Socket3 wrote on 2023-07-30, 20:16:

gamefan_851 wrote on 2023-07-28, 15:28:

Would you say that Radeon 9600pro would be nice partner card for that gpu or should I step up the game a bit and look for a Geforce FX card or even highter?

An equivalent Geforce fx card would be stepping down really. The fx 5xxx family are rather mediocre cards, particularly low and mid end cards of the generation. 6xxx are debatably overkill for win98. The 9600 is perfectly fine.

That's good to know. Thanks for the warning. In that case I will limit my search to the 9600rpo like originally planned.

After some research i also tempted to start looking for a 9700pro or 9800pro due the very high performance. But after reading about the potential over heating problems and that it might be very hard to get some of these cards in working order at decent price I moved back to only consider the 9600pro.

I have also narrowed down which mother boards to get.

Will either get a Gigabyte K8VT800M or the Asus A7V880.

While searching around I aso found a sock 939 mainboard from abit the ABIT ABIT-KN8 VER:1.0 at good price. In fact it would be a bit cheaper then recommendend socket 754 main boards.

What do you guys think about socket 939 main boards?

Abit itself seems to be good brand have read many good stuff about their earlier Iterations of different motherboard chipsets.

So if socket 939 is not too modern for win98 gaming the abit might be alternative to the above mentioned sock 754 boards.

Practically all first-gen DirectX 9 Radeon cards are plagued with reliability issues. Radeon 9600 cards are not an exception. 50/50 chance that the one you'll get will be dead. So you need to be sure, that it's tested before buying. With 9700/9800 that chance is around 80/20 though and really not worth it.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-07-30, 21:02:

Practically all first-gen DirectX 9 Radeon cards are plagued with reliability issues. Radeon 9600 cards are not an exception. 50/50 chanche that the one you'll get will be dead.

Thanks for the info. That's bad news then. Would you say that geforce cards of the same gen are a a bit more reliable?

FX5200/FX5500 - useless trash cards for an Athlon system.
FX5600 - more reliable, but somewhat slower in older games and horrendously slower in games with Shader Model 2.0 (DirectX9).
FX5700 - same thing, 50/50 chance it would be DOA.
5900XT - more reliable, from my experience, but harder to find at affordable price nowadays.

But 9550/9600 cards are very affordable and numerous, so you may want to try to gamble anyway.

gamefan_851 wrote on 2023-07-30, 20:54:

While searching around I aso found a sock 939 mainboard from abit the ABIT ABIT-KN8 VER:1.0 at good price. In fact it would be a bit cheaper then recommendend socket 754 main boards.

Wikipedia says that there is no drivers for NForce4 for Windows 98 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NForce4 🙁
Better search for something VIA based (Abit AV8 maybe ?)

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-07-30, 21:22:

FX5200/FX5500 - useless trash cards for an Athlon system. FX5600 - more reliable, but somewhat slower in older games and horrend […]
Show full quote

FX5200/FX5500 - useless trash cards for an Athlon system.
FX5600 - more reliable, but somewhat slower in older games and horrendously slower in games with Shader Model 2.0 (DirectX9).
FX5700 - same thing, 50/50 chance it would be DOA.
5900XT - more reliable, from my experience, but harder to find at affordable price nowadays.

But 9550/9600 cards are very affordable and numerous, so you may want to try to gamble anyway.

Thanks for the list of the cards including the infos. That was very valuable.

I think you are right. The 9550/9600 cards are very affordable and numoerous so I will dare to gamble.

I think 9550 or the 9600 are really awesome cards in case i am lucky and find one in working order. They are also powerful enough to serve me well as win 98 gaming system for games from 99 to 2001/2002.

zyga64 wrote on 2023-07-30, 22:30:

gamefan_851 wrote on 2023-07-30, 20:54:

While searching around I aso found a sock 939 mainboard from abit the ABIT ABIT-KN8 VER:1.0 at good price. In fact it would be a bit cheaper then recommendend socket 754 main boards.

Wikipedia says that there is no drivers for NForce4 for Windows 98 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NForce4 🙁
Better search for something VIA based (Abit AV8 maybe ?)

Thanks for the advice. I should have double checked the KN8 before mentioning it. Without win98 driver support the board is useless to me 🤣.

I will research about something VIA based only like the AV8 you have mentioned.

gamefan_851 wrote on 2023-07-30, 21:06:

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-07-30, 21:02:

Practically all first-gen DirectX 9 Radeon cards are plagued with reliability issues. Radeon 9600 cards are not an exception. 50/50 chanche that the one you'll get will be dead.

Thanks for the info. That's bad news then. Would you say that geforce cards of the same gen are a a bit more reliable?

Its not all doom and gloom for the 9000 Radeons.

The 9600 XT cards have a much higher chance of being just fine, the 9600XT uses a better designed PCB with temperature monitoring and better cooler design, if I was in the market for a card from that series the 9600Xt would be the one I went hunting for. (The 9800 XT/XXL shares this better PCB and Cooler design with the 9600 XT so is another option if you find one at a good price)

Anything 9700 based is likely to be a huge gamble to the point 9/10 cards listed will not be tested or sold for parts only, anything 9800 based, aside from the XT/XXL models, will also be a big gamble but people seem to have had a higher success rate with this series over the 9700 cards.

I would certainly rate the 9000 Radeons much higher than any of the Geforce FX trash nVidia released, that said the FX 5950 Ultra would be a fun card to own ...if one could actually find one not listed for 500+ USD

If you want, you can look at my post history on why I would recommend against going with a newer 754/939 platform for this use case. VIA's chipset drivers are total PITAs and the BIOS has a lot of bugs with AGP on 9x and I killed a motherboard by making a mistake flashing the BIOS, ATI chipsets flat out do not support 9x and nForce chipsets are known to have lots of issues. Socket 462 should be great, and if you care a lot about sound and MIDI I would recommend going with an Audigy 2 card.
IMO a GeForce FX wouldn't really be a good choice for this, a GF4 MX or any GF2/GF3 as well as their ATI equivalents should be fine. I am not well rounded into the 5v rail issue and will look into that as I'm interested in trying to build something exactly like this.

@Trashbytes Thx for the further information about the 9000series. Going with the 9000 seeems to quite a gamble but since the 9600 and 9550 are not that expensive I think I willing to do teh gamble. if I am lucky a radeon 9000 series card would suit my gaming desires perfectly.

bobsmith wrote on 2023-07-31, 11:37:

If you want, you can look at my post history on why I would recommend against going with a newer 754/939 platform for this use case. VIA's chipset drivers are total PITAs and the BIOS has a lot of bugs with AGP on 9x and I killed a motherboard by making a mistake flashing the BIOS, ATI chipsets flat out do not support 9x and nForce chipsets are known to have lots of issues. Socket 462 should be great, and if you care a lot about sound and MIDI I would recommend going with an Audigy 2 card.
IMO a GeForce FX wouldn't really be a good choice for this, a GF4 MX or any GF2/GF3 as well as their ATI equivalents should be fine. I am not well rounded into the 5v rail issue and will look into that as I'm interested in trying to build something exactly like this.

Thanks. I am going to check out your old posts. to get another point of view on that matter.

zyga64 wrote on 2023-07-30, 22:30:

Wikipedia says that there is no drivers for NForce4 for Windows 98 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NForce4 🙁
Better search for something VIA based (Abit AV8 maybe ?)

The absence of drivers for the chipset is not necessarily a problem, when you know, how to deal with it (my AMD 760G/710 SB has no W98/ME drivers and W98SE work, I've also seen a lot of links about working W98s on much newer hardware), but yes, last W98 drivers from nVidia was for nForce3 chipsets. What is absolutely "must have" are W98 drivers for graphics card. SATA and large HDD are supported by R.Loew patches, if onboard LAN and audio are unsupported, he can always use some supported into the PCI slot. Even USB are solved by Maximus Decimus patch.
But I absolutely agree that the way with the board, fitted with a supported chipset, will be much simpler and less troublesome.

the 9600XT uses a better designed PCB with temperature monitoring and better cooler design

Large chunk of 9600XT was anything but that. Just look at Sapphire cards with small noisy coolers and that's still on the better side.

gamefan_851 wrote on 2023-07-30, 20:54:

That's good to know. Thanks for the warning. In that case I will limit my search to the 9600rpo like originally planned. […]
Show full quote

Socket3 wrote on 2023-07-30, 20:16:

gamefan_851 wrote on 2023-07-28, 15:28:

Would you say that Radeon 9600pro would be nice partner card for that gpu or should I step up the game a bit and look for a Geforce FX card or even highter?

An equivalent Geforce fx card would be stepping down really. The fx 5xxx family are rather mediocre cards, particularly low and mid end cards of the generation. 6xxx are debatably overkill for win98. The 9600 is perfectly fine.

That's good to know. Thanks for the warning. In that case I will limit my search to the 9600rpo like originally planned.

After some research i also tempted to start looking for a 9700pro or 9800pro due the very high performance. But after reading about the potential over heating problems and that it might be very hard to get some of these cards in working order at decent price I moved back to only consider the 9600pro.

I have also narrowed down which mother boards to get.

Will either get a Gigabyte K8VT800M or the Asus A7V880.

While searching around I aso found a sock 939 mainboard from abit the ABIT ABIT-KN8 VER:1.0 at good price. In fact it would be a bit cheaper then recommendend socket 754 main boards.

What do you guys think about socket 939 main boards?

Abit itself seems to be good brand have read many good stuff about their earlier Iterations of different motherboard chipsets.

So if socket 939 is not too modern for win98 gaming the abit might be alternative to the above mentioned sock 754 boards.

For win98 the best thing to get (in my humble opinion) if you want to go high end is a Geforce 4 Titanium. The Ti4200 will play anything from that time period even at high resolutions.

The 9700 was a great card but it's rarer then a Geforce 4 Ti and possibly more expensive (haven't checked prices in the last 3 or so years). If you can find one I'd say take it over the 9600 Pro. It works with older versions of catalyst as well witch might provide better compatibility with some games.

Nvidia FX 6xxx cards have their uses as well, but I'd only recommend those for hybrid 98/xp builds or running some games with misleading system requirements (like Dungeon Keeper 2, Black and White, etc) at very high resolutions.

bobsmith wrote on 2023-07-31, 11:37:

If you want, you can look at my post history on why I would recommend against going with a newer 754/939 platform for this use case. VIA's chipset drivers are total PITAs and the BIOS has a lot of bugs with AGP on 9x and I killed a motherboard by making a mistake flashing the BIOS, ATI chipsets flat out do not support 9x and nForce chipsets are known to have lots of issues. Socket 462 should be great, and if you care a lot about sound and MIDI I would recommend going with an Audigy 2 card.
IMO a GeForce FX wouldn't really be a good choice for this, a GF4 MX or any GF2/GF3 as well as their ATI equivalents should be fine. I am not well rounded into the 5v rail issue and will look into that as I'm interested in trying to build something exactly like this.

We have 4 socket 754/939 builds (5 if you count one backup rig currently not in use) and had no issues with them whatsoever. All VIA chipsets. Motherboards used (off the top of my head) are nothing special - MSI K8T-NEO (754), ECS KV2 Extreme, Asus K8V-VM (754) and an Abit AV8. Various processors. Socket 754 machines run 256MB of DDR400 and the 939 ones run 512MB (2x512). Various video cards (Radeon 9800, FX5900XT, FX5950 Ultra, FX 6600GT AGP), sound cards are Sound Blaster LIVE!, Yamaha DS-XG, or Aureal Vortex 2. I think 2 of them have YMF724 cards. They replaced the socket A rigs I mentioned before and we use them for 12-14 hour long retro lan parties every other weekend. VIA Hyperion 5.12a chipset drivers, Catalyst 6.2 for the 9800, forceware 45.23 for the FX cards and Forcecware 66.94 for the 6600GT.

bobsmith wrote on 2023-07-31, 11:37:

by making a mistake flashing the BIOS, ATI chipsets flat out do not support 9x

If you're talking about video cards, there's a plethora of win98 drivers all the way up to the X850XT. Motherboard chipsets yea, they're too new and do not support win9x - but aren't those AM2? I don't remember ever seeing an ATi chipset socket 754 or 939 mainboard.

[EDITED] - on that last bit, it seems there are some (very few) socket 939 mainboards that used the ATi xpress 200 chipset, but I've never personally seen one. I have AM2 boards with that chipset, but nothing with socket 939.

Socket3 wrote on 2023-07-28, 13:23:

As for what to stay away from - if you plan on dual booting win98, stay away from nforce boards in general. I've managed to get win98 up and running on an Asrock K7NF2, but no luck with my Abit AN7, or NF7, or my Asus A7N8X - they either fail to boot completely (Abit AN7) or become unstable (NF7, A7N8X) after installing the nvidia forceware driver.

Out of curiosity, how does the instability manifest on the A7N8X? I'm rocking an A7N8X-VM with 1.5 gigs of RAM and Win98SE (with unofficial SP 2.1a and PATCHMEM both installed) seems to work fine, apart from explorer.exe often crashing when deleting EXE files... which, while weird and a bit annoying, is not that bad.

Not that I'd particularly recommend the board either, though -- for one, it doesn't have the P4 power connector, so finding a decent PSU is a bit of a pain. (Even I don't have one ATM.)

I don't remember ever seeing an ATi chipset socket 754 or 939 mainboard.

ATi had chipsets even for Socket 478. Not very popular, but with impressive for its time integrated graphics. They've also made chipset for 939, to promote Crossfire implementation on AMD platform.

A7N8X-VM

Socket A boards without +12v CPU connector are somewhat dangerous to use with high-end Athlon XPs, even if you have strong +5v rail. ATX connector and surrounding area with be noticeably hotter than other parts of the board.

Socket3 wrote on 2023-07-31, 17:18:

For win98 the best thing to get (in my humble opinion) if you want to go high end is a Geforce 4 Titanium. The Ti4200 will play […]
Show full quote

gamefan_851 wrote on 2023-07-30, 20:54:

That's good to know. Thanks for the warning. In that case I will limit my search to the 9600rpo like originally planned. […]
Show full quote

Socket3 wrote on 2023-07-30, 20:16:

An equivalent Geforce fx card would be stepping down really. The fx 5xxx family are rather mediocre cards, particularly low and mid end cards of the generation. 6xxx are debatably overkill for win98. The 9600 is perfectly fine.

That's good to know. Thanks for the warning. In that case I will limit my search to the 9600rpo like originally planned.

After some research i also tempted to start looking for a 9700pro or 9800pro due the very high performance. But after reading about the potential over heating problems and that it might be very hard to get some of these cards in working order at decent price I moved back to only consider the 9600pro.

I have also narrowed down which mother boards to get.

Will either get a Gigabyte K8VT800M or the Asus A7V880.

While searching around I aso found a sock 939 mainboard from abit the ABIT ABIT-KN8 VER:1.0 at good price. In fact it would be a bit cheaper then recommendend socket 754 main boards.

What do you guys think about socket 939 main boards?

Abit itself seems to be good brand have read many good stuff about their earlier Iterations of different motherboard chipsets.

So if socket 939 is not too modern for win98 gaming the abit might be alternative to the above mentioned sock 754 boards.

For win98 the best thing to get (in my humble opinion) if you want to go high end is a Geforce 4 Titanium. The Ti4200 will play anything from that time period even at high resolutions.

The 9700 was a great card but it's rarer then a Geforce 4 Ti and possibly more expensive (haven't checked prices in the last 3 or so years). If you can find one I'd say take it over the 9600 Pro. It works with older versions of catalyst as well witch might provide better compatibility with some games.

Nvidia FX 6xxx cards have their uses as well, but I'd only recommend those for hybrid 98/xp builds or running some games with misleading system requirements (like Dungeon Keeper 2, Black and White, etc) at very high resolutions.

Thanks for sharing your opinion about the gefore 4 4200 ti. Playing all games from the late win 98 peroid in high resolution sounds excatly what I am looking for.

The prices of the geforce 4 4200 are also very attractive which is another big pro.

The discussion about potential problems when using too "new" mbs for win 98 gaming is interesting and i also would not mind to use a socket 462 and not a socket 754 or 739 if is really necessary.

But in general a socket 754 board is more attractiv for me because having a more modern mb might come in handy to try out different powerful cpu.

I need to resesarch a bit more before I make my final decision.

There are many good offers for both offers on ebay kleinanzeigen (I am from Austria so getting stuff from germany would be the cheapest way to get stuff)

Socket 462 can be very cheap on that plattform.

That one for example would be the cheapest

https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/mainbo … 593491-225-9098

i am not sure if would be worth a purchase though. it says that has a on boad graphics unit and that's not what i am looking for because i am not sure if I can turn of the integrated graphics unit in the bios to use a real gpu.

gamefan_851 wrote on 2023-07-31, 20:07:

[...]
https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/mainbo … 593491-225-9098

i am not sure if would be worth a purchase though. it says that has a on boad graphics unit and that's not what i am looking for because i am not sure if I can turn of the integrated graphics unit in the bios to use a real gpu.

Yes, you can insert external graphics card in AGP slot and disable integrated S3 Savage, but
this one is one of the earliest Socket A boards with SDR Memory (and its VRM capacitors are not in good condition).
Therefore I don't recommend it.
You'd rather look for something newer (KT400 and up). You may p.m. me as well 😀

zyga64 wrote on 2023-07-31, 20:44:

Yes, you can insert external graphics card in AGP slot and disable integrated S3 Savage, but this one is one of the earliest So […]
Show full quote

gamefan_851 wrote on 2023-07-31, 20:07:

[...]
https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/mainbo … 593491-225-9098

i am not sure if would be worth a purchase though. it says that has a on boad graphics unit and that's not what i am looking for because i am not sure if I can turn of the integrated graphics unit in the bios to use a real gpu.

Yes, you can insert external graphics card in AGP slot and disable integrated S3 Savage, but
this one is one of the earliest Socket A boards with SDR Memory (and its VRM capacitors are not in good condition).
Therefore I don't recommend it.
You'd rather look for something newer (KT400 and up). You may p.m. me as well 😀

Thanks a lot for the info. Then I will keep looking for something newer that thas the Kt 400 chipset or better).

edit: is there a particular mobo with the kt 400 or highter you would recommend?

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-07-30, 21:22:

FX5200/FX5500 - useless trash cards for an Athlon system. FX5600 - more reliable, but somewhat slower in older games and horrend […]
Show full quote

FX5200/FX5500 - useless trash cards for an Athlon system.
FX5600 - more reliable, but somewhat slower in older games and horrendously slower in games with Shader Model 2.0 (DirectX9).
FX5700 - same thing, 50/50 chance it would be DOA.
5900XT - more reliable, from my experience, but harder to find at affordable price nowadays.

But 9550/9600 cards are very affordable and numerous, so you may want to try to gamble anyway.

The 9550 is cheap as chips and seems to be able to survive Chernobyl, but a far better card than a FX5200 IMHO. Not a great card, but vs a 64bit FX 5600 I'd take the 9550.

The 9550 is cheap as chips and seems to be able to survive Chernobyl

Same as 9600 - early flip chip design with shitty coolers.