterly seamless. You just plug 1 card in via DVI, the other via VGA. These are both classed as the same input on this monitor. There is actually another DVI input too if you want to use that, but you will have to switch inputs to view it. The end result is a multi boot system, that requires zero changes or button pressing to switch between AGP and PCI-E. You even get the AGP POST, followed instantly by the PCI-E OS boot screen. No OSD or other annoyances. It's also a 19" 1280x1024, so it's perfect for old games. And the colour rendering and contrast are amazing compared to other 4:3 monitors I've tried. and it's BEIGE!!!
The monitor is an NEC MultiSync 1880 -> https://www.zdnet.com/product/nec-multisync-lcd/
You're welcome 😁
OK, now for some problems.....
I have a 775dual-VSTA and a 4coredual-sata2. I wanted to boot every version of Windows, and for the most part, I got it working. When I first go the boards I did some tests with various OSes, GPUs and HDDs and here's what I ended up with:
AGP - nVidia TNT2 M64 - Works with Win3.1 😉
PCI-E - nVidia 9600 GSO - (I just happened to have the card and a lot of the other GPUs I tried put the blower on 100% unless initiated by the OS, this one is silent)
IDE HDD
SATA HDD
SATA SSD
Now I tried both GPUs together, in various versions of windows and they behaved exactly how I wanted. With the one exception being Win7, which will not let me use the PCI-E card, even if I disable the VGA card. The only way is to change BIOS to default to PCI-E. Interestingly though I don't have this problem in Win2K, or XP (or 8 and 10 for that matter). The point is I have had Win98 working on this system. Several times in fact.
I also discovered that I could get Win9x working on the SATA HDD with the VSTA board (BIOS emulating IDE), but not the SATA2 board. It wouldn't boot. It will work on the SATA2 board from an IDE HDD (sort of)
But here's where everything falls apart 🙁 So after going round in a few circles installing different OSes, I got everything working apart from Win95/98/ME. All do the same, so to make everything a lot simpler, let's just go back to basics. Here's my current setup...
vsta and sata2 board both do the same thing, I've got them set up side by side.
Just 1 IDE HDD connected
Just TNT2 AGP connected
512MB RAM
Latest OEM BIOS flashed
Tried 3 different versions of the Via drivers
Just using Win98SE
Disabled everything I can in BIOS. No sound, no lan, no usb, no serial, no parallel
After installing windows then drivers, I get 2 issues in device manager. A resource conflict with ACPI device, and two PCI bus devices. One of which says "Windows could not load the driver because the computer is reporting 2 bus types." It also won't detect the GPU properly and when you manually install the drivers, the system won't boot unless you put it in 640x480x16colour.
What I don't understand is that I've had this system running Win98, with both GPUs in place, all mobo features enabled, sound, graphics, SATA hdds all working fine. I don't know what I'm nissing here, it's driving me insane, please help!!!