Have you read about the i740 ? It is one of the worst performing AGP cards and "In August 1999, after less than 18 months on the market, Intel withdrew the i740 from the market." Do some Googling and you will see lots of bad reviews. I suggest you get a differant video card...

Horun wrote:

Have you read about the i740 ? It is one of the worst performing AGP cards and "In August 1999, after less than 18 months on the market, Intel withdrew the i740 from the market." Do some Googling and you will see lots of bad reviews. I suggest you get a differant video card...

I know of how bad the performance is. With a 64-bit core, a 64-bit memory bus, a 66MHz core clock, and an ok, but worthless with the 64-bit bus 100MHz memory clock, and a garbage rendering method using the AGP bus in an idiotic fashion (offloading way too many graphical assets into the slower system memory rather than keeping it mostly onboard like later cards do), it's a perfect storm.

I've personally used this card before, and while the performance was less than stellar, it functioned just fine. There were no driver issues, no weird bugs, nothing. It was slow, but not unstable, from what I can tell.

I would get another card, if I had the money for another card that would fit well in a machine like this. The whole point of this machine is not to be a stellar performer, but a realistic system for somebody trying to squeeze the best performance out of it that they could with limited funds: Good specs for late 1998-early 1999 Pentium 200 MMX

I have several TNT2 cards, two M64 based units (one is a Compaq OEM 16MB, the other, an ASUS AGP V3800M 32MB), a TNT2 Vanta LT (16MB, Compaq OEM), and a TNT2 Pro (16MB, Compaq OEM). Don't ask why I have so many Compaq OEM parts, it just happened that way. The problem with all of these cards is that all of them, every single one, were made past 2000, and used architectures that were at best, brand-new and too expensive for a money strapped person at the time.

That's why I'm trying to use the i740. It's what I've got, it makes sense in context of the build, and it was made around the time period that would make sense for parts for this build to be from. I have a bias here, but I feel like just because hardware was bad for the time, doesn't mean I should label it as worthless immediately unless it doesn't fit in the context of the build, or unless the build requires faster hardware to achieve its goal. The goal of this build isn't game-based (unlike my previous, technically ongoing build, been at it for a year and a half now), it's realism-based, so I really want to use the i740 if possible.

i would rather go with a ATi Rage Pro/Rage 128, Matrox Millennium, 3Dfx Voodoo 2, Banshee, or 3, or nVidia Riva 128/TNT/TNT2 than use a Intel I740.

I haven't looked into this really but I remember many SS7 chipsets having AGP problems. Could it be that this early AGP card that used the bus in a very funky way is incompatible with this SiS chipset?
Maybe that's at least a direction to troubleshoot.

i would rather go with a ATi Rage Pro/Rage 128, Matrox Millennium, 3Dfx Voodoo 2, Banshee, or 3, or nVidia Riva 128/TNT/TNT2 than use a Intel I740.

I really don't want to be a dick but answers like this are not helpful at all if the question is how to get the card working and the one asking has explained in detail why he wants to use that specific card after it had been suggested he should use another card.

The subject got me curious because I have an i740 lying around somewhere (but I never tried to run it

I found this:
-------------------
Super Socket 7 issues with agp cards
Postby canthearu » 2018-7-03 @ 11:44
The Intel 740 is really the wrong card to use on a super socket 7 system. It is very heavily focused and reliant on AGP features, and ss7 tend to have a lot of trouble with properly supporting these AGP features.
You will probably never get it working well.
**

And in the text file of Software Driver Release PV4.0V - June 14, 1999 it reads:
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
The Intel740(tm) graphics accelerator is optimized to run with the
following PC configurations:
(1) Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R)II processors
(2) Motherboard: Based on the Intel(R) 440LX, 440BX, 440GX AGPset
or a later generation Intel AGPset, motherboard must have an
unpopulated AGP slot or the Intel740 chip must be down on the
motherboard
(3) Operating System: Windows* 95 OSR 2.1 or later (with USB
Supplement) or Windows* 98.
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

PARKE wrote:

The subject got me curious because I have an i740 lying around somewhere (but I never tried to run it […]
Show full quote

The subject got me curious because I have an i740 lying around somewhere (but I never tried to run it

I found this:
-------------------
Super Socket 7 issues with agp cards
Postby canthearu » 2018-7-03 @ 11:44
The Intel 740 is really the wrong card to use on a super socket 7 system. It is very heavily focused and reliant on AGP features, and ss7 tend to have a lot of trouble with properly supporting these AGP features.
You will probably never get it working well.
**

And in the text file of Software Driver Release PV4.0V - June 14, 1999 it reads:
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
The Intel740(tm) graphics accelerator is optimized to run with the
following PC configurations:
(1) Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R)II processors
(2) Motherboard: Based on the Intel(R) 440LX, 440BX, 440GX AGPset
or a later generation Intel AGPset, motherboard must have an
unpopulated AGP slot or the Intel740 chip must be down on the
motherboard
(3) Operating System: Windows* 95 OSR 2.1 or later (with USB
Supplement) or Windows* 98.
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Death. Figured as much.

I'm unsure of what to do now. All I have that is even close to time-accurate lying around are TNT2 and TNT2 M64 cards. The closest I have that would make sense with this machine is a TNT2 M64 16MB, which is obviously kinda far flung out, so I will likely have to suck it up and get an ATI card of some sorts and pray it works.

For testing purposes, I'm going to throw the M64 in there, just to see if it'll work better than that i740. Bleh, Intel, quit being so proprietary. The reason why it worked before is because it was on a 440BX chipset. This card on any 440_X chipset is going to be a gigantic bottleneck, the mere idea of even paring this with a Celeron on a 66MHz FSB is ridiculous, it will bottleneck the Celeron any day.

athlon-power wrote:

Death. Figured as much.
8><CUT
I'm unsure of what to do now.

The only (experimental) thing you could try is to run it on a Windows ME install because of the 'improved' onboard driver collection. But this is just an idea in order to see if it can work at all, don't take it too seriously. And I am not sure how well (or unwell) ME runs on an MMX 200.

I remember back in the day VIA actually released a new revision of its MVP3 chipset specifically to fix i740 compatibility...

The OP's board has a SIS chipset if I'm not mistaken but running the i740 on an MMX 200 system seems to be a too long stretch anyway.

PARKE wrote:

The OP's board has a SIS chipset if I'm not mistaken but running the i740 on an MMX 200 system seems to be a too long stretch anyway.

I agree with that, i740 is not the best choice for a Pentium MMX. i740 was not a bad card, it was only a bit late to the market, but the market was evolving very fast back then, so...

The card was designed for Pentium II and AGP, but, as I said before, it was released a bit later than expected, it was more than competitive with Voodoo1, Rage Pro, Riva128, but it was no match for Voodoo2 or Riva TNT. So it sold for a low price, but this was actually a problem, because it was bought by people with low budget that paired the card with slow and/or non Intel CPUs.

That's why it got a bad reputation, people with Cyrix 6x86 300 or K6 300 CPUs bought i740 and expected their systems to perform like a PII 300 and Voodoo2 8 MB, because they thought that the systems are "identical" (300 MHz CPU and 8 MB videocard).

a i740 is much better then the ATI Rage Products with 8Mb..
i run one and its fine it has good drivers, works and is operating stable.

i think you simply did not run one back in the days.. everything worked on it we wanted to play.

I have a couple of i740 that are missing a heatsink. I've had them for a long time and never used them. I remember them to be working fine, just tried them some time ago and they booted to the OS just fine. You can have one of them if you cover the shipping cost 😀

aaronkatrini wrote:

I have a couple of i740 that are missing a heatsink. I've had them for a long time and never used them. I remember them to be working fine, just tried them some time ago and they booted to the OS just fine. You can have one of them if you cover the shipping cost 😀

Thank you, though I'm pretty jack squat out of money at the moment, and I'm pretty sure the card itself works fine, but the chipset's interactions with it might not. I'd need a 440 based chipset, or maybe an Intel chipset for a Pentium, but I doubt there are Intel based Socket 7 boards with AGP.

Even if there was such a board, I couldn't afford it, so I'm pretty much stuck where I'm at right now.

Well, ever since I got a new AGP card, an 8MB ATi Rage 128, it's changed... nothing.

That's right. Nothing. The same exact problems are still present. It refuses to do anything above 640x480x16.

This is a problem, because if this is an AGP issue, the only PCI card I have is a very dodgy Trident TGUI-9440-3 that had its VRAM upgrade modules installed backwards by the previous user. I switched them around, but I doubt they'd work, so I'd have to remove them.

This would leave me with one megabyte of VRAM. This wouldn't be so bad, but I don't fancy the idea of 800x600x24 (if even that) being my maximum resolution for a Pentium 200MHz machine. I'm fine with it on a 486- because it's a 486.

I have disabled power management in BIOS, along with a couple of other setting changes, and am trying 98 SE instead of FE. If this messes up again, I get to disable PnP in BIOS and re-install 98 again. If it still doesn't work, it'll be yet another system where I really have no way of using it in any proper fashion. I don't know why I continually am one step away from being able to have a machine like I want it, and then have some idiotic, unaddressable problem pop up. The PCI video card I have is fit for a 486, not a Pentium 200.

[EDIT]

It was either disabling power management, or using Second Edition that seems to have fixed it. I can get full-color 2D video, but it still remains to be seen if I can get 3D rendering going on it or not. It says that it's either an XPERT 99 or XPERT 2000. I am not sure which one it actually is.

i740 was not a bad card, it was only a bit late to the market

Actually it wasn't all that late. i740 just thrashes Riva 128ZX with SDRAM memory, which was released in the same year.

I've had GA-586SG motherboard with the same chipset SIS5591. Most of AGP cards I've tried were unstable: Riva TNT, TNT2, S3 Savage4.
For me it looks like power problems because most stable (but not ideal) configuration was TNT2 Vanta LT 8MB (Compaq OEM), with Riva128 4MB only slightly worse.
I've ended up with S3 Trio3d/2x - bad 3D performer but for desktop and DOS it is enough and can be paired with Voodoo. Bad thing is, that many of those no-name cards have poor signal quality.

You can also try to install SiS AGP driver before installing drivers.

This is correct SIS AGP driver for 5591 chipset: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5seglx53ok4xifn/91agp140.zip?dl=1

Well, I know I'm raising an old thread from the dead but I'm encountering the exact same issue with both i740 cards I have. I've used multiple drivers with the same issue. I've also tried them in two diffrent motherboards with 815 and 440 chipsets with pentium IIIs and same issue as the OP every time. Im stumped.

soviet conscript wrote on 2021-08-03, 20:59:

Well, I know I'm raising an old thread from the dead but I'm encountering the exact same issue with both i740 cards I have. I've used multiple drivers with the same issue. I've also tried them in two diffrent motherboards with 815 and 440 chipsets with pentium IIIs and same issue as the OP every time. Im stumped.

Also Win98FE?

Perhaps SE (and WDM drivers) would work better. In any event the chip itself is solid. I have one in my system (a Diamond Stealth II G460) with Compaq SW400 (i840) motherboard. It's not fast, but perfectly solid. I'm using XP though, so not exactly the same.