If the AGP card obstruction is at least half inch above the PCI slot, it should be possible to get a PCI riser on a ribbon cable in there.

Oh, USB sound, these nasty little buggers are around cheap a few places and I think are old enough to have 98SE support, but not sure if they do true EA...
https://techsourcecanada.ca/computer-and-lapt … 5.1-sound-card/

However, you may want to look at projects using pico and pi boards that let you have multiple cards in one.

Edit: This looks like the same one on Amazon, in the details there it says it does EAX and Win98
https://www.amazon.ca/Sound-Channel-External- … sr_1_45?sr=8-33
But these things are everywhere, can probably find one at a more local tech junk store.

I mean yeah, unless you aren't really going to compromise on swapping the agp card or removing one of the voodoo 2s to free up a slot, another option is to swap the motherboard.

Using pci/agp extender seems janky, over other options. But as BitWrangler said, maybe an alternative multi sound card in an isa slot is an order, if you don't mind that it is not 100% original, that will also fix your slot problem.

yeah i'd drop the whole v2 sli fantasy and stick with one at most. SLI has more drawbacks than benefits. it's overrated. I'd also drop the AWE64

I'd also drop the awe64.

You'd be better served with SB16 compatability with a waveblaster stuck to it, or a modern rethinking of the GUS if you need user uploaded sound patches.

AWE64 is more for a small handful of 90s windows games that used creative labs' soundfont loader. To target both platforms (win9x and dos), get an awe32 instead.

I once used a PCI extension cable to utilize the adjacent ISA and PCI slots (normally I could use just one of them). But nearby a graphics card I'm not sure, you may want to check first whether this would obstruct an air flow and cooling.

Such cables can be easily found and they should be cheap on the Chinese marketplaces - here is an example - but their soldering quality was not very good, so I strongly recommend to check the connectivity in each of the lines and that it's uninterrupted when you bend the cable, or just resolder it right away.

From the build perspective, the main challenge was with the IRQs: not every PCI slot is equal, you may need to study the MB manual and shuffle stuff to keep everything working and stable when adding more cards.

Also, think ahead how you can secure any card on the extender: I attached it to the case on a metal bracket, by the same screw holding the graphics card, but this can work somewhat reliably only with the smaller and lighter pieces.

And keep in mind that not every card is a good candidate for putting it on a riser, since the rear ports will be not directly accessible after closing the case. I ended up with the combo IDE/SATA/USB2 controller - the USB could be connected to a front panel, and the rest didn't need a constant access. Some smaller sound card maybe good option as well, if you can daisy-chain it to another sound card inside the case (using its internal line-in or cd-in connector).

Summing up: this option works, but it needs both experimentation and good planning.

My 2-cents worth of suggestion:
Drop the stock cooler on the AGP card and use water cooling with a single-slot cooler block.
I imagine that would also work to lower the temperature of the GPU too, which should help it last longer as well, especially given that it's an nVidia.
Now I know this may not be cheap or easy to implement... but I never tried to claim that it would be. 😀

leileilol wrote on Today, 19:59:

yeah i'd drop the whole v2 sli fantasy and stick with one at most. SLI has more drawbacks than benefits. it's overrated.

For me, 1024*768 with Z-buffer at high framerate was quite the benefit. As long as the CPU can feed them fast enough, but with a P4 3000 that should be no issue at all. My P3 1000 does it just fine. For Glide, that is. For Direct3D it's far easier to just plonk a good, more recent D3D card in it. My 4200Ti outperforms the Voodi in Direct3D.