Reply 20 of 20, by AaronS
Hello everyone, thought I'd add to this thread some drivers and info. Recently I picked up two Gericom laptops from 2004 with the intention of using them for Windows 98:
Gericom Hummer (February 2004)
Intel 845PE Chipset (AGP 4X) with Pentium 4 Mobile Northwood 3.06Ghz
Nvidia FX Go5600 (AGP 8X) / 128MB / NV31
Gericom Hummer Extreme (June 2004)
Intel 848P Chipset (AGP 8X) with Pentium 4 Desktop Prescott 3.00Ghz
Nvidia FX Go5700-VE (AGP 8X) / 128MB / NV36
I managed to find the OEM drivers for both of these on Gericoms old download directory through waybackmachine, only the Go5600 had 98/ME/2000 drivers in addition to XP drivers, though you can just use generic 98 drivers for either. The 98/ME/2000 drivers for the Go5600 are labelled as 44.20 and the XP drivers are 44.83. Using coolbits we can overclock both of them freely and see other bits of info.
The later Gericom with the FX Go5700-VE unfortunately cannot use anything below generic 52.16, even trying to force install 45.23 in Device Manager, it will install, reboot, and the screen becomes a garbled mess. I'm aware that even for desktop FX 5700 series the desirable 45.23 drivers don't work out of the box but can be force installed, but this doesn't seem to be the case with the laptop variant, however this is the "VE", they MIGHT work on the regular FX Go5700 GPUs in other laptops. Similar to the desktop variants, the clocks are lower for both the core and memory on the "VE". Looking at old benchmarks, apparently the regular Go5700 ran at 350 / 580, for this VE, it is 300 / 550, overclocking them to the same values as the regular Go5700 is still roughly -10% for performance and scores in benchmarks. The OEM drivers for this laptop are 56.67, and it does indeed mention two FX Go5700's (the regular: 348 and the VE: 347):
NVIDIA_NV36.DEV_0347.1 = "NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5700"
NVIDIA_NV36.DEV_0348.1 = "NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5700 "
Also with these laptops, the GPU modules are removeable (I think this was fairly common at the time), I did try to put the 5600 into the Gericom Hummer Extreme where it would get a slight boost from AGP 8X but it doesn't actually boot, just a black screen, something in the vBios maybe. There are also ATI Radeon Mobility cards for these laptops too and I did manage to find a 9700 on ebay but it also doesn't boot 🤣 although I'm more interested in Nvidia cards for their compatibility with table fog and 8 bit palletized textures, which both do support.
Gericom Hummer - 44.20 (98/ME/2000)
Gericom Hummer - 44.83 (XP)
Gericom Hummer Extreme - 56.67 (XP)