I don't know if it has anything to do with your card, but often when installing drivers for radeon cards from that period of time in win98se they default to higher refresh rate than what many lcd can show and I get out of range message and I have to boot to safe mode to change refresh rate manually for them to work in windows. The drivers still seem to assume that people are using crt monitors with them.

In any case bulging caps should be always changed before powering up any hardware.

The out of range also occurs when it's turning on as well at the POST screen, boot/splash screen, and the desktop. I'm going to check my motherboard and see what's going on and/or swap the boards again to see what the heck is going on. I'm also planning on recapping the GPU as well with new caps (the 5 electrolytic capacitors) and visually inspect the motherboard to see if there are any bad caps. Could a cheap PSU also become a factor in this as well?

It's not uncommon to run into problems with DVI compliance with video cards from those years. You can probably dig up old threads about it with a web search. The WIndows drivers might smooth things out once they load. Behavior varies across drivers. For example I use a DVI EDID simulator with my monitor and older drivers were not reading its EDID correctly.

Those Radeons also do not support aspect ratio scaling which is a major bummer for widescreen monitors (especially notebooks!). Their first GPUs with aspect ratio scaling are X1000 series IIRC. NVidia had support for that from the beginning.

That's the only issue: Windows won't load at all, except for safe mode with the card. I installed the Catalyst 6.2 drivers supplied by ATi and PhilsComputerLab when it was the basic video driver loaded. Is it because I'm using the wrong drivers causing the system to not load very well?

I found more info about the card. It's a PowerColor ATI Radeon 9600 XT Bravo R96A-C3T.

Try an older driver like say Catalyst 4.2 instead.

Have you had any problems with other AGP video cards on that motherboard? Try any other ATI cards?

Have you installed the VIA 4in1 drivers? 98SE might not work properly with KM266 AGP otherwise.

The nVidia cards were also a hit and miss as well (AGP), and I found the culprits: 2 blown caps and one almost spewed its guts out, so, I desoldered them off.

Gallery: https://imgur.com/gallery/905DE2Y

Also, where can one simply find a new fan for the heatsink? On my card, it's making a rattling noise, but, it goes away after a couple of seconds. I dusted the cooling fan and the heatsink off as well. Also, would a 16V 1000uF 10000 hr@105C capacitor suffice, or is that overkill?

My trick for noisy old GPU fans is to pop them off of the heat sink, peel up the sticker, and put a single drop of Bones Speed Cream into the motor. Its skateboard bearing oil so its nice and light and comes with a great tip for using very tiny amounts. I cleaned up a card that I'm pretty sure someone tried unsuccessfully to oil a fan on because it was covered in thick, greasy, black goop. Less is more!

Silicone grease is useful for those fan bearings too. It doesn't do anything to the surrounding plastic and it will stay where you put it. It will slow the fan down a bit though.

I use petroleum jelly.

I ordered new capacitors on Digikey (10V 1000uF @ 10000 hrs/105C) along with the 16V 10uF SMD capacitors for the Radeon 9600XT and my VooDoo2 card that I've had for 3 years.

Update on the card: I recapped the card with the new 1000uF 10V caps that has a 10000 hr at 105C lifespan (the through-hole caps) and I don't get the Out of Sync message on my monitor any longer. YAY! Good news is, the card works, bad news is the drivers won't work well (has Catalyst 6.2 installed, will install with either 4.3 or 4.7 driver set). Work in progress and it's better than nothing.

Edit: I installed the revision 4.2 on my system and still nothing (attempts to boot, but, refuses). I'm planning on replacing the PSU and changing the drivers to 4.3, 4.7, or back to 6.2 for the drivers and see what happens.

Changed the PSU to no avail, however, after disabling the fast write and other things on the AGP slot and lowering the AGP Aperture size from 64MB to 16MB, installed the 6.2 drivers, and it's working without any issues. Going to install the 4.3 driver set for better clarification. Now I need to figure out why my VooDoo2 card isn't working properly after a recap.

Swapped the board to the Socket 370 board and it works with that without issues, however, I cannot get Direct3D to work on the machine whatsoever and the AGP Texture Acceleration isn't available as an option to enable or disable. When I attempt to test the Direct3D using the DirectX Diagnostics program, it locks up the system. Is it because it's incompatible with Windows 98SE? Since I got the card working, my plan is to install it in my Windows XP machine and see how it performs.

VIA KT266 (and KM266 as well) have had a bunch of incompatibility issues back in the days. ( https://web.archive.org/web/20070929194345/ht … hp/t-76493.html ). Would highly recommend using George Breeze's patches along 4in1.

Me and my friend used two Jetway KT266 rigs for quite a time that days, and used GF2MX200, 4MX440, 4Ti4200, 4Ti4200-8x, Radeon 9000 and 9100 there on AGP4x without any major issues, but mostly on Windows 2000 or XP. I can try installing 98SE on Shuttle KT266 with (Powercolor?) 9600Pro to see if any issues arise, but almost sure it will work just OK.

Btw, doesn't your Sempron need 166fsb?

Where can I find that?

http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=876

Thank you kindly, sir.

Not only the latency patch, but also KM266 register hacks for WPCREDIT, as it changes some AGP`s inner stuff too, and `Memory interleave enabler`, which may (or may not, incase it's already has working BIOS settings) speed things up.
Author's homepage: http://www.georgebreese.com/net/software/#KM266