God Of Gaming, by set of qualities X800/850 are better than 7800GS. "Bad dos support" applies to horizontal scrolling bugs in 2D sessions like Dangerous Dave. Not so bad as many people think.
DFI G7S620-N board is very capricious with Core 2 CPUs. I spent a few years, have made titanic work for proper tuning this mobo and can say the following:
- you will not get proper and stable work with 45nm 'wolfdale' gen at all
- you should flash a last not beta BIOS for proper 65nm 'conroe' gen work and optimal other components work
- you should disable C1E and necessarily make physical VID mod for CPU, voltage value must be constant and optimal, otherwise you'll get sudden freezes, power off and even impossible next system start
The best CPU for this mobo is X6800. I run it at FSB800 (with BSEL mod 200) and x13 multiplier in BIOS. 2600MHz frequency is very comfortable and ultra enough for most WinXP games. But can be stable up to 3200MHz (x16). I made triple boot Win98(+DOS7)/WinXP/Win7x64. When DOS starting the multiplier is setting to x8 and ODCM is setting to 1/8, the CPU frequency in DOS is 200MHz (in autoexec.bat). When Win98 starting the multiplier is setting to x10/11, the CPU frequency in Windows 98 is 2,0/2,2GHz (in autoexec.bat too, via menuitem). When starting WinXP or Win7 the multiplier is staying x13/x15 as in BIOS setup.
God Of Gaming wrote on 2020-12-09, 10:56:
so a 7800gs agp might be ideal card to use for this build
No. Optimal video set for this build consists of two video cards. First is PCI card (and Primary adapter in BIOS setup) GeForce FX5200/5500 which used in Win98+DOS. Second is AGP card Radeon HD3850 or HD4670 which used in WinXP (and may in Win7). Windows 98 and DOS can not switch Primary adapter but Windows XP and 7 can. Therefore Primary adapter in BIOS setup must be PCI. When starting Windows XP/7 you run it in dual-card mode and Primary video card with Windows Desktop is AGP always in Windows setup. In Windows 98 the DirectX7.0 is installed. All DX8.1+9.0 content can be run excellent and successful in Windows XP with AGP Radeon HD.
X800/850 and 7800GS are single-card designs. Both are good for Win98+WinXP but worse than dual-cards setup.
If you don't want to use dual boot 98+XP please forget about Core 2, X850XT, 7800GS etc. Just take one good single core Cedar Mill CPU and a top AGP FX5900/5950 card. Or even Ti4800. Believe me it will be much better! 😀
cyclone3d wrote on 2020-12-09, 19:38:
Does that motherboard support ISA DMA? It doesn't look like it to me but I am unfamiliar with other than ITE PCI-ISA bridge chips.
Yes, it does! Please don't doubt 😀 Winbond is a good proper chip. And ISA DMA support depends not only PCI-ISA bridge. It depends on SouthBridge and proper BIOS for each motherboard. There are two ISA sound cards which can not work on ICH5 SouthBridge (as I know, maybe more). They are Creative Goldfinch CT1920 and GUS PnP. All other cards (which I saw, tried and heard) can be run!
And one more thing: G7S620-N has -5V line direct from its own ATX power connector to ISA bus. I use five slots riser. Works!