I don't think the Matrox G400 is a terrible choice if were pretending the CPU is a PIII and the game focus is late 90's, especially when paired with a V2. The later more mature drivers were decent for 3D and the card was fairly competitive at its release. especially if were talking a G400 MAX. plus you get EMBM support if you want to play with the few games that support it.

The GF2 Ultra arrived - it's an eVGA, and it seems to work perfectly. I got Windows 98SE installed this evening, and it had no trouble throughout, and scored 79xx in 3DMark2000. I went with the 30.82 drivers suggested here, which were a very small download/install, and seem to be working fine. The Voodoo2 in the system scores much lower (I want to say around 1500 but honestly I've forgotten in the last hour 😵), but works correctly too.

As far as IQ (because I know this has come up with GeForce 2 cards in the past) - this GF2 Ultra is the first NV1x I've ever seen exhibit the "wavy lines" thing (I've owned 3-4 of them in the past that've never done it), but I've noticed it isn't consistent - it did it on and off (rebooting would either clear it or cause it) during Windows setup and while running on the MS VGA drivers at 640x480, but once the nVidia drivers were loaded and it setup at 800x600 (and later 1024x768) with higher refresh rates I haven't noticed it return. I wouldn't be too annoyed if it did either - it's fairly subtle (at least on this card I guess), and if I didn't have a solid blue or teal background during setup it'd probably have gone unnoticed entirely. I also have probably the worst possible setup for overall VGA quality, which may be influencing things; I have the GF2 looped into a DVD decoder via VGA, and that's looped into the Voodoo2, before connecting to the monitor. 🤣 Overall it looks good enough for day to day usage imho, and great for gaming. I probably wouldn't want to do anything "high precision" with this setup, but watching a movie or playing Unreal - no problem at all!

Thanks all for the input, and once I get the final little tidbits setup this should make a fantastic gaming box. 😀

Oh, and another note: I was afraid the GF2 Ultra would be loud because of the cooler design (mine looks a lot like other cards you see in pictures with the square green fan and little sinks on the RAM), but it's actually a pretty quiet card. You will notice it vs a passive card, but it's quieter than say, FX 5700 Ultra.

Excellent, glad to see everything working so far obobskivich. I believe you can do without the DVD decoder card, the 2GHz Willamette has enough grunt to play DVDs by itself easily (unless you have a specific use for it). The little fan on the GF2 is indeed very quiet, at times I had to look very carefully to see if it was actually working; it does gather a lot of dust quickly though, so try to clean it out as often as possible (I used to clean mine every 2 months, but you can adjust this for how often the P4 build will be in actual use).

Great work so far, keep it up and you'll end up with a neat Win9x gaming box 😎

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

Excellent, glad to see everything working so far obobskivich. I believe you can do without the DVD decoder card, the 2GHz Willamette has enough grunt to play DVDs by itself easily (unless you have a specific use for it). The little fan on the GF2 is indeed very quiet, at times I had to look very carefully to see if it was actually working; it does gather a lot of dust quickly though, so try to clean it out as often as possible (I used to clean mine every 2 months, but you can adjust this for how often the P4 build will be in actual use).

Great work so far, keep it up and you'll end up with a neat Win9x gaming box 😎

Oh yeah, I know the DVD decoder isn't required - when the P4 was new in '01 it didn't have such a card, and did fine with DVDs back then. I thought it was a neat novelty though, and it doesn't seem to have any negative impact on the machine. The player application isn't bad either, which is nice. This build isn't meant to just handle 9x limited software, but to absorb 9x-limited gadgetry like the Voodoo2 and the Dxr3. None of it is really required. 🤣

On the dust - I'll keep an eye on it. I tend not to have problems with dust with other machines, and the intake on this case does have a filter, but we'll see how that works out over time. I doubt it'll get enough running time to be a serious issue either way though. 😊