Thanks, Serpent Rider. I'm a bit out of place with Radeons as the only ones I have ever used were my 8500, 9800 and 4850 when new. I was rocking Nvidia between 9800 to 4850.

I plan hybridizing Catalyst 7.7 with the OpenGL files from Catalyst 7.11 and seeing how that works out for me. I may also forgo the CCC for Tray Tools, which I remember using a lot of back in the day.

As far as Catalyst is concerned, what driver components aren't necessary? I know CCC is optional and I don't need South Bridge drivers. What is the WDM portion and BIN portion of the driver folders?

I think, there's not much you can trim from X series cards. Well, obviously VIVO, but that's also optional install.

EDIT: You can also try to poke N2O Driver pack (also creation from radeon.ru) and see what they've did. These drivers had big emphasis on small driver size (no control panel or installers).

The hybridizing comment reminds me that you can just drop a particular ATI OpenGL ICD file into the game directory. That usually works fine as long as the drivers and OpenGL ICD are of relatively similar vintage.

It's also possible Catalyst 7.7's ICD is just as great as 7.11's for those Bioware games. I just know 7.12 is a cut off point and ~Catalyst 5.x and earlier should be missing effects, possibly slow and unstable.

By the way the X1000 series has some pretty nice 16-bit color dithering, improved from the previous cards for some reason and much better than anything from Nvidia. One interesting thing to do is run DGVoodoo1 at 16-bit color and get what at least I think is a really nice dithered look from old Glide games. Wheel of Time is a good one.

They also have superb anisotropic filtering. The HQ AF mode looks nicer than even most of the Radeon HD cards. Less mid distance mip map aliasing/shimmer.

I've got my Barton 2500 in running as a 3200 now. 3dMark 03 only picked up 100 points going from 2.0 to 2.2ghz.

I'm using a hybrid driver I threw together quickly. It's the 7.4 with old control panel using 7.7 D3D and 7.11 OpenGL. I noticed the OpenGL was setup differently between 7.4 and 7.11 in the inf and compensated for that. Everything is running well so far. I don't have KOTOR to test on it though.

I REALLY need to do something with the fan speed. It's the loudest thing in the system which is super quiet otherwise. I may rig up a PCI slot switch with some resistors on a switch to slow it down.

Rewire that fan to run on 5V, may that helps.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-07-01, 22:04:

Rewire that fan to run on 5V, may that helps.

Cheers,

I wired a potentiometer in line and it didn't work at all. I've got a resistor assortment on the way to test different values.

Even wired 5V direct?

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-07-01, 22:34:

Even wired 5V direct?

Cheers,

I haven't tried it. A bit worried that it wouldn't be fast enough at that power level.

Is this the CPU fan or the GPU?

The GPU.

Did you try the legendary Omega Drivers? https://www.guru3d.com/files-categories ... fied).html

I haven't but this hybrid set I've cooked up seems to work well so far. I may share it after a while but I don't have much time to mess with it. I've much more time to post about it. 🤓

Changing my AGP aperture from 256 to 512 gained a tiny amount in 3dMark, up to around 13080 now. I'm not sure what I should have it at. I figured 512 wouldn't hurt as the system has 2gb and the card is 256mb.

I'm not sure if there is a downside to maxing out the aperture but that usually seems like the way to go. I'm not sure if other manufacturers had recommendations, but Matrox suggested 256MB to avoid G400 OpenGL problems. The setting is an upper limit on dynamic usage.
https://www.evga.com/support/faq/FAQdetails.aspx?faqid=59067

What sort of cooler does your particular X1950 have on it? I have a X1950XTX CF edition with the standard ATI OEM blower cooler. It usually works properly and uses the VBIOS's speed/temp table, but sometimes it will just lock to full speed. I think it's a solder joint somewhere because it behaves normally once it gets warmed up, or sometimes if I touch the board.

It's the stock Visiontek cooler. X1950 Pro 256mb AGP. Tray tools has the fan section grayed out. I'm going to experiment with some resistors in a few days and may solder up a rig with a switch for quiet mode.

Edit: Replacement fan came and is much quieter. I also wired in a 33 ohm resistor in line to slow it a little bit. It's not bad now as long as my hack job holds together.

I ran 3dMark 2003 with my system at default 2500+ speed with my hybrid driver. 12896 is what it scored. When CPU overclocked to 2.3ghz and the video card overclocked slightly, the best I have managed is 13490. The overclock on the CPU is helpful because my setup is certainly bottlenecked there in games.

The hybrid driver works great except for some annoying screen blink when initializing tray tools or the control panel. It's a 7.4 old control panel set with 7.7 D3D files and 7.11 OGL files.

I can't recommend a particular driver version but Omega drivers are nice addition to all 9500, 9700SE, 9550, 9800SE owners.

9x00SE cards can unlock 4 Pixel Shaders/TMU/ROP which give a nice ~20% boost to a PRO card level. Same goes for a few 9500 / 9550 models with L-shaped memory config and 256bit bus.

9800SE AIW model cards are basically a guaranteed unlock since they only slowed those down for floppy power connector requirements and always use L-shaped memory config

Hello guys, do you know how to enable, or how to check if Fast Write and Side Band Adressing are ENABLED through software? all the time i was using just the bios options

RivaTuner.

I can share my latest 3DMark03 from a newly recapped EPoX 8K3A.

I actually found this post because of some troubleshooting after re-installing Windows XP.
Catalyst 10-4 refused to install. Every time I ran setup I got an eternal blinking cursor in the upper left corner. Some SnappyDriver installation later + newer Catalyst + removal .. I managed to get past troubles and I now have results from version 8.723 / Catalyst™ Software Suite 10.4 which is my designated version. I got good scores with this in the past.

I have used MSI MS-6380E a lot, running with the same CPU & GPU, Athlon XP 2800+ Barton & Radeon HD 4650.

Results from MS-6380E & 8K3A are now very close but tighter RAM timings are possible with EPoX.
I also switched to a solid copper cooler and have more consistent CPUMarks (Zalman CNPS 5000+ https://www.ocinside.de/review/fan_zalman_cnps5000plus/) .
Either because of the cooler or because of the timings. Maybe a bit of both?

I came up with the conclusion that I got better results after a cold boot where the heat sink is room temperature.
The Athlon XP may not have thermal throttling but.. Southbridge can assert STPCLK# in response to THERM#.
So I think a good cooler is at least as important as frequency, it has direct impact on CPUMarks, correct me if I'm wrong on any of this 😜

As there are not that many publicly available benchmarks of Athlon XP, it was good to see Shishkebarbarian's benchmark from a HD4670.

Performance with an X850 XT is terrible on anything but an Athlon 64 onwards.