Nice post!

I'm quite startled by the big differences in performance shown here.

Can you say anything about VIA's stability btw? Or was your testing crash-free?

Thanks a lot. It took ages. On and off, a couple of days to do. Everything was crash free. But the removal of the ATAPI fix was interesting -

I rolled back the CF device to the beginning again, so it had a fresh Win98SE installation on it. I then installed the VIA 4-in-1 SP, version 4.37. I ticked all of its installation options. I noticed when I tried to benchmark Serious Sam, the demo stuttered for about 0.5 seconds during play, and consequently the benchmark readings provided by this game were incomplete. I tried 3 reboots, and this problem occured all 3 times. I then reran the VIA SP 4.37, and chose to uninstall the ATAPI fix. And that fixed this problem! 😀

The results obtained for 4.37 were roughly inline with previous VIA SPs, but the 3D Mark score is a bit poor. Conclusion: 4.35 seems to be the best out of the four SPs I tried.

retro games 100 wrote:

Thanks a lot. It took ages. On and off, a couple of days to do. Everything was crash free. But the removal of the ATAPI fix […]
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Thanks a lot. It took ages. On and off, a couple of days to do. Everything was crash free. But the removal of the ATAPI fix was interesting -

I rolled back the CF device to the beginning again, so it had a fresh Win98SE installation on it. I then installed the VIA 4-in-1 SP, version 4.37. I ticked all of its installation options. I noticed when I tried to benchmark Serious Sam, the demo stuttered for about 0.5 seconds during play, and consequently the benchmark readings provided by this game were incomplete. I tried 3 reboots, and this problem occured all 3 times. I then reran the VIA SP 4.37, and chose to uninstall the ATAPI fix. And that fixed this problem! 😀

The results obtained for 4.37 were roughly inline with previous VIA SPs, but the 3D Mark score is a bit poor. Conclusion: 4.35 seems to be the best out of the four SPs I tried.

Yup, seems VIA SP 4.35 + NV 43.45 is the way forward here!

I think your research into KT133A the 98SE SP 2.1 and the NV drivers will be quite useful for future setups of mine! 😉
The fact that the 98SE SP doesn't influence performance is any significant way is imo a good thing. Iirc the SP was meant to only provide updates, more features and increased stability, essentially making 98SE more "modern" 😉

Any idea about the Radeons and their performance?

A bit off topic: Think it would be a good idea to start somekind of knowledge-base thread where we can all post our experiences with VIA and what drivers/software_packages work best for us?

So did you checked that your memory timing were set such way that they allowed rank interleave? Did you use a 2 or 4 interleave?
Are you sure that 23.11 didn't had a AGP speed fallback?
Is the Atapi Fix something to prevent the data corruption on Port2 if there is high PCI traffic?

I have to congratulate your patience. I hate the Via 4in1 SP with a passion, but I suppose your research could really help a lot of people here, as it could have helped me a few months ago!

VIA s370 and KT133(A) seem like motherboards that require a bit of tweaking to get working correctly, kinda like Super 7

Re: check memory timing: There's no interleave BIOS option for this board. I think the idea behind the patch is to enable it, but I don't know any more details.

Re: Are you sure that 23.11 didn't had a AGP speed fallback? Say if 23.11 has a "speed fallback" (I'm not sure what you mean), I don't think you can enable it to dramatically improve performance.

Re: Atapi Fix. ATM, my board has no PCI add-in cards, so the successful uninstall of this particular VIA component seemed to assist performance in other non-PCI ways.

Re: Radeons. Actually, I tried to get a Radeon 9800 XT working in this mobo, but it wouldn't POST. I think the previous owner's replacement capacitor near the AGP slot prevents this card from being properly seated!

Re: knowledgebase threads. Can't see anything wrong with that idea! 😀

retro games 100 wrote:

When I installed the VIA 4in1 service packs, I chose to install all options. If the AGP segment had an option, I chose "turbo mode".

I've just installed 4in1 4.35 on my new rig and 'Standard mode' was selected by default. What is the actual difference between Standard and Turbo mode and which one is preferred?

There is a tool for tweaking the VIA memory interleave (as most bios have it wrong), I forgot the name of it at the moment... my win98 machine is currently offline, when I get it put back together I'll post the tool. It uses a vxd to override the bios and set the memory interleave. You can also adjust the ram timings with it and other things.

There is also a later version of the tool which uses a sys driver and works in 2k/xp.

Necrobump.

Thanks for this comparison. I recently set up a KT133A build and used the 4-in-1 driver that was on the installation CD, 4.43v.

I use 45.23 with my Ti4600, so I was wondering whether it would be worth it to install 4.35. Unless I'm missing something, the only major difference I see is with the WinTune 98 "Video" score.

Also, I am using a fresh Win98SE install + DX8.1 but not the Breese patches.