I believe the 6800 Ultra Extreme AGP could be, as that's the last AGP card to have 98SE support on the Nvidia front. I believe ATi dropped support much earlier than they did.

hey guys;)
on the topic of high end win98se machine
ill just share my specs.. i have two machines for this purpose..

one is the Aopen AX3SU http://www.motherboards.org/mobot/motherboard … d/AOpen/AX3S-U/
and i have this machine running a PIII 1.4ghz "-S" processor with 512MB ram (2 x 256MB pc133 SDRAM)
gfx card: geforce 6200 256MB vram AGP

and my other machine is an Asus P5PE-VM https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P5PEVM/
and its running an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 cpu! with 512MB ram (2 x 256MB DDR400)
gfx card: Geforce 6600GT AGP

i wish i had a geforce 6800 ultra tho 😉 i had wanted to explore the higher end AGP options but i lost interest in favour of more midi related lo-tech goals;)

philscomputerlab wrote:

If we just consider going for overkill, what IS the fastest AGP card for a Windows 98 SE machine?

i have heard of someone using a 7800GS by Gainward..
i think that is the fastest because its really a 7900GT? or something like this? i remember reading that it was a PCI-E level card that was back-ported to AGP by gainward basically.. using some kind of PCI-E to AGP bridge
but its a pain in the ass to get the drivers to work .. i forget all the specifics.

i cant remember this is stuff from a few years ago - my brain cant keep up.. but i remember figuring all of this out last year or the year before
and also hacking the geforce 6xxx series drivers to support widescreen on my lcd widescreen monitor

i think this is the card tho:

I have a P3 Coppermine 1Ghz machine with 512MB RIMMs and decided after much benchmark checking and testing to drop a Geforce 3Ti 500 in there. It seemed to give scores pretty close to what the Geforce 3Ti was capable of doing and the games from that era all played amazingly well. I had tested it with a Ti4800se, a 5900Ultra, a 6600GT and a 9800Pro. To be honest some games like Quake III OSP ran smoother with the lowly Geforce 2 Ultra than with the Geforce 3Ti and I figured there was no point in going for a faster card because the games which require the 4Ti's or high end FX cards would be CPU bottlenecked by the Pentium III.

There's no real point in going DX9 card style on a 98se machine, and the DX8 performance of some of the older cards is stellar. Stick with games of the era and you'll be fine.

here is a chart i did last year or the year before.. albeit this was done while worrying about MAC os9 compatible graphics cards.. but the info is relevant to win98:

for radeon i think the fastest is the X800 XT
http://www.ixbt.com/video2/images/r420xt/r420 … with-cooler.jpg
the purple colored cards are the ultra high end ones with high throughput...
but i think they are 2k/XP only past the X800 XT

re: the 9600XT yes its got a slightly higher clock but lower memory bandwidth/throughput then the X800 XT
the yellow colored ones are such cards with 'nerfed' bandwidth/throughput

ive got a few radeon9800 Pro's but i use them in a G5 + a G4 mac
one i flashed to mac, the other was mac compatible already

SRQ wrote:

Semi-related question: What's the best, ~quietest~ PIII cooler I can get? I would love to get this system to be as quiet as possible.
Dorky as it is, I enjoy free-writing creatively with the monitor turned to amber at night in the dark. Quiet is good.

Personally I very much like the Arctic Cooling Copper Silent 3. It's cheap, it's silent, it's not very heavy and it had no problems keeping my Barton 3200+ cool

chrisNova777 wrote:

i have heard of someone using a 7800GS by Gainward.. i think that is the fastest because its really a 7900GT? or something like […]
Show full quote

philscomputerlab wrote:

If we just consider going for overkill, what IS the fastest AGP card for a Windows 98 SE machine?

i have heard of someone using a 7800GS by Gainward..
i think that is the fastest because its really a 7900GT? or something like this? i remember reading that it was a PCI-E level card that was back-ported to AGP by gainward basically.. using some kind of PCI-E to AGP bridge
but its a pain in the ass to get the drivers to work .. i forget all the specifics.

i cant remember this is stuff from a few years ago - my brain cant keep up.. but i remember figuring all of this out last year or the year before
and also hacking the geforce 6xxx series drivers to support widescreen on my lcd widescreen monitor

i think this is the card tho:

There was one for sale in The Netherlands, but it may have been from another manufacturer.
It was indeed a 7900 PCI-E modded to fit in an AGP slot and was called GF7800GS, even though it wasn't one.

yea they are pretty rare i think there was only a few thousand ever made. mostly circulated in england + surrounding areas (im guessing from what i read gainward was more popular there in small boutique computer upgrade shops in the early 2000s). alot more rare in north america i think

So with official driver support, the GF6 series is the final one? And what about ATI? Is the X800 series supported with Widnows 98 drivers? Or are the 9800 cards the final ones?

philscomputerlab wrote:

If we just consider going for overkill, what IS the fastest AGP card for a Windows 98 SE machine?

/w official drivers either a 6800 ultra or x850xt. I think the x850xt is a bit faster not sure

/w modded driver (latest catalyst omega for win98 i think) the x1950xt agp

SRQ wrote:

I believe the 6800 Ultra Extreme AGP could be, as that's the last AGP card to have 98SE support on the Nvidia front. I believe ATi dropped support much earlier than they did.

No they did not. The x800 series work fine with 6.2 as well as te x1600 agp. Some omega drivers for win98 also have support for the x1900 series.

You can also use a pci-e 1900 card in win98 if your board has a via chipset. Both video card and 4in1 drivers will install corectly.

"offical" support for ATI ends with the x800 XT.. (excludes the x850 XT) from what i read just a moment ago
and of course GF6 series for nvidia.. "officially"

Why worse 98 combatiblity ?
i have much badder experience with GeForce 2...
A NX6200 GeForce with 128Bit Memory interface is much faster then a FX5600 on P3 1Ghz.
And supports AGP 1x and 2x Slots. And if you have NV43 you can unlock it to 6600 and get fastest AGP 1x/2x GPU avaible.

Blood 2 on GeForce 2 has missing Polygons and complete Characters, also other Lithtech Games..
They are fine on 6200. As Example.
Project I.G.I -> Missing Polygons, Drawing Errors on GeForce 2, works perfect on NX6200.

i recently used a Geforce 2MX card (the one that is VGA/ADC from a powermac G4) on win98se that i re-flashed to PC and i also was surprised at it's performance + that i could get widescreen display working on it (after text editing the driver files in the .777 geforce driver pack)

definately a bad ass card for the time it was released (spring 2000)

chrisNova777 wrote:

"offical" support for ATI ends with the x800 XT.. (excludes the x850 XT) from what i read just a moment ago
and of course GF6 series for nvidia.. "officially"

It does not. I have a sapphire X850XT AGP in one of my socket A rigs and it installed w/o issue. I used either 6.2 or an older version of catalyst - 5.8 perhaps - no sure. I am sure however that the card is a x850XT AGP made by sapphire.

This is a good thread, because we can find other way of thinking... Anyway i really don't understand the idea of using a gpu like GeForce 6x00, 7xx0 or ATI X series with a gaming p3 platform. If i were you, i would use no more than ATI 8500-9000 (RV200 and derivated) or FX, 4 TI series. If you want to play with hardware or benchmarks it could be fun but no more than this

Late model AGP cards would be a reasonable upgrade for a Socket A or p4 based Win98 machine.

gdjacobs wrote:

Late model AGP cards would be a reasonable upgrade for a Socket A or p4 based Win98 machine.

even in this case i'm not agree. If you use last agp cards on win98 machine, you lost compatibility for example p.texture and some old engine simply don't like pixel shader 2.0b (like soul reaver) etc

For Soulreaver 2, apply patch 1.02 and change HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Crystal Dynamics\Soul Reaver 2\1.00.00\DisableVShader to 1 .

And here you go.

This might be of interest to the Radeon X800 / X850 cards. These are the Catalyst® Version 6.2 for Windows ME Release Notes:

The Catalyst® software suite is designed to support the following ATI product family: […]
Show full quote

The Catalyst® software suite is designed to support the following ATI product family:

Radeon® 9800 series
Radeon® 9000 series
Radeon® 9700 series
Radeon® 8500 series
Radeon® 9600 series
Radeon® 7500 series
Radeon® 9500 series
Radeon® 7200 series
Radeon® 9200 series
Radeon® 7000 series
Radeon® 9100 series
Radeon® Xpress 200 series

This Catalyst software suite also provides Beta software support for the following ATI products:

Radeon® X850 series
Radeon® X550 series
Radeon® X800 series
Radeon® X300 series
Radeon® X600 series

Official beta support sounds good enough to me 😀 Was the X850XT PE available in AGP?

Source: http://www2.ati.com/drivers/Catalyst_62_ME_re … ease_notes.html

Yes it was

http://www.chip.de/ii/111446380_ec938ff044.jpg

They use a Bridge CHIP like nvidia.

Very nice, thanks 😀