Look for something like a 6800 gt agp as the drivers are already there and they are a good bit faster than a 6600. If you are lucky or willing to spend the extra money a 6800 ultra or a 7800 gs will certainly do the job.

I'm actually more worried about the reliability of such cards than performance, I know 6800 is a native AGP card, will that help the card survive longer?

About such cards, I've only found a fairly priced (less than I've paid for the 6600GT) this 6800XT AGP from ASUS at an unknown state.
People in the reviews writes about unlocking it to the full 6800.
Will it be good?
I've not seen any other deals at the moment from NVIDIA, I guess ATI is out of the question?

I believe the survival issue is around solder problems for 6/7/8/9 series. I've had 6600, 6800gt, 7950gx2 all fail this way. I have not heard of failures in corresponding failures in high end ATI cards but no idea whether they work with 98.

If the issue is indeed with non-lead solder cracking due to flexing in heat/cooldown cycles, survivability is going to be more improved by keeping the cards cool and avoiding buying any cards that might have been thrashed or even just used a lot.

Some of the 7800gs+ AGP cards look as though they have huge hsfs [gainwards for example] - some of these are actually 7900gs as I recall. I think people have managed to get these running in 98. Maybe look at those.

I'd actually just use a Ti4 or FX59x0, but they might not meet your browsing or gaming needs.

The 6600GT did had a lost of dust on it when I bought it, but it worked fine for quite a while, after cleaning it and putting a new thermal paste. Only recently it has failed.
7800GS's are too expensive 🙁
While I would be OK with ATI cards, I'm worried about older DirectX games and DOS games ran under 98SE with it.
I also want to have an older NVIDIA GPU, though I won't be able to test if they surpass my needs until I've tried them.
I actually had less problems with MX 440 than 6600GT under 98SE, since the drivers are much older (45.23 vs. 77.72) and do work better overall in terms of stability and shutdown times. Even NFS: Most Wanted runs better on 1024x768 on 45.23 on MX 440 than later drivers.
But no Pixel Shaders are a bugger.
EDIT: I've found a reasonably priced FX5900 from PNY, seeing as it can run on the 45.23 drivers, it sounds like a good deal, though it says it's noisy.
EDIT2: I should have probably said that I can have only resolution up to 1024x768, though I want games to run very nicely.
Seeing as there are many problems with having great DX9 card that doesn't cause problems or are not expensive, maybe I should stick to more period correct games? But at the same time, I want to play them too...so many dillemas 😐
How much a difference you think there is when putting a better GPU in browsing the internet? By using Opera 12.02 with KernelEx that is. I'm actually more concerned about this, so I focused on a good CPU and putting as much RAM as 98SE supports.

I'll tell how you can cope with reliability problems, learning how to fix to at least buy some time and stocking up extras. Some of us hoard hardware for this reason even when we already have plenty as spares really do make the difference in keeping some builds alive. Depending on went wrong with your 6600 it can be fixed and just go for something Good rather than just settling for something that works. 6800s often go for cheap when other collectors get lazy or too picky 😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chFpIeBzXaw

I recently purchased one of those Asus V9999 6800LE Agp cards from Ebay, and whilst I could unlock all pipes ok, in 3dmark2001 there were sparkles on Neo's sunny's
in the Lobby Game test, disabling one of the Vertex pipes fixed that.
Interestingly I cannot overclock or even undeclock the card with the extra pipes enabled, must be some sort of driver/hardware conflict of sorts.
I think You are better off getting a 6800Gt with all the pipes enabled to start with. This happened in Win98se and Windows2000.

This could also be chipset or bandwidth issue as My Year 2000 Abit KT7-RAID has SDRAM and KT133 Chipset and so far Radeon 9800XT (Actually Medion 9800xxl 128mb
is the fastest Graphics card for it as benchmarks are higher than A Gainward 6800GT and Quadro FX3000 (fx5900) except Doom3 where I got 40fps instead of about 36
with the 9800xt.

I haven't noticed any issues with older games with the 9800xt and Dos games. Also the Dos picture quality is excellent and better than either of the Nvidia cards.
A TI4200 is perfect though as well.

I wish I knew what is wrong with the 6600GT, there are no signs of any faulty capacitors, burned tracks, or anything. I know you can bake GPU's but that's a last resort. 😀
As of now, no cheap 6800GT's, only 6800 regular, but fiddling with unlocking pipes doesn't sound fun.
Radeons are more common though, and I could buy a Radeon 9800XT just like yours, though I'll probably by too slow. 🙁

MrMateczko wrote:

I wish I knew what is wrong with the 6600GT, there are no signs of any faulty capacitors, burned tracks, or anything. I know you can bake GPU's but that's a last resort. 😀
As of now, no cheap 6800GT's, only 6800 regular, but fiddling with unlocking pipes doesn't sound fun.
Radeons are more common though, and I could buy a Radeon 9800XT just like yours, though I'll probably by too slow. 🙁

9800XT are strong cards and they are cheap but for one reason as they don't support shader model 3 which is why people spend the extra buck for the Geforce 6/7 era cards. You can bake the card and see if that works. The non GT 6800 is ok performance wise is a bit faster than a 6600 but not as much as a GT, unlocking pipes is a dice roll but for some people it is fun. Never know if you had gotten one that fully unlocks until you try 😉

You could also try an X800 - X850 XT / XL /GTO - these babies are pretty underrated - decently priced and not very hard to find. Some versions are faster then the 6800GT and drivers are win98 / VIA friendly unlike late win9x nvidia drivers.

In my country, the Radeon Xxxx AGP series are somewhat common, but the prices are way over the top! They ask more than for later Xxxxx and HD series.
The cheaper ones are for PCI-E 🙁
There's one rather cheap X800 GTO AGP on sale, but it says it has dot artefacts on screen...even though baking does fix such things, I know the problem can revert after some time. Did all ATI GPU's had such crap VRAM chips? Even my first GPU that came with this build, a Radeon 9550, had artefacts on screen, and I got the MX 440 in return.

And I know late NVIDIA drivers are rubbish, I've used 77.72 on my 6600GT, the 8x.xx ones are crap.
Never had a Radeon card with 98SE in my life, so it can be an interesting experience...I wish someone gave me one for free.

MrMateczko wrote:

Did all ATI GPU's had such crap VRAM chips? Even my first GPU that came with this build, a Radeon 9550, had artefacts on screen, and I got the MX 440 in return.

Failure rate for the for all 2002-2004 GDDR / GDDR3 equipped cards is the same regardless of manufacturer. I have card as old as the GF4 Ti 4600 / Radeon 9700 PRO with vram artifacts. The 6800 series and the x800 series have an almost identical failure rate. Right now I have 3x dead 6800 AGP cards and 2x dead x800/x850 cards - all with the same defect - bad vram. It seems cards with hyinx vram hold up a bit better then samsung equipped cards. Judging by available datasheets it seems hyinx was a bit more conservative when it came to binning GDDR chips witch resulted in fewer dead cards equipped with fast hyinx GDDR vs ones with samsung chips.

My 9550 had hynix RAM, the MX 440 and 6600GT both have Samsung RAM.
Right now, I'll just be looking for a great deal to pop up. I have other things to worry about in the real life. 😀

All my dead cards sans a 9800pro have samsung vram. Same thing when i worked in rma.

MrMateczko wrote on 2016-05-07, 07:43:

I wish I knew what is wrong with the 6600GT, there are no signs of any faulty capacitors, burned tracks, or anything. I know you can bake GPU's but that's a last resort. 😀
As of now, no cheap 6800GT's, only 6800 regular, but fiddling with unlocking pipes doesn't sound fun.
Radeons are more common though, and I could buy a Radeon 9800XT just like yours, though I'll probably by too slow. 🙁

Appologies for bumping an old thread but I discovered my Leadtek Winfast Nvidia GeForce A6600 didn't work because it wasn't in the AGP slot properly and the particular board design makes it look slotted in but the giveaway was the agp latch wasn't locked!

Thanks for the response. Since then, I've learned about issues with the AGP connector, pesky little fella.

As for the topic in question, I do not have these parts anymore. I now have a far more powerful PC to do ridiculous overkill 98SE stuff with. AGP is just not enough for my taste 😀

Hopefully, you stuck with Nvidia. They still have the old 90's/early-2000's Nvidia GPU optimizations/customizations in their current drivers.

nforce4max wrote on 2016-05-06, 22:30:

I'll tell how you can cope with reliability problems, learning how to fix to at least buy some time and stocking up extras. Some of us hoard hardware for this reason even when we already have plenty as spares really do make the difference in keeping some builds alive. Depending on went wrong with your 6600 it can be fixed and just go for something Good rather than just settling for something that works. 6800s often go for cheap when other collectors get lazy or too picky 😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chFpIeBzXaw

i believe ati cards stop offering drivers around the 9800 series were NVIDIA went on much longer.