Just got an Accelero S2 for this thing! It's quite big, but doesn't weigh all that much - only 211 grams. I managed to get the stock cooler off fairly easily. On the back of the card, there are two plastic things holding the heatsink on. I snipped the ends off with some small scissors. Then, I pushed these snipped off plastic bits downwards, with the tip of the scissors. These snipped off plastic bits then went through the retaining holes, and the heatsink could then be freed.

The 2 bottles in the photo did not come with the package. I bought them seperately, and use them whenever I need to do stuff like this. One bottle cleans the area, the other bottle prepares the area.

I just installed it, and I didn't break it! It still works! 😉

retro games 100 wrote:

I just installed it, and I didn't break it! It still works! :wink: […]
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I just installed it, and I didn't break it! It still works! 😉

I can't believe you're passively cooling this. Is the fan really so loud and power hungry that you'd give up that much space and a PCI slot?

retro games 100 wrote:

I just installed it, and I didn't break it! It still works! :wink: […]
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I just installed it, and I didn't break it! It still works! 😉

Is that... plenum rated VGA cable? It's almost got to be as thick as it is.

Man, that's a really nice cable. Who makes it, and how much damage did it do to your wallet?

sliderider wrote:

I can't believe you're passively cooling this. Is the fan really so loud and power hungry that you'd give up that much space and a PCI slot?

The stock cooler is really poor, and the wasted PCI slot is the "shared" one next to the AGP port, so I'm happy to give that up!

SavantStrike wrote:

Man, that's a really nice cable. Who makes it, and how much damage did it do to your wallet?

This seller is practically giving them away - recommended! 😀
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … em=380315875528 (UK ebay auction)

I've attached the RAM heatsinks supplied with the Accelero cooler to the 4 RAM chips on one side of the video card. Now, looking at the other side of the video card, I notice that there's a sticky label covering 2 of the RAM chips.

I tried to peel them off, but they have left "torn sticky paper" behind, stuck to these RAM chips. Before I put the RAM heatsinks on to these chips, what is the best way to remove this "torn sticky paper" please? Thanks a lot for any advice.

Rubbing alcohol and a paper cloth? Just let it soak for a moment. Not sure if it'll work, I usually don't bother with removing stickers.

Tetrium wrote:

Rubbing alcohol and a paper cloth? Just let it soak for a moment. Not sure if it'll work, I usually don't bother with removing stickers.

It will.

Rubbing alcohol removes nearly every thing. Especially the 99 percent pure stuff (search for it at drug stores, they carry it).

I love these Arctic Cooling cleaning bottles. They are fantastic!

Regarding the passive cooling, while possible, it does rely on case fan ventilation.

Another alternative (which is time accurate) is this one from Zalman:

I had one of these back in the day, and Sapphire even shipped a passive version of some of their cards using this cooler.

Zalman also sold a fan for this product:

Which ones are cheapest now btw? I'd love to get a few, but I am not going to pay €30x4 🤣!

I am testing these two Radeon 9800 cards again. They are the one featured in my o.p., and also the one with the Accelero cooler on it. Firstly, they have different BIOSes.

Here is Everest Ultimate info about the ATI card in the o.p.

Here is Everest Ultimate info about the Accelero cooled ATI card. The Part Number is different to the one above. Although the PCB has the same part number on it compared to the ATI card in the o.p., the sticker on the back of this card shows a different part number to the card in the o.p., and this is reflected in the Everest info shown below.

I wonder why the Accelero cooled one is R360. Isn't that an XT? I wonder if it's a 9800 Pro that the previous owner has flashed to an XT (which apparently is possible according to the net), or whether it's one of Sapphire's Atlantis models, which I think is "between" a Pro and an XT.

Anyway, the point of my rambling is that with the Accelero cooled R9800, I couldn't install any driver other than the last 6.2 Windows ME targeted version. When installing an older driver eg 3.7, I saw the familiar ATI error message saying that it couldn't find the appropriate ATI card to install the driver. (I've seen this message over the years, when testing different old ATI cards.)

I was going to investigate whether this problem was due to the card's BIOS, when I decided to attempt the old driver installation on a different mobo. I think this mobo has a different VIA 4-in-1 driver. I think it's 4.35. The other test mobo (Epox) was 4.43. To my great surprise, the old driver that I was trying to install (version 3.7) worked. So, it wasn't the ATI BIOS that was causing this driver to fail. It may have been the VIA 4-in-1 driver version.

Flashing these cards was very popular, so it's possible that the owner increased the clocks that way.

You could look up old reviews to double check the stock clocks.

I had a 9800 and I also had it flashed.

I had a quick browse online, and I think the BIOS is a 9800 Pro version, with stock clocks. I wonder if increasing the stock clocks has led to so many defective Radeon 9800s being found on ebay these days? 😉

retro games 100 wrote:

I had a quick browse online, and I think the BIOS is a 9800 Pro version, with stock clocks. I wonder if increasing the stock clocks has led to so many defective Radeon 9800s being found on ebay these days? 😉

Ow, thanks for the warning. One reason to not be hasty when it comes to top-of-the-line graphics cards. You never know what the previous owner done with it, and people who buy high end cards tend to be more of the overclocker kind.

I did a comparison test, between Windows 98 and Windows ME. The hardware used was a Radeon 9800 Pro, using a VIA mobo + 1.4 Pentium III server CPU, 256MB RAM. Benchmark = Serious Sam, demo 5, 1280x1024x32. For the W-ME test, I did a fresh install.

When the W-ME test showed a drop in performance compared to the W-98 test, I tried a few tricks to improve it. I installed the VIA 4-in-1 4.35 chipset driver, with the AGP in turbo mode. That didn't improve the score, so I installed George Breese's latency and memory interleave patches. That's didn't improve the score. I then doubled the amount of mobo RAM to 512MB, but that didn't help either. In fact, the scores dropped a fraction.

The last thing I did to try and improve W-ME performance was to uninstall the ATI driver version 3.7 (seems to be a good one for W98), and install the W-ME targeted driver version 6.2, and it helps. Please bear in mind that the W-ME test system has "enhancements" over the W-98 test system, including the extra RAM (although that may make things fractionally worse), and the George Breese patches.

retro games 100 wrote on 2011-04-22, 18:54:

Introduction I am testing an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB AGP video card. Its part number is PN 109-A07500-00. It seems to have […]
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Introduction
I am testing an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB AGP video card. Its part number is PN 109-A07500-00. It seems to have heatsinks on nearly every chip! I'm testing it on a KT133A based mobo with 256MB of RAM, and a mobile barton 2000+ rated CPU.

1) Link to this card's BIOS.
2) Link to the ATI video card flash utility, FlashRom version 2.4.
3) Links to the ATI Catalyst driver version 3.7. See note 3 below.
4) Link to the ATI Catalyst driver version 6.2.

Notes
1) The webpage for the BIOS says that the same BIOS can be found in the Crucial 9800 Pro, GeCube 9800 Pro, and Powercolor 9800 Pro cards. I assume this is the latest BIOS.
2) This utility works in DOS. BTW, I found out all of the card's relevant BIOS info by running Everest Ultimate.
3) Please google for this file. It's called wme-catalyst-7-93-030812a1-010735c-efg.exe. I tested some of these old ATI drivers, and information about these tests can be found below. I found that version 3.7 was the fastest.
4) This is the latest and final driver which works on W98. It was written with ME in mind, and is based on the WDM (windows driver model). It seems to be the slowest driver to use, when I tested it with Windows 98.

Benchmark info
I decided to test some of the old ATI Catalyst drivers. I wanted to see if they made the card run any faster or slower. I began with version 3.1, and ended with version 6.2. Uninstalling one version then installing another version was problematic. In the end, I got this technique working OK. What you need to do is this:

1) Uninstall the ATI Catalyst software found inside the Windows 98 Control Panel "add/remove" software area. If it's listed as one item such as "ATI Driver", then you just need to uninstall that, but if it's listed as a "cluster" of 3 apps, with one of them being called "uninstaller", then double-click on that one in order to uninstall all 3 of these apps. Then reboot.
2) Delete the "error / yellow exclamation mark!" VGA driver found inside the W98 control panel System / Display area. Then reboot.
3) When the desktop reappears, W98 will reinstall the VGA driver. Rebooting is not necessary at this point.
4) Run Driver Cleaner version 2.7. Select to clean out the "ATI" driver. Then reboot, although this may not be necessary.
5) Install the next ATI Catalyst driver for testing...

Benchmark data
The format below is x=y where x is the ATI Catalyst version and y is the score from 3DMark 2001 s.e.

3.1 = I could not get this to install. I don't think this version covers the Radeon 9800 Pro card. I think the Pro card was released after version 3.1 was released.
3.2 = I could not get this to install. The installation routine reported "infsetup errors". I expect this version does not cover the Pro card.
3.3 = I decided not to look for this version on the net.
3.4 = 11502
3.5 = 11506
3.6 = 11534
3.7 = 11663 (Fastest)
3.8 = 11554
3.9 = 11454
3.10 = 11528
3.? = I'm not sure if there are any more 3.x drivers, after version 3.10. I've seen 3.11 mentioned, but when I downloaded it, it was version 4.1
4.1 = 11489
4.2 = 11451
4.3 = 11297
4.4 = I don't think there's a driver for W98 from this version onwards. Apart from one more they did, which is version 6.2
6.2 = 10187 (Slowest)

It was a lot of "fun" trying to track down all of these old ATI w98 driver versions. If you want to do the same, here is a good tip. You'll find the Windows 2000/XP versions much easier to find. For example, just take a look on the oldapps.com website. Once you find them, notice that each download package has a text file in them with the large driver name. Copy this in to your clipboard, and paste it in to google, and then rename it to wme-xxxx, where xxxx is the large driver version number. (You want to remove the wxp-w2k letters.)

Then google for this search string. You'll then find the wme (windows me) driver versions fairly easily. Another tip is - change the first group of letters from wme-xxxx to control-panel-xxxx, if you find that the downloaded wme driver package has been "cut down" to just include the driver itself, and it does not contain the ATI control panel app. You can then track down the correct version number for the ATI control panel.

The card

I'm sorry to disturb this post after all this time , but is the support/brackets that holds the fan-radiator on the gpu made of metal? did you get them from anywhere? and the BGA heatsinks.... copper ?duble sided pads? Is it posible to still find some in EU for buying?

BTW , did you test the GPU with drivers from Guru3d webpage archive? did it handle better with the omega drivers?