I had one of these fan blower type Arctic coolings on a Radeon 9700. Was terrific.

On a 9800 I had a cooler from Zalman.

The other option is a cheap mod. It involves removing the cooler and cleaning the cheap. Next remove the old fan and any plastic that's covering the cooler, so that you only end up with the metal cooler.

Mount the cooler and then find a way to mount a new 60 or 80mm cooler.

I thought the Arctic Cooling blower coolers were great until the bearings started to wear out on them and they got noisy. 🙁 I actually got free replacements from China a few times but they wore out too eventually. It took a couple of years.

It was particularly annoying because they bragged about their ceramic bearing and its longevity.

I see maybe that's why they stopped making these kind of coolers...

I dug out another Epox mobo, and this one's had its caps replaced. I fired it up @ 160 MHz bus speed, and inside Windows 98, I set the 3000+ mobile barton to use a multi of 16. That gives a CPU clock speed of 2560 MHz, which is borderline madness. I ran it with a Geforce 5950 Ultra, and although "clock for clock" the Radeon 9800 XT beats it, it still performed competently:

The 9800XT is a beast of a card, mine set me back a good $800 back in the day.

I used it with a P4 2.4GHz Northwood, and later with an AthlonXP 2800+ Barton. Good times...

Cheers for posting your benchies! 😀

rg100: I want to test out my 9800xt and fx5950 in my AGP based core 2 rig. Could you tell me resolution your running 3dmark01 at?

Sure, every setting inside 3DMark 2001 s.e. was left alone, and therefore it was using all of its default settings. BTW, is your C2D rig "special", in as much as it has a Win98 driver?

I just had a look online for typical benchmark scores, for the Radeon 9800 and Geforce 5900 family of cards. One webpage is here [PCStats], and in it they test these cards using a Pentium 4 @ 3 GHz, using a bus speed of 200 MHz. Their 3DMark 2001 scores of about 18000-19000 are far better than mine.

The reason must be that their test rig's mobo "architecture" is superior to the Epox mobo that I'm using. Their hardware testing specification can be seen on this webpage [PCStats]. As well as their stated 200 MHz bus speed, they are using something called 3200LL memory. I don't know what this is, but it must be much faster than the PC-133 SDRAM I am using. I guess the 9800 and 5950 cards are being bottled necked inside my mobo, because of the lower RAM and bus speed on my Epox mobo.

Your results are still impressive, considering that this mainboard was only designed to support Athlon Thunderbirds up to 1.4 GHz.

3200 is 400MHz DDR and LL usually means low latency (CL2). The SDRAM you are using is definitely holding you back.

Here's a couple of my old 3dmark scores - first one was an XP 1800+ wth a GF4 Ti4200 with 512MB DDR, Asus A7V333 mobo (ignore the green UI, yes I actually thought that looked good about 10 years ago... 😒 )

Second one is an XP2800+ with Radeon 9800 Pro, and 1GB dual channel DDR, Abit NF7 mobo

These systems are long gone but I can still remember that Win 2K seemed to give me the highest 3Dmark scores , even if only a few points above XP.
Also one thing to try - launch 3Dmark, go ctrl+alt+delete, task manager, shut down ALL running processes excluding svchost and essential windows processes... but everything else, including Explorer, kill it. Then run your benchmark. This seems to be good for another few points. You can try raising priority of the 3dmark process but I never noticed a difference from this.

😀
BTW, here's a (sorry rather poor) macro photo of some of this board's replacement caps. Is it best to have the caps sitting as flat/level +close to the board as possible?

Well with my limited knowledge of electronics...

it *should* be ok in that circumstance because they are probably just power filtering caps, however if you get into more complex circuits were timing/signal strength is an issue that having longer leads on your components than necessary can introduce parasitic capacitance.

As long as the board is stable and works I don't think there is any issue.
I'm sure someone who knows more than I do will be able to correct this if its wrong 😀

Interesting info! I am now inclined to "upgrade" my SDRAM powered Epox mobo, and get something a bit quicker for Win9x only use. I will still use the Epox board, but limit its use to the most demanding SVGA DOS games, such as late era DOS flight sims, and any other hi-res DOS games. But I suppose I've been a bit short sighted, because these late era DOS games can be run successfully within a Windows 9x "dos box", and consequently SoundBlaster effects can be provided by a PCI sound card such as a Vortex 2 card. However, that is using SB emulation.

A related (and possibly redundant) thought crossed my mind for a suitable ISA sound card to try. When I find it, I would like to see if an ESS AudioDrive works OK in the Epox's ISA slot. I remember it had a good wavetable header.

For Win98 games circa year 2000, I think I'll investigate nForce2 mobos that have a 200 MHz bus speed. As for the graphics card, the 9800 will be OK. I'm not really tempted to get anything faster like a Geforce 6800, because IMHO that goes too far in to the Windows XP era.

I don't think the nForce2 ultra 400 (the official 400MHz FSB versions) came out until about 2003/2004 or so... I remember I upgraded the A7V333/XP1800+ to the NF7/2800+ in 2004 - which is pretty well into the XP era. I got the 9800 in 04 I think as well.

If you want to stick to 2000/2001 ish hardware (which is the end of the win98 era - many people just went from 98 to XP) you'll probably need to stick to Athlon Thunderbirds, GeforCe 3 or Radeon 8500.

Don't forget the onboard sound on the EP-8KTA3. I cannot remember much about its sound quality (haven't tried it in years), but if you enable the resources for it in the BIOS setup, it emulates a SB Pro. It is at least accurate enough to fool Win98, which automatically installs SB Pro drivers. 😉

retro games 100 wrote:

Sure, every setting inside 3DMark 2001 s.e. was left alone, and therefore it was using all of its default settings. BTW, is your C2D rig "special", in as much as it has a Win98 driver?

The motherboard I used for this is an Asrock 775i65g. It indeed does support Windows 98, but I'm not using that. It's also significant because the 4x/8x AGP slot teamed up with a socket 775. I'm only aware of other Asrock motherboards, and another made by DFI called the 875p-T, having this combination. But in this case, the ability to use C2D makes it one of the fastest AGP sockets possible.

775i65g rev. 02 with bios 3.30
Intel E5800 3.2ghz 800mhz
2gb Corsair DDR500
WD Raptor 300

This motherboard is actually sold with a 1066 front side bus rating, but using it usually requires using a memory divider like 2:3 or 4:5, instead of 1:1. Using DDR500 memory, I have overclocked the front side bus to 250 from 200, and retained the 1:1 divider. I did have to drop the multiplier, but I have it stable at 3.74ghz.

Thanks a lot for the extra info people.

prophase_j, your scores are outstanding. Congratulations! Did you decide to get this mobo because you didn't want to waste your existing AGP hardware? I understand from your post that you don't use Win98 on it. But did you try it anyway, just as a quick experiment? I see from your scores that the FX and XT AGP cards are tremendously bottlenecked on my SDRAM powered rig.

retro games 100 wrote:

I see from your scores that the FX and XT AGP cards are tremendously bottlenecked on my SDRAM powered rig.

I've been telling you this ever since you published 10k+ score on a radeon 9800 😅 Now to start benchmarking without bottlenecks? 😊 Then you will see the difference between 9700, 9800 pro and XT 😉

Generally speaking, I've been concentrating on retro mobos with ISA slots. In order to avoid bottlenecks with fast video cards, I'm going to need a faster mobo, and consequently it won't have any ISA slots. That's OK. I can get a faster PCI/AGP mobo that still has a Windows 98 driver.

In order to maintain some "retro feel", I might not get a C2D system however. Instead, I might get an nForce2 mobo, with a 200 MHz bus speed. Although that will still bottleneck these fast video cards, it will definitely improve the benchmarking scores.

For anything faster than the above proposed system, I'm happy with my typical modern PCI-e system with Windows XP. 😀

DonutKing wrote:

Second one is an XP2800+ with Radeon 9800 Pro, and 1GB dual channel DDR, Abit NF7 mobo

I had a very similar system in that era...

XP 2800+ Barton, 9800XT, Asus A7V600, 1GB DDR400

Good times.