On an OC'd 7970 I dare to doubt it 😉

d1stortion wrote:

swaaye wrote:

Stop worrying about power for your computer that's going to be used sporadically and get a card like FX 5900 so you don't have to compromise.

Don't compromise - get the FX 5900. Never need to worry again about your neighbor pissing you off with lawn mowing, now you have the tool to fight back 🤣

You mean the FX 5800. 😜 The 5900 line had better, less loud cooling solutions.

swaaye wrote:

5700 is first supported by driver 56.64 which just happens to be the last driver stable on 440BX. So you can't try older drivers as you can with the other FX cards...

I'm currently using driver version 81.98 with my GF4 MX440 and i've not run into any problems (yet).

Will an FX5900 show much of an improvement over a 5700 (or 5700 Ultra) with a 1.4GHz CPU? There must be a cut off point where i won't notice any speed increase with a faster GPU? The FX59xx cards are probably the best i can get as i'm pretty sure the GF 6 series, Radeon 9600/9800 cards and above are AGP4x/8x (1.5v/0.8v) only?

... That Gigabyte cooling solution looks ridiculous and i bet it's a real screamer with all those tiny fans!

You will only see a improvement in certain games. Anything heavily cpu dependent will show a bottleneck for either the 5700 or 5900.

ProfessorProfessorson wrote:

d1stortion wrote:

swaaye wrote:

Stop worrying about power for your computer that's going to be used sporadically and get a card like FX 5900 so you don't have to compromise.

Don't compromise - get the FX 5900. Never need to worry again about your neighbor pissing you off with lawn mowing, now you have the tool to fight back 🤣

You mean the FX 5800. 😜 The 5900 line had better, less loud cooling solutions.

Damn, I hoped no one would notice 🤣 the 5800 is indeed the one with the "legendary" reputation, but generally speaking almost all of those old small fans are terrible as swaaye said.

PowerPie5000 wrote:

Will an FX5900 show much of an improvement over a 5700 (or 5700 Ultra) with a 1.4GHz CPU?

The better fillrate will help with higher resolutions or AA/AF modes in older games, with later more CPU bound games not so much though.

Yeah if you want to run AA at a reasonably high resolution, you need gobs of fillrate. CPU doesn't really matter.

On the other hand if you want to play at 800x600 without AA on your 5900 Ultra and have a 200 Hz monitor, then CPU will be much more critical to getting that 200 fps. 😁

swaaye wrote:

Yeah if you want to run AA at a reasonably high resolution, you need gobs of fillrate. CPU doesn't really matter.

On the other hand if you want to play at 800x600 without AA on your 5900 Ultra and have a 200 Hz monitor, then CPU might be much more critical to getting that 200 fps. 😁

The max i'll play is 1280x1024 with AA and aniso filtering as it's the max resolution my Win98 PC monitor can support... Games usually look fine at 1024x768 with AA applied on that old monitor anyway if i need to lower the res. I think 128MB VRAM should be fine 😀.

Does Win98SE have any limitations when it comes to the amount of VRAM?

d1stortion wrote:

the 5800 is indeed the one with the "legendary" reputation, but generally speaking almost all of those old small fans are terrible as swaaye said.

The loudest i've ever owned were a pair of reference Geforce 7900 GT cards in SLI... And i don't miss them at all 🤣.

PowerPie5000 wrote:

Does Win98SE have any limitations when it comes to the amount of VRAM?

Using LFB probably 4080 MB.

elianda wrote:

PowerPie5000 wrote:

Does Win98SE have any limitations when it comes to the amount of VRAM?

Using LFB probably 4080 MB.

More than 4GB? How?
AFAIK the 4GB physical address space is shared between RAM, video RAM and other components (confirmed by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_GB_barrier#Mem … nd_disabled_RAM).
It should be more something like 1-2GB.

In reality this would be limited by the supported video cards anyway. AFAIK the latest video cards with W9x drivers were NVidia FX 6xxx and ATI 9xxx so maximum video memory would probably 512MB. Don't know about other manufactures but I doubt that they had better support for legacy operating systems.

I know Windows 98 has memory and address space limitations, so i'm thinking 768MB RAM and a graphics card with no more than 256MB (which is probably the max anyway for cards compatible with the i440BX AGP chipset)... I doubt i'll even need 256MB VRAM with the old pre-2002 games this machine will be running.

idspispopd wrote:

More than 4GB? How? AFAIK the 4GB physical address space is shared between RAM, video RAM and other components (confirmed by htt […]
Show full quote

elianda wrote:

PowerPie5000 wrote:

Does Win98SE have any limitations when it comes to the amount of VRAM?

Using LFB probably 4080 MB.

More than 4GB? How?
AFAIK the 4GB physical address space is shared between RAM, video RAM and other components (confirmed by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_GB_barrier#Mem … nd_disabled_RAM).
It should be more something like 1-2GB.

4 GB is 4096 MB
, so 4080 MB is not more than 4 GB,
so 16 MB is still free in the 4 GB range.
Win98SE can run with 16 MB RAM.

Graphics cards LFB is mapped by PCI MMIO below 4 GB. Given a mapping granularity of 16 MB the memory could theoretically be mapped starting at 16 MB up to 4096 MB, resulting in 4080 MB.

This is also exactly the functionality described in the wikipedia section you linked yourself.

I also don't see what windows address space limitations for the RAM has to do with VRAM access. Every old PCI card capable of LFB is mapped below the 4 GB and it obviously works fine.

I opted for a cheap 128MB Gainward FX5700 in the end. I'm sure it's plenty for what i need it for and it'll be an improvement over the fairly capable MX440 😀.

Nice. I demand photos and commentary. 🤣

@elianda: Sorry, I did a wrong calculation.
Still the value would be extremely theoretical. And other components may need MMIO space, too.

idspispopd wrote:

@elianda: Sorry, I did a wrong calculation.
Still the value would be extremely theoretical. And other components may need MMIO space, too.

Back when I was running a dual tualatin with 4GB of PC133 ECC Registered ram, Usable Ram for OS largely varied between 3224MB to 3985MB aproximately. according to what video card I used. I tested several Geforce cards and pretty much all of them reduced usable ram to 32xx megs, and 3Dfx 2d cards to 34xx-35xx, whereas by using a matrox G200 / G400 AGP, it would increase up to 38xx-39xx megs 😉 BIOS Ram check was also way faster than by using nv cards. 😁

d1stortion wrote:

Gigabyte just recently put out a cooling solution on some of their cards that has those little old school fans. Not sure what th […]
Show full quote

Gigabyte just recently put out a cooling solution on some of their cards that has those little old school fans. Not sure what they were thinking...

Do the lights in the house flicker when all those cooling fans come on?

No worse than anything else 🤣 @ sliderider.
I like the concept but the noise and general maintenance is horrendous, I like that it doesn't loop(recycle) to much of the air as badly as for example some of the typical dual fan "windforce" designs.

nforce4max wrote:

No worse than anything else 🤣 @ sliderider.
I like the concept but the noise and general maintenance is horrendous, I like that it doesn't loop(recycle) to much of the air as badly as for example some of the typical dual fan "windforce" designs.

I'll show you a better one than that

V5 6K overclocked to 201mhz. Yes, all of those massive fans, front and back, are needed to keep it cool at that speed.

Another view showing the heatsink on the front.

More info with benchmarks and pics here

http://forum.hwbot.org/showthread.php?t=37936

Yikes! It makes the Noctual D14 sitting next to it look like trailer house! I applaud the Audacity of the mod!