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Win98SE When is the hardware overkill?

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Reply 20 of 110, by The Serpent Rider

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I think the last Intel chipset that can work really well with Windows98 is i975. ICH7 still has native FDD and IDE support for example.
It's way worse for AMD though, because you're stuck with nForce 3 and VIA KT880/KT890. The former is not all that good, due to being "forward thinking" Nvidia chipset.

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Reply 21 of 110, by BushLin

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The Serpent Rider wrote:

I think the last Intel chipset that can work really well with Windows98 is i975. ICH7 still has native FDD and IDE support for example.
It's way worse for AMD though, because you're stuck with nForce 3 and VIA KT880/KT890. The former is not all that good, due to being "forward thinking" Nvidia chipset.

Are you sure? 975x has no AGP support and the boards don't have Windows 98 drivers.

Screw period correct; I wanted a faster system back then. I choose no dropped frames, super fast loading, fully compatible and quiet operation.

Reply 22 of 110, by God Of Gaming

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^ I'm running win98 on a P45 board, and overall it works fine, but the 3rd party IDE controller wont boot from hdd so its only useful for storage or optical drive, win98 has to be on sata hdd working in ide mode, which is fine really, but 975x has ide controller integrated in the chipset rather than with 3rd party controller, so it will probably allow booting from hdd and work fine. PCI-E is not a deal breaker either, plenty of PCI-E graphics cards with win98 drivers available, from nvidia 5, 6 and 7 series and ati r300 and r400 series. So really the only real drawback is that you lack driver for the onboard network chip so you need to add a pci card if you want networking

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Reply 23 of 110, by WildW

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I'm in the first camp - I like to play older games and to avoid compatibility issues I run Windows 98 for some games. Like many others here I have too many old computers. One is a Gateway with Pentium III 450 because that's what I had back in that era, though this time it has AGP Voodoo 3 instead of the Rage 128 I had back then. This gives me compatibility with games from when Glide dominated - I found that some games didn't work properly with later graphics cards (I think at least Star Trek: Klingon Honor Guard and Star Trek: Hidden Evil.)

But the 450 MHz CPU and Voodoo 3 were really too slow for Star Trek Armada (which has horrible sound issues in Windows XP), so I have one of those silly overpowered Athlon 64 Windows 98 machines - I figure that should be enough CPU grunt for anything. I've kept the GPU sane with an FX5600 though.

Reply 24 of 110, by God Of Gaming

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For me its probably mostly for the sound. Seems like most games can be gotten to work on at least winXP if not even newer using various fixes and patches, and can even be gotten to output their best graphics with wrappers like nglide and dgvoodoo2, but one thing people who do that tend to ignore is the sound side of things - Aureal A3D only works right under win9x, and even Creative EAX in some games sounds a bit broken with wdm drivers and only sounds right with vxd drivers (only usable under win9x). So my motivation for building win98 PCs is to get those games to sound at their best too, not just look and play at their best

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Reply 25 of 110, by agent_x007

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BushLin wrote:

Are you sure? 975x has no AGP support and the boards don't have Windows 98 drivers.

Why AGP + chipset drivers are so important to you for Win98 ?

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Reply 26 of 110, by mothergoose729

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agent_x007 wrote:
BushLin wrote:

Are you sure? 975x has no AGP support and the boards don't have Windows 98 drivers.

Why AGP + chipset drivers are so important to you for Win98 ?

3DMark 03 v2.jpg

How stable is the 7800gtx in windows 98 games (and in general, how stable is the platform)? I always saw these kind of builds as benchmark busters rather than practical. Would you disagree?

Also, what are the USB, SATA/IDE, and networking support/speeds like? DMA for the hard disks and the CD Rom drive? It seems like I/0 is where the later platforms struggle.

Reply 27 of 110, by The Serpent Rider

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Since 925X chipset can still work with Win9x officially, you can at least fool the ICH7 based system:
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/147 … -Desktop-Boards

But technically ICH10 could be compatible with that driver too. I'va managed to boot HDD from ICH10 WinXP install on ICH5 board for example.

Last edited by The Serpent Rider on 2019-07-02, 17:48. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 28 of 110, by agent_x007

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mothergoose729 wrote:

How stable is the 7800gtx in windows 98 games (and in general, how stable is the platform)? I always saw these kind of builds as benchmark busters rather than practical. Would you disagree?

Also, what are the USB, SATA/IDE, and networking support/speeds like? DMA for the hard disks and the CD Rom drive? It seems like I/0 is where the later platforms struggle.

I admit I didn't played hours long sessions on this platform/PC.
But it worked fine for most games I tested (after I applied patches/tweaks).
You can read my thread for more details (side note : I didn't used 98 for DOS games, I had dedicated DOS 6.22 for that).

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Reply 29 of 110, by mothergoose729

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agent_x007 wrote:
I admit I didn't played hours long sessions on this platform/PC. But it worked fine for most games I tested (after I applied pat […]
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mothergoose729 wrote:

How stable is the 7800gtx in windows 98 games (and in general, how stable is the platform)? I always saw these kind of builds as benchmark busters rather than practical. Would you disagree?

Also, what are the USB, SATA/IDE, and networking support/speeds like? DMA for the hard disks and the CD Rom drive? It seems like I/0 is where the later platforms struggle.

I admit I didn't played hours long sessions on this platform/PC.
But it worked fine for most games I tested (after I applied patches/tweaks).
You can read my thread for more details (side note : I didn't used 98 for DOS games, I had dedicated DOS 6.22 for that).

Would you mind throwing up a link? I'm curious...

Reply 30 of 110, by Srandista

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mothergoose729 wrote:

Would you mind throwing up a link? I'm curious...

Here you go: "Madness", One retro PC to rule them all :)

Socket 775 - ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA, Pentium E6500K, 4GB RAM, Radeon 9800XT, ESS Solo-1, Win 98/XP
Socket A - Chaintech CT-7AIA, AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9600XT, ESS ES1869F, Win 98

Reply 31 of 110, by RaverX

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CPU: I think P4 Northwood, Athlon XP is the limit for Windows 98.
Athlon64 or very late P4 (3.2 GHz and above) are "usable", but I don't see the point in using such a system, at that point Windows XP is a much better choice, any game/application that can run only under 98, not under XP will not require that much processing power.
Anything newer is clearly overkill, Win98 doesn't support more than one cpu(core).

Video: GF3/GF4, maybe FX5950 Ultra. Or Radeon 8500/9700, maybe 9800XPro or XT. More than that is overkill, in my opinion.

RAM: 512 is the limit, can be patched to support 1 GB, but again, at that point Windows XP is a better choice.

A great Windows 98 machine: PIII 1000, 512 MB, Geforce4 Ti4600, V2 SLI. It should run almost anything from 1992 to 2002.
If you want older (than 1992) games, then you should go pure MSDOS and much older hardware.
Newer (than 2002) games, go Windows XP and better hardware.

Reply 32 of 110, by BushLin

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agent_x007 wrote:
BushLin wrote:

Are you sure? 975x has no AGP support and the boards don't have Windows 98 drivers.

Why AGP + chipset drivers are so important to you for Win98 ?

AGP is important for Windows 98 because PCI-E cards appear not to be stable in all situations and not exceeding late AGP Intel chipsets is still past the point of diminishing returns for Win98 only titles. That and later Nvidia drivers you need to run PCI-E cards suck outside benchmarks like 3DMark. I don't see the point other than an experiment into the limits of Win98.
If you've managed to run a much newer system with Win98, long term, without patches and no crashing on old games which don't run on W2K and above I'm all ears but I see lots of evidence of problems and not much to the contrary.
I mentioned supplied drivers purely from the fact that if a motherboard manufacturer like ASUS is supplying Win98 drivers for a board it means they (and Intel) have tested it, actively supported it and usually ironed out things like IRQ issues or DMA problems with soundcards in DOS.

Screw period correct; I wanted a faster system back then. I choose no dropped frames, super fast loading, fully compatible and quiet operation.

Reply 33 of 110, by TimWolf

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Great thread. Really quite a good read through. Right now I'm playing with a 775 single core P4 EE 3.73ghz that I'm kicking around making dual boot. Possibly a 1.4ghz Tualatin on a i440BX, 1400 Duron on M812, and K6-3+450(oc560 I hope). I like to do wacky builds. I'll probably be using Win98 on most of these. Generally I've been planning and gathering, but I'm getting to the building and playing stage again. Prior to the holidays I'd been messing with 286 / 386 hardware. My family keeps yelling at me for watching the same Phil videos 3 and 4 times, and asks why I'm not making youtubes. Thought I should probably film and capture all of the 'fun' as I go forward. So I took a break to get familiar with Windows 10 and a modern build that could capture, stream, and edit video. I'd been primarily still on XP for main desktop until just a few months ago (really) though I had Win Vista/7 on laptops over the years. Finished the new Win10 machine a month ago, and back to obsessively acquiring, to the point where I just about can't justify any more until I build something out 😁 Not sure if there is any point to running 98 on anything newer than a P4 from what I'm seeing. From what I can tell even that is a bit silly, but hey, I have to put a limit on it somewhere and that sounds good to me.

Thanks everyone!

Reply 35 of 110, by Srandista

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WildW wrote:

Just occurring to me rather late, the really nice benfit of Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 hardware is the ability to use a modern power supply without worrying about a weak 5V rail.

I will add to this, that another nice benefit of 775 (either Pentium 4 or Core 2) is ability of using modern (and therefore quiet and powerful) coolers.

Socket 775 - ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA, Pentium E6500K, 4GB RAM, Radeon 9800XT, ESS Solo-1, Win 98/XP
Socket A - Chaintech CT-7AIA, AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9600XT, ESS ES1869F, Win 98

Reply 36 of 110, by God Of Gaming

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just to mention, ATi X850XT (PE) is a candidate for being best win98-compatible graphics card, and while I got lucky and won an AGP version of it for a fairly low price at an auction, they tend to be very expensive, and the PCI-E version is much more common and is usually cheap

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Reply 37 of 110, by Srandista

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Two things regarding that X850. You can get that one much cheaper just by buying X850 Pro VIVO and unlocking full 16 pipelines with BIOS. Guide is here: https://www.techpowerup.com/articles/100
And on the theme of overkill, X850 for some reason can't be connected to HDMI monitor, it won't send any video signal. Don't ask me why, or how is it possible, when both Radeon 9xxx and X1xxx have no problem with that. It is what it is...

Socket 775 - ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA, Pentium E6500K, 4GB RAM, Radeon 9800XT, ESS Solo-1, Win 98/XP
Socket A - Chaintech CT-7AIA, AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9600XT, ESS ES1869F, Win 98

Reply 38 of 110, by mothergoose729

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WildW wrote:

Just occurring to me rather late, the really nice benfit of Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 hardware is the ability to use a modern power supply without worrying about a weak 5V rail.

😀

God Of Gaming wrote:

just to mention, ATi X850XT (PE) is a candidate for being best win98-compatible graphics card, and while I got lucky and won an AGP version of it for a fairly low price at an auction, they tend to be very expensive, and the PCI-E version is much more common and is usually cheap

You can use PCIE cards in windows 98. The FX Quadro 1300 would be my pick though for PCIE cards. ATI cards and later Nvidia GPUs don't support table fog and 8 bit textures, which while not game breaking or anything, are nice features to have.

Reply 39 of 110, by God Of Gaming

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Games affected by lack of table fog and 8bit textures are really few, probably less than 10, out of several thousand, so hardly a serious issue, and the x850 has better image quality and AA than the FX 5900 line, also ati truform emulation.

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project