SiliconClassics wrote:

Have you considered reconditioning that fan? Here are a couple of brief articles that make it sound rather simple to refurbish a […]
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PowerPie5000 wrote:

I have a Matrox G400 Max (with a dodgy fan that i can't find a replacement for)...

Have you considered reconditioning that fan? Here are a couple of brief articles that make it sound rather simple to refurbish a noisy cooling fan with a bit of oil and perhaps some graphite powder:

Oil bearings for fun & profit

Repair your noisy CPU and system fans

Considering how much retro hardware relies on fans that are becoming increasingly hard to find, might it make sense to add fan repair to a list of skills that includes capacitor replacement and retrobrighting?

I might give it a go... Thanks for the tip 😀. The Voodoo5 i'll be receiving soon uses the same fans, so i expect they'll be a bit iffy by now too!

I've just ordered a Geforce 2 off ebay for a few quid, but i'm not sure if it's a GTS or Ultra (it's 64MB). The model/part number is 'NV886.0 REV A' and there was another listed as 'NV886.0 REV C' ... I wonder what the difference is between A and C revisions? They looked identical except the one i picked was cleaner looking 😁 .

EDIT: Will the nVidia reference geforce 2 cards have better image quality than 3rd party cards from Hercules or Asus etc...??

PowerPie5000 wrote:

EDIT: Will the nVidia reference geforce 2 cards have better image quality than 3rd party cards from Hercules or Asus etc...??

Tough question. Usually, the Asus models had great image quality, as well as some higher class MSI ones. I know for fact that innovision and eagle were pure garbage and I do think that they did use reference design. But I could be wrong 😒

elfuego wrote:

PowerPie5000 wrote:

EDIT: Will the nVidia reference geforce 2 cards have better image quality than 3rd party cards from Hercules or Asus etc...??

Tough question. Usually, the Asus models had great image quality, as well as some higher class MSI ones. I know for fact that innovision and eagle were pure garbage and I do think that they did use reference design. But I could be wrong 😒

I have an Inno3D Tornado (Innovision) GF2 MX laying around and can confirm the 2D image quality is crap (not too bad in 3D though). I thought the reference designs were better quality? Just like the old ATI Radeon reference boards are usually better than the 3rd party boards.

I'll wait and see what the other GF2 (GTS or Ultra) is like when it comes through the post.... Looks like a reference/OEM design, but also looks like it could be a Visiontek/Elsa GF2 Ultra (Visiontek manufactured GF2 cards for Elsa, and they are supposed to be good).

Nooooooo!!! I just got my GF2 through the post and one of the ramsinks and a capacitor has come off!! I blame the postman for cramming it through my letterbox along with other stuff!

Now i have to wait for a reply from the seller.

PowerPie5000 wrote:

Nooooooo!!! I just got my GF2 through the post and one of the ramsinks and a capacitor has come off!! I blame the postman for cramming it through my letterbox along with other stuff!

Now i have to wait for a reply from the seller.

Wow. Funnily enough, I just had a WinFast A250 Ultra (Ti4600) delivered to me yesterday and it was delivered in just the same fashion, crammed hard into the mailbox. Fortunately it was over-packaged in massive amounts of bubble wrap.

And then I unpacked it and found four or five bulged caps and one leaking 🤣.

m1919 wrote:

PowerPie5000 wrote:

Nooooooo!!! I just got my GF2 through the post and one of the ramsinks and a capacitor has come off!! I blame the postman for cramming it through my letterbox along with other stuff!

Now i have to wait for a reply from the seller.

Wow. Funnily enough, I just had a WinFast A250 Ultra (Ti4600) delivered to me yesterday and it was delivered in just the same fashion, crammed hard into the mailbox. Fortunately it was over-packaged in massive amounts of bubble wrap.

And then I unpacked it and found four or five bulged caps and one leaking 🤣.

Mine arrived in a barely padded envelope 😒. I've not heard back from the seller yet so it's a good thing i didn't pay too much for it. I always look for cards that don't use many electrolytic caps.

Luckily i have a Voodoo5 5500 on the way from Ireland 😎.

PowerPie5000 wrote:

Nooooooo!!! I just got my GF2 through the post and one of the ramsinks and a capacitor has come off!! I blame the postman for cramming it through my letterbox along with other stuff!

Now i have to wait for a reply from the seller.

You'll be lucky if the seller does anything about it. All the seller has to say is they are not responsible for breakage during shipping and if it wasn't insured, you have no recourse. I got a motherboard a while back that had a broken cap when I opened it and I couldn't do anything about it because it happened during shipping.

sliderider wrote:

PowerPie5000 wrote:

Nooooooo!!! I just got my GF2 through the post and one of the ramsinks and a capacitor has come off!! I blame the postman for cramming it through my letterbox along with other stuff!

Now i have to wait for a reply from the seller.

You'll be lucky if the seller does anything about it. All the seller has to say is they are not responsible for breakage during shipping and if it wasn't insured, you have no recourse. I got a motherboard a while back that had a broken cap when I opened it and I couldn't do anything about it because it happened during shipping.

Luckily Royal Mail pay out for loss/damages even if it's not tracked/recorded. They automatically insure items up to £40 (i think) for free... The GF2 i bought was much less than that of course. It's the sellers responsibility to claim for damages as they have the postal receipt.

The ebay seller said i could pick another card, so i chose a 64Mb Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS Pro (Geforce 2 Pro).... In the meantime i'm going to solder the cap back onto the damaged GF2 Ultra board and find some thermal adhesive to stick the ramsink back on (i'll do the other ramsink too as it appears the manufacturer really skimped on the goo!).

I still have a Voodoo5 5500 on the way along with a slot-1 PIII 850MHz CPU to replace my 650MHz one. I'm thinking even a Geforce 2 Pro could outperform a V5 with most games.

Ultra > Ti > Pro > GTS > 256 DDR > Voodoo5.

But then Glide usually brings the best quality in old games.

swaaye wrote:

Geforce 2 Pro is faster than GTS and both are quite a bit faster than Voodoo5. But then neither can do Glide which makes then worthless in many cases.

I wouldn't say worthless as the GF2 appears to be better when it comes to Direct3D and OpenGL. I could always run a GF2 along with a pair of Voodoo2 cards in SLI for Glide 😀.. Didn't the Voodoo3/4/5 cards have the worst Glide compatibility?

I'm just hoping the 2D image quality will be ok with the Hercules GF2.

Yeah except with D3D and GL you might as well go Geforce FX and benefit from much better image quality options.

Voodoo5 works with most Glide games. DOS Glide games usually won't work but there are a few exceptions. I had Carmageddon working once.

swaaye wrote:

Yeah except with D3D and GL you might as well go Geforce FX and benefit from much better image quality options.

But i'll be using it with a slot-1 PIII 850 and a 440BX board that only supports 3.3V AGP (1x, 2x)... Would even a nasty FX5200 outperform a GF2 Pro or Ultra?

As I've said you can run any FX in AGP 3.3v just fine.

With FX you really want an Ultra variant. The non Ultras are gimped in various ways. 5200 Ultra is faster than any GF2. 64bit 5200 is not fast. 5200 Ultra is faster than 5500. There are lots of cheap 5600 and 5700s on fleabay. Even 5900 is pretty cheap but those are big and hot so may be more than you want to deal with.

swaaye wrote:

Yeah except with D3D and GL you might as well go Geforce FX and benefit from much better image quality options.

Voodoo5 works with most Glide games. DOS Glide games usually won't work but there are a few exceptions. I had Carmageddon working once.

This needs to become sticky or somewhere where it's visible. Really. This is exactly the explanation why not to bother with any GF less then FX, but GF 6800 would be even better 😀 Either go full retro (with 3dfx) or full D3D/OGL; dont settle for less 😎

elfuego wrote:

swaaye wrote:

Yeah except with D3D and GL you might as well go Geforce FX and benefit from much better image quality options.

Voodoo5 works with most Glide games. DOS Glide games usually won't work but there are a few exceptions. I had Carmageddon working once.

This needs to become sticky or somewhere where it's visible. Really. This is exactly the explanation why not to bother with any GF less then FX, but GF 6800 would be even better 😀 Either go full retro (with 3dfx) or full D3D/OGL; dont settle for less 😎

But wouldn't my PIII 850 and AGP 2x slot be a huge bottleneck for an FX based card? Are the FX cards still ok with DOS games too? One of the main issues i'm worried about is 2D image quality... Nothing i've tried so far can match the Matrox G400 Max!

PowerPie5000 wrote:

But wouldn't my PIII 850 and AGP 2x slot be a huge bottleneck for an FX based card? Are the FX cards still ok with DOS games too? One of the main issues i'm worried about is 2D image quality... Nothing i've tried so far can match the Matrox G400 Max!

There is no bottleneck that you will notice. Not even if you run a 5900 Ultra. I've thoroughly used 440BX + 5900 Ultra. I've even played games like Doom3 and Far Cry on it. The bottleneck you will run into is the CPU since even a PIII 1400 is too weak for games like those.

G400 Max does have nice output but it is essentially useless for gaming. I never use mine. I've found 3dfx cards to be good. I think GeForce4 and later are usually good quality. Radeon cards are often great but they suck for DOS and old 3D games. I just use DVI when I can these days.

Actually, G400's EMBM is neat, but any Radeon can do it faster.

I had a Leadtek GF2 Ti, great card. It seems that image quality is the most important thing. My card was fast and AFAIK I never had any visual issues with it.

I later upgraded to a 9700 PRO, which, while being substantially faster, introduced various issues like overlay flickering, et cetera. But I don't see why you would want such a fast card on a dedicated Win98 system.

I think at the time my PSU was 300w. I'm inclined to think 200w isn't a problem (at least...unless you add some double height card in). You can always check these things with a kill-o-watt.

hwh wrote:

But I don't see why you would want such a fast card on a dedicated Win98 system.

To max out most win98 games, reduce the load on the CPU and maybe try out FSAA with older 3D games... Hardware T&L is a good thing to have since a few Win98 games use it 😀. I'm not bothered about cards with pixel and vertex shading as any game that uses it will probably run too slow with old PIII 850.

hwh wrote:

I'm inclined to think 200w isn't a problem (at least...unless you add some double height card in). You can always check these things with a kill-o-watt.

I'm hoping my 200W PSU will be fine... I've used it with a 64MB ATI Rage Fury Maxx + Voodoo 2 SLI combo before with no power issues 😀.

PowerPie5000 wrote:

To max out most win98 games, reduce the load on the CPU and maybe try out FSAA with older 3D games...

Do not forget anisotropic filtering. FSAA is nice and all, but aniso is much better implemented on later GF cards then on GF2 (e.g. it seriously SUCKED). Back then, Nvidia was implementing series of 'driver optimizations' to make NV chips score more on 3dmark; the side effect was: image quality was terrible.

Ages ago, I've made a 3D visual quality comparison between a 3dfx voodoo 5 5500, radeon 8500 and GF 4MX. Everything was maxed out, e.g. ultra high quality in driver settings, with FSAA and anisotropic filtering, and LOD -2 + FSAA on v5 5500. The difference was immense. I'll try to find the old thread somewhere...