F2bnp wrote:

Totally. My Tualatin 1.4GHz with a Ti 4200 runs NOLF2 just fine at 1280x1024 on High Details (30+ fps).
I wouldn't consider Athlons due to the awful chipsets.

Awwww cmon now, they really arent that bad. KT133A is an awesome retro chipset having full-ISA support, nforce2 is pure bad-ass; and KT333 is *the* chipset to have for any AGP x2 video card (e.g. Voodoo 5). Even KT600 is not too shabby, really. 😅

It seems that this is not my lucky day, I just tried the Asus nforce2 board and it appears to be DEAD, tried a cmos reset but the thing still does nothing, I even exchanged the CPUs and RAM ...0, Oh well, I guess I'll put AMD out of the equation for now.

elfuego wrote:

Awwww cmon now, they really arent that bad. KT133A is an awesome retro chipset having full-ISA support,

Uh, no thanks. I'm not going anywhere near that ever again. I've had enough Via for the rest of my life. 😁

F2bnp wrote:

Uh, no thanks. I'm not going anywhere near that ever again. I've had enough Via for the rest of my life. 😁

It sounds like you just had a misunderstanding with a MVP4 😁

swaaye wrote:

Actually couldn't care less about the NVAPU/Soundstorm with its buggy drivers.

Actually, I love SS. It has awesome surround and great bass-regulation, and also epic stereo-to-surround up-sampling. I never had any issues with drivers - what are you referring to? DOS support maybe (I never tried it)?

elfuego wrote:

I never had any issues with drivers - what are you referring to? DOS support maybe (I never tried it)?

I remember working on a friend's system and with EQ2 (main addiction) it would screech loudly occasionally, seemingly some bug with 3D audio. I also recall trying to get 5.1 out of Far Cry and it wouldn't work. He ended up getting an Audigy 2. I don't think NVIDIA supported NVAPU well on PC. The last driver update was in mid 2004. That makes Creative look amazing.

I think the best use of the NVAPU is the Xbox. Many games use 5.1 output through DDL and it's great. It's clearly the best console audio of that generation.

swaaye wrote:

I remember working on a friend's system and with EQ2 (main addiction) it would screech loudly occasionally, seemingly some bug with 3D audio.

Now that you mention it, this does ring a bell. I vaguely remember having it on Abit NF7-S at start. But a driver and/or bios update (no idea which) solved the issue - of that I am 100% certain, since that was my main system for more then a couple of years. NF2 also used to have problems with SATA RAID at start, but this also got fixed with BIOS update; and pretty fast for that matter (within 1-2 months after ramp-up).

I know this is an old thread but I wanted to make some comments. First of all, a GF4 ti4600 is not a "great windows 98 card for games between 1997-2001". Seriously? The GF4 line was released in 2002, so really you're looking at 2001-2005 or 2006. I ran a GF4 even after that and it still played most games at high res...especially a 4600. Secondly, it shouldn't be paired with a 700 or 800 Mhz CPU as mentioned...you're talkin' a mid to higher-level Athlon XP. As such, you should be running windows 2000 or XP on it in the first place, not 98. And "putting AMD out of the equation right now" makes no sense. What exactly are the problems you have? Does the system boot at all? Does it do anything? Have you checked your connections?

And "not considering Athlons due to awful chipsets is plain wrong". The slot-A athlons had the old irongate chipset that had issues with providing enough voltage to more demanding AGP cards, but after the move to socket-A, every chipset was rock solid. That trend continued with 754 and 939. All three of these (A, 754, 939) were far superior to intel's offerings in performance, and equal if not better in stability.

And to give credit where credit is due...since then, intel is the superior product, but during that time they couldn't touch AMD.

guys... If I were you, I wouldn't try to use a nf2 motherboard with two voodoo2. Tried the same with an Abit AN7 plus a 2500-m running at 2.4 and two 12megger Iodata V2 cards, and it gave me shitty performance both under win98se and w2k sp4 😒

Keep in mind I was using Fv2 drivers, official ones kept crashing.

subhuman@xgtx wrote:

guys... If I were you, I wouldn't try to use a nf2 motherboard with two voodoo2. Tried the same with an Abit AN7 plus a 2500-m running at 2.4 and two 12megger Iodata V2 cards, and it gave me shitty performance both under win98se and w2k sp4 😒

Keep in mind I was using Fv2 drivers, official ones kept crashing.

Ummm I had a Creative V2 8MB SLI setup up and running with an Abit NF7-S without any issues in Windows XP with Fv2 Gold. Not sure about Win98 though. 😒

I think one of the games for a GF4 Ti4600 is Half Life 2. So I would strongly recommend nForce2+Athlon XP 3200+.

As for the Socket A problems described here, I didn't had this bad experience with them and I worked with a lot of those systems.

elianda wrote:

As for the Socket A problems described here, I didn't had this bad experience with them and I worked with a lot of those systems.

Neither have I. I've used KT133A, KT333 and KT600 boards and they've always worked flawlessly for me. Never used MVP3 orMVP4 though as I went ali for my Super 7 build 😜

The only time to consider KT133A or KT266A/KT333 are when you desire ISA or AGP 2x support.

ah yes, Win2000 Fv2 drivers patched to nf2 worked "great", other than the horrible performance 🤣

KT333 is awesome though, a bit slower(single channel only ram) than nf2 but, from experience, more compatible with older stuff (for example my sq2500's mpu401 port didn't work on my AN7 but it did on a DFI ad75, or how my 2 12mb iodata ga-vd2 would perform like crap on the first one but rock 6032 3dm99 3dmarks on the second one under 98se)

Anyway, if you are going to use a 2ghz athlon I would greatly recommend you to have some kind of active cooling because of the overheating bug. My Obsidian board fries at the stock 90mhz clock while playing Q3 arena on my single 266fsb MP2800 rig 🤣

Some chipsets do something with PCI that causes quirks with Aureal drivers. nForce2 and i815 come to mind (from personal experience). I'm sure other chipsets too. Aureal drivers often make me angry regardless of chipset though! 😀

swaaye wrote:

Some chipsets do something with PCI that causes quirks with Aureal drivers. nForce2 and i815 come to mind (from personal experience). I'm sure other chipsets too. Aureal drivers often make me angry regardless of chipset though! 😀

haha, yes, they're a bit glitchy, but with i815 and other chipsets I'm sure it's just a matter of configuring au30mmed.inf properly 😁 Once I did it everything was working great on my via chipset boards. If you want I can upload my INF if you have problems with i815 regarding "primary pci bus" errors and lockups with SBFM emulation driver.

Oh I know about the bus detection tweak. What I was more referring to was that I've had a lot of stability problems playing games with Vortex 2. The A3DAPI.DLL likes to crash the Win9x kernel even on 440BX or KT333. It seems to vary from game to game though. SiN and Elite Force are definitely trouble.