hello all, i have been trying to get the best performance and smoothest experience with need for speed 4 high stakes in windows 98se, i have purchased a few graphics cards this past year as well a motherboard and cpu's trying to figure out whats causing the sudden dips in fps in this game, i have tested all resolutions, 16 and 32 bit, tested each option in the graphics settings, the game is fps locked to 64-65 fps, but no matter what settings i use the game will dip into the 50's and sometimes lower depending on the hardware im using,

a little over a year ago i purchased an Asus P3V4X v1.02 motherboard, got a couple sticks of crucial 133mhz memory and was using a pentium 3 650mhz cpu, running at 133fsb overclocked the cpu to 866mhz, i started buying graphics cards, i bought a fx 5500, a fx 5700ve 256mb, a geforce4 ti 4400, a geforce3, a 3dfx voodoo3 3000, every one of these cards had issues with fps dips, i also purchased a pentium 3 1ghz 133fsb thinking it could be a cpu limitation but again the same results.

i recently purchased a new motherboard, thinking about all the negativity i had read about the Via apollo pro 133a chipset i went for a 440bx chipset, i ordered an Asus P3B-F v1.04 and flashed the latest bios and installed my 1ghz 133fsb cpu in this build with my gainward geforce3, ran some benchmarks i scored 9172 in 3dmark 2000, thats roughly 1000 points higher then i was scoring with the P3V4X Via board, i was really impressed with these results, i then fired up Need For Speed High Stakes, and the same damn thing happened,

just this afternoon i installed a geforce4 ti 4400 in a P4 build using a 2.66ghz northwood, with 1gb of ram, tested with stock clocks then overclocked the ti 4400 to ti 4600 stock speeds, same performance dips, then i overclocked the P4 from 2.66ghz 133fsb to 3ghz 150fsb, same dips ran a few runs of 3dmark 2000 testing my overclocks and hit 16208, so i know it cant be a cpu limitation

i am at a loss, i have tested the original retail disk, tested all the patches i could find, tested a modern version that requires some files from the original disk to be copied over to work, every thing i have tried has resulted in the same crappy performance, except running the game on my main pc using the above mentioned modern patched version, v-sync enabled, it was locked at 60fps and never dipped bellow, but thats not my goal, i want to play the game on my old rig, has anyone figured out how to smooth this game out ? any help with this would be great