512MB VRAM works fine for Windows 98SE. At l;east it works with an NVIDIA 7900GTX.

Are you installing 98 first edition or 98 Second Edition?

However, you are not going to find drivers for that 8800 GT as it not G80 based.

There are modded drivers that supposedly support G80, but the 8800 Ultra doesn't work... gives a similar BSOD after installing the drivers.

512MB system RAM should be fine but anything over that and you may need to use a patch.

It really sounds like something else is going on with your system.

I would try installing XP and see if it works. Could be (highly likely) that your PSU is going bad. Those old Antec units had a bad habit of the capacitors going bad.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-04-21, 04:48:

512MB VRAM works fine for Windows 98SE. At l;east it works with an NVIDIA 7900GTX. […]
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512MB VRAM works fine for Windows 98SE. At l;east it works with an NVIDIA 7900GTX.

Are you installing 98 first edition or 98 Second Edition?

However, you are not going to find drivers for that 8800 GT as it not G80 based.

There are modded drivers that supposedly support G80, but the 8800 Ultra doesn't work... gives a similar BSOD after installing the drivers.

512MB system RAM should be fine but anything over that and you may need to use a patch.

It really sounds like something else is going on with your system.

I would try installing XP and see if it works. Could be (highly likely) that your PSU is going bad. Those old Antec units had a bad habit of the capacitors going bad.

It's not 98 SE. I did try installing that but, as Windows 98 was already on it, it refused, so I reinstalled regular 98. I haven't tried 98 SE again though.

XP is what I was using on it before. I don't have an XP disc so will have to make one (edit: um, is there a reliable place to get one I can burn on disc from?), but keep in mind it didn't bother about the 2000 disc.

Can a PSU go bad if it's unused for 5 years?

nforce 650 chipset isn't a good choice for a WIn9x system. It's going to be a battle to get it to work let alone well.
https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=107895.0
Then as already mentioned Graphics card isn't supported either.

Unsupported hardware doesn't mean it wont work, but you do have to either have the skill or desire to hack drivers, do work arounds and make compromises to get it up and running. Not something I'd recommend as a first project.

You should be able to get Windows 2000 working on that motherboard though. Video card will still be a pain though
If you have your CD drive set correctly in the boot order and a bootable CD it should always boot from CD. CoOmputers aren't smart enough to know if your 1/2 way though a install or whatever.
I'd hazard a guess and say you don't have a bootable Win2k CD.
You can download Windows 2000 boot disks off the internet easy enough though

chinny22 wrote on 2020-04-21, 09:15:

nforce 650 chipset isn't a good choice for a WIn9x system. It's going to be a battle to get it to work let alone well. https://f […]
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nforce 650 chipset isn't a good choice for a WIn9x system. It's going to be a battle to get it to work let alone well.
https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=107895.0
Then as already mentioned Graphics card isn't supported either.

Unsupported hardware doesn't mean it wont work, but you do have to either have the skill or desire to hack drivers, do work arounds and make compromises to get it up and running. Not something I'd recommend as a first project.

You should be able to get Windows 2000 working on that motherboard though. Video card will still be a pain though
If you have your CD drive set correctly in the boot order and a bootable CD it should always boot from CD. CoOmputers aren't smart enough to know if your 1/2 way though a install or whatever.
I'd hazard a guess and say you don't have a bootable Win2k CD.
You can download Windows 2000 boot disks off the internet easy enough though

Bummer.

Windows 2000 won't work for the game I'm trying to play anyway. But it is a Windows 2000 CD, I've used it before too, I think on this very computer. Windows 98 booted from CD fine and I've even specifically selected the disc drive to boot from with the 2K disk in, it just doesn't see it now.

Update: I was able to 'complete' the installation by changing an advanced startup option about drive compatibility in msconfig. (thanks to that thread link above!)

It meant the CD Drive didn't work, but I was able to skip every file the installation wanted from my disc (they weren't important, just to do with the fancy features no one used like TV or whatever). So now I can get to desktop, but it still freezes whenever anything mildly strenuous happens, like opening the file explorer for example.

So it seems a lost cause. It was an overkill PC anyway, so I should probably just try and find an XP ISO or something and keep it as it is. Unfortunately I can't install Windows 2000 at all as for some reason it won't boot from the disc, and the freezing desktop means I can't do it there. Hopefully it'll read an XP disc...

Yeh XP is what that motherboard wants.
I went out and got a P5N-D specifically to make a SLI WinXP build and it's overkill in that role as well 😀

Update: I was able to trick the PC into installing Windows 2000.

I started with the Windows 98 disc in and formatted the hard drive anyway with the command prompt. Then I took out the disc and put in the 2000 disc, and ran WINNT.exe in command prompt. It all went fine.

Now I just need to somehow find some XP ISO or something, they seem to not exist or are on dodgy websites.