First post, by DrLucienSanchez
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi guys, this is a work in progress, but I've more or less completed the Windows 98 part of my project.
Just some context, I have a few builds, FX5900, Ti4200, MX440 with Pentium II, III and IV, the Pentium II, too slow, the Pentium III I have, too slow, and the Pentium IV, doesn't really interest me, especially with power consumption and heat, same for the FX as well. I did have a Voodoo 3 AGP, but sold it recently, as just not my thing to be honest, I like 32bit colour, not fussed about Glide.
I wanted something cool, and reasonably powerful, goal is to cover some limited DOS games that I like, the whole Windows 98 thing, EAX, but able to max and get playable frames for everything up to around UT2003.
Celeron 440 2.00Ghz (Conroe-L) 35w TDP and, I think around 3.4Ghz Pentium 4 speed, or a bit better, plenty of room for overclocking, but it's not needed.
Gigabyte G31M-ES2L - there are no Windows 98 drivers, it's a ICH7 chipset, I have manually applied the chipset drivers via device manager. SATA does work when patched, but is flaky at best, the BIOS options are there for a mix of IDE and SATA but it's not stable and I get very bad performance, so I have stuck with IDE via converter.
WD Blue 320GB SATA, using the IDE converter, partitioned to 120GB FAT 32, the other NTFS, which i will later be installing XP to.
512MB DDR2 800Mhz RAM currently, one stick, so in single channel mode. I can get this board on 98 to recognise 2GB in one slot with the RLOEW patch, if I populate the other channel with another 2GB stick though, I get a protection error on boot. I'll update this to 2GB once I get XP installed though.
Audigy 2 ZS sound card, VXD drivers, courtesy of this wonderful website, with very helpful instructions. I have SB16 emulation and General MIDI with the SC-55 soundfont.
600W Seasonic PSU
Finally, this rig, as of yesterday had a PCI MX440 64bit, not bad to be honest, brilliant 800x600 card, any higher resolution, it chokes, UT 99 maxed out with 16 bots, low of 56FPS, max of 85, which is the refresh rate. DOS performance, for some reason was pretty slow, Doom DOS timedemo ran at 23fps, Screamer Rally at 65K and high res ran somewhat of a slide slow, same for Quake and Duke3d at 800x600, probably on par with my 400Mhz PII, however this has now changed.
I now have a new old stock X600 Pro 256MB PCIE card running with 6.2 cat drivers successfully. Repasted, but I may look into a better cooling solution down the line, only £15. I was expecting a lot of issues, which didn't actually occur, no black screens, issues with shut down, or any serious anomalies. Probably a little but better, maybe 10% than my Pentium 4 2.53Ghz with Ti4200 in terms of performance. Doom DOS timedemo goes to 120fps, Screamer and DOS performance at high res is now smooth. I can max out UT 2003, 16 bots, on average lows of 20 to 60fps, which if fine for me, any more performance I would just use my Ivybridge XP system.
So it works fine, at least for me, Duke3D, Screamer, Quake and Doom 1&2 are perfect, I can't comment on others as these are my primary DOS only games.
Max Payne 1 and 2, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, all fine, UT 99 and 2003 perfect and I get a steady 60fps on Unreal Gold flyby, I game at 1024x768.
Bugs for me though which I have noticed, which does not occur on my FX5900 -
Latest nGlide works fine, on part with the 5900 on my Pentium 4 system, but with this setup, Descent 3 in Glide shows small black artefacts, and a sort of SLI looking tearing - this issues goes away if using OpenGL or Direct3d, I will test with Undying later, but I'm fine using OpenGL or D3D, just an observation.
The biggest bug though is the refresh rate, I can not get it more than 60Hz, it worked fine with the MX440 at 85 to 140Hhz, but his, I set in display properties to 85, it changes on display properties to that number, but not actually on the monitor, stays at 60, and Hztool can't override this either, annoying, but not the end of the world, but probably a driver issue, I'll test it with XP once installed, but if anyone knows of a fix, then please let me know!!
I've attached some images, if you've seen Doom and Dukle3d you've seen them all, but if you want me to screenshot anything else, just let me know 😀 but this was really just a proof of concept to show that PCIE can work very well, and this is a build that satisfies me more than my period correct systems.
BTW, case was a new old stock "Acme" case I got from fleabay, I can't fit a CD/DVD drive as the PSU takes up most if the speace at the top, but I run everything off Daemon Tools - redbook audio also works fone for me, when tested with QuaKe II.
