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: […]
Show full quote

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: […]
Show full quote

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.