Here is the list of video cards that don't show a video signal in my motherboard:

1PCI  Dell 09629U   P0002            Nvidia TNT		
2AGP  VisionTek     NV996            Nvidia TNT2 M64
3AGP  Compaq 179997 P0016            Nvidia TNT2
4AGP  Dell 0G0170   P118             Nvidia Geforce FX5200
5PCI  GeCube        GC-R9250LPCI-C3  ATi Radeon 9250
6PCI  VisionTek     X1550 V/D/VO	    ATi Radeon x1550

The computer boots with these cards, there's just no video signal.

Just about finished with the benchmarking.

I thought I'd try out the fastest card that works with the motherboard to see how well it performs. I have a FireGL 9700 X1-128 and a busted up Radeon 9800Pro with a missing inductor and a broken fan.

I got the FireGL 9700 X1-128 running in Windows 98 using catalyst 6.2 with the 9700pro driver. Everything runs fin in dos windows except for 3dmark. 3dmark99 gives me about a dozen of the tiny arrow check boxes that the catalyst control center uses as bullet points and then locks. 3dmark2000 goes black for 5 seconds and then returns to the windows desktop. Hmmmm. Is it because of the driver? The driver with the FireGl card? The driver with the FireGl card and 3dnow and this bios? I upgraded to DirectX9c. No luck.

So I put a new inductor on the 9800pro and rigged a fan.

It looked great in a 2d desktop. The Text mode on the other hand ....

I tried 3dmark and got the same failures as I did with FireGL 9700 X1-128. Tried some quake 2 GL and it was running pretty well for about a minute before it had a burst of VGA garbage before going black. Looks like the 9800 pro needs some more recovery time.

I thought about trying the omega drivers with the 9700. For a second. And then I remembered why I hated rage cards back in the day.

But on the plus side, I was finally able to get ATTO benchmark to run on the innodisk CF. It only does UDMA 4 with the promise controller.

I'd really like to get that 9700 to run just to see what the best case scenario might look like, even though it seems like it might not make that much of a difference on a slow CPU.

I tried these patches: Re: 3dmark99 MegaThread Re: 3dmark99 MegaThread

I’ve always known that SGRAM was more desirable than SDRAM, but I had thought it was just more capable ram, as in it could hit higher frequencies. After looking at my benchmark, I can see that SGRAM out performs SDRAM by about 5-15% on 3D workloads at the same frequency and I started asking more questions. How could that be? Bulk fills and masked writes handled by the ram chips themselves? I see. Seems reasonable. Z occlusion built into the ram? My My. Very Interesting. I should have stopped there. I started looking into more advanced GDDR features . When I got up to bus and address inversion, my mind was blown like the first time I looked into MFM vs RLL or Row Hammer exploits. Time for bed. That’s quite the box of tidbits that I never knew about.

I tried a bunch of stuff like disabling AGP x2 in the BIOS & changing the AGP aperture window. No difference.

Turns out that going back to ATI Catalyst 4.3 did the trick. 3dmark 99 and 2000 are running now on the FireGL 9700.

https://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=1567

douglar wrote on 2025-08-29, 18:55:

Here is the list of video cards that don't show a video signal in my motherboard: […]
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Here is the list of video cards that don't show a video signal in my motherboard:

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1PCI  Dell 09629U   P0002            Nvidia TNT		
2AGP  VisionTek     NV996            Nvidia TNT2 M64
3AGP  Compaq 179997 P0016            Nvidia TNT2
4AGP  Dell 0G0170   P118             Nvidia Geforce FX5200
5PCI  GeCube        GC-R9250LPCI-C3  ATi Radeon 9250
6PCI  VisionTek     X1550 V/D/VO	    ATi Radeon x1550

The computer boots with these cards, there's just no video signal.

I got the AGP TNT and the FX5200 cards to work in DOS! I wish I knew how though. PCI TNT is still a no-go. And I still don't have them working in Win98.

I also recapped an old 64 bit memory MX 4000 card because my working MX 4000 card turned out to only be 32 bit memory.
Here is is with Puffy Caps-- https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/bfg-asl-mx4000
Curiously, I went by the name "Puffy Caps" when I was a slam poet. (<--- Joke!)

Repo Man11 wrote on 2025-08-25, 23:23:

When I've used Promise IDE cards with MVP3 motherboards they have always worked, but at some point in installing Windows 98 drivers Windows would get stuck when rebooting and I would have to move the card to another PCI slot. Once all of the drivers were installed this would no longer happen and I could leave it in the same slot from then on. Just an FYI.

Apparently this is also a good strategy for PCI video cards too. If you card doesn't initialize in PCI slot 3, try moving it to PCI slot 2. Now it works. If it isn't working in slot 2, try slot 3. It must reset the PCI Bus Enumeration or something like that.

Anyway, I have a surprise leader in the benchmarks right now. PCI Creative Labs 3D Blaster Banshee (CT6750)

edit -- Although it looks like it just locked hard in 3dmark 2000 =(
edit -- It was HOT! Seems to be running stable now that I put a fan on it
edit -- Moving the card around fixed some cards, but the Radeon PCI 9250 & X1550, Riva TNT PCI , and Intel i740 AGP are still not liking this board.
edit -- Intel i740 AGP works if I disable AGP 2x features in the BIOS

The full results are below--

Seems like the Banshee might be best for earlier games and the MX4000 might be better for later games, but I guess that all comes down to drivers

What are some good games to test that would be picky about the cards and drivers ?

Notes:

• The Chris3d benchmark gives a pretty clear rating of AGP vs PCI
• Could not get the PNY MX4000 to run doom fast, even though it had some of the best 3d mark scores
• I ran 3d Bench from an 800x600x16bit desktop using the default test button. That's 800x600x 16bit for 3DM99 and 1024x768x16bit for #DM2K.
• The cards slower than the i740 had serious 3d rendering issues. The i740 itself had pretty good rendering quality
• 3d Bench 99 seemed CPU limited on everything faster than the i740
• 3d Bench 2000 seemed like there was a bandwidth limitation and a driver CPU limitation.
• In the end, PCI vs AGP didn't matter all that much. In the Voodoo3 case, the PCI card had SGRAM that offset any advantages that AGP had.
• While the Fire 9700 is clearly the fastest card here, the K6-III 400 CPU wasn't able to feed it fast enough, allowing cards like the MX4000 and Voodoo that have lower CPU requirements in the drivers to out pace it.

I rearranged some of the rows in the table above and I found another NV5 card yesterday and I added it in the chart.

I think the noticeable things are that --

• Doom scores pretty much plateau after the GPU's got to 66Mhz, except for the later Nvidia cards when DOS became lower priority
• Even though the three cards in the Rage 128 category has PCI, AGP and faster AGP, the 3dmark scores don't really change, suggesting that even this card
• Unclear why the pair of NV18 cards do so well on 3dmark 2000. Do they cheat some how?

OK , I see that I got the wrong date on the Rage Pro Ultra. Should be 1999-09.