Officially, there is no native support or official drivers from Nvidia for the Quadro FX 3450 PCIe on Windows 98 SE

zapbuzz wrote on 2026-01-09, 09:07:

Officially, there is no native support or official drivers from Nvidia for the Quadro FX 3450 PCIe on Windows 98 SE

That's not an issue. There's a patched version of the Forceware drivers that works.

There are cheap SATA to IDE adapters that work (about 4 USD). I'm using one with an Abit KT7A Athlon board:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006917394 … .3af018023AY3sJ

This even works with a Samsung 860 EVO 256GB SSD that never worked properly with older non-intel native SATA controllers.
I cannot tell the possible maximum speed since the Abit KT7A even with native IDE drives can achieve about 70 MB/sec max. With the adapter the SSD can achiveve the same speed.

zapbuzz wrote on 2026-01-09, 09:07:

Officially, there is no native support or official drivers from Nvidia for the Quadro FX 3450 PCIe on Windows 98 SE

I tried a Quadro 3450 in Windows 98. It ran 3D benchmarks ok I think, but I recall being disappointed with general game compatibility. I think it also gave me windows stability issues also, like failing to shut down cleanly. Will be interesting to see if you find the same.

Falcosoft wrote on 2026-01-09, 10:20:

There are cheap SATA to IDE adapters that work (about 4 USD). I'm using one with an Abit KT7A Athlon board:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006917394 … .3af018023AY3sJ

I was just looking for cheap SATA2IDE adapter, thanks for sharing!

I suspect that you will have some issues with the GPU. Drivers installing is one thing, games working is another.
Even vanilla Geforce 6000 series support is a hot mess in Windows 98.
Best of luck though.

Jasin Natael wrote on 2026-01-09, 18:56:

I suspect that you will have some issues with the GPU. Drivers installing is one thing, games working is another.
Even vanilla Geforce 6000 series support is a hot mess in Windows 98.
Best of luck though.

I was never much of a gamer—nevertheless, I have different machines for different responsibilities. For retro gaming on Windows, I have a Dell Optiplex 760, Core2 Duo 3.2GHz, 4GB RAM, Nvidia Quadro FX 1800 running Windows XP and Windows 7.

For the machine at the top of the thread, my intention is to dual-boot Windows 98SE and Windows 2000, so in theory, I could run the Windows games on Windows 2000, but there's really no need for that (as I would tend to use Windows XP or Windows 7 instead).

The games I care most about on Windows 98SE are MS-DOS (Doom, Duke Nukem, Skyroads, etc.) and since these use VGA (or VESA at a push), hopefully these won't cause any issues as they are not hardware or 3D accelerated.

If you've reached this point, my next attempt at getting Windows 98 installed, is to ditch the onboard SATA controller (since it cannot operate in legacy IDE mode), and instead use a Silicon Image Sil3114 PCI/SATA controller card. These apparently have good compatibility with Windows 98, and can operate in legacy IDE mode.

Admittedly, this does throttle the SSD by a long way, as a SATA3 SSD should operate at around 600MB/s, but PCI in reality is only around 100-110MB/s....comparatively fast for Windows 98, but slow for SATA.

Anyway, I've got to wait a couple of weeks for the controller card to arrive, so I'll update on progress later.

ONIXLabs wrote on Yesterday, 11:12:

The games I care most about on Windows 98SE are MS-DOS (Doom, Duke Nukem, Skyroads, etc.) and since these use VGA (or VESA at a push), hopefully these won't cause any issues as they are not hardware or 3D accelerated.

There is no point overcomplicating things with hardware that is too modern then. Get a decent socket A (these ones work well with modern PSUs), socket 478 or socket 754 board, or socket 370 if you find it cheap. Pair them with a 128bit Geforce MX, which is also cheap and a Yamaha YMF-7x4 sound card or if you get a cheap s370 board with ISA, then YMF-718/719 for DOS. These tend to be cheap too. This gives you maximum compatibility at minimum cost.