VOGONS


First post, by red_avatar

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I got my hands on a very cheap Aopen Xcube in mint condition (EX915 with a Pentium IV 2.8Ghz). I love the form factor but it only has two slots on the motherboard: PCI & PCI-E. No AGP ... .

aopenex915_pspc.jpg

aopenex915_pcie.jpg

Now I have a dilemma - I want this Xcube to cover most Windows 98 games that don't run well in Windows XP (I have a different PC for that with a GTX 750 Ti which is remarkably compatible) but here I run into the issue of which graphics card to get.

  • Voodoo 3 3000 seems the best solution but I only have the AGP version and the PCI version is €400 ... .
  • A Voodoo 2 12MB card (combined with the on-board graphics) ... I have one to spare but honestly it's not ideal for games past 1998 since performance is limited.
  • I could go with a late Nvidia PCI card like the FX 5500 but there's all kinds of driver issues there from what I hear & the performance is not that great.

Does anyone have any idea what card might be powerful enough & be compatible enough to fit this build? It doesn't have to be able to run games after 2001 (I'll bank on my XP system for that) but it should run games before that at a decent framerate (such as Drakan for example).

Retro game fanatic.
IBM PS1 386SX25 - 4MB
IBM Aptiva 486SX33 - 8MB - 2GB CF - SB16
IBM PC350 P233MMX - 64MB - 32GB SSD - AWE64 - Voodoo2
PIII600 - 320MB - 480GB SSD - SB Live! - GF4 Ti 4200
i5-2500k - 3GB - SB Audigy 2 - HD 4870

Reply 1 of 3, by dominusprog

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Go with ATI X300/X600 PCI-E.

ATI cards for retro builds... any benefits?
PCIE GPU for Win98SE ?

Duke_2600.png
A-Trend ATC-1020 V1.1 ❇ Cyrix 6x86 150+ @ 120MHz ❇ 32MiB EDO RAM (8MiBx4) ❇ A-Trend S3 Trio64V2 2MiB
Creative AWE64 Value ❇ 8.4GiB Quantum Fireball ❇ Win95 OSR2 Plus!

Reply 2 of 3, by momaka

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^ I'll 2nd the suggestion for an X600 as well - it's more or less equivalent to a Radeon 9600 in many regards, so should be able to run most 90's games quite well... and driver-wise, W98 is OK with the X100 series of cards.
Alternatively, maybe something like a GeForce 6800 (vanilla/GT/etc) might also be an OK alternative (and quite a powerful one, actually.) If looking to spend a little less, then look for a GF 6600 GT or even LE.

Reply 3 of 3, by RetroPCCupboard

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Yeah, I have also had luck with PCIe X300 and X600. X850 XT PE also worked. But it is expensive now. I think I had no success with nVidia PCIe cards