As my Win 95 build did not perform too hot, I decided to move onto my Win 98se build and replace the FX 5200 I have with a very cheap Quadro FX 1500 I picked up on ebay. Of late, I have been buying a lot of retro stuff on ebay and I might test out a few more vintage video cards I picked up and describe my experience with them.

The Quadro FX 1500 is a PCIe card and on my 775 motherboard I had to use the unofficial 82.69 modded driver. I had to do the manual installation of the driver as the driver exe would not recognize my card. An annoying bug that happened to me during the manual installation was that I had to keep on pointing the nvidia files to the installer as it somehow lost track of what directory the files were in.

I had also tried to get the older 77.72 patch up and running by replacing the INF file with a modified one but sadly while Win 98 se does manage to detect the device as a quadro fx 1500 card, it does not allow me to change the resolutions. I keep on running into the issue in the image below when I install the 77.72 driver. It could be because I am using a DVI to VGA adapter, however I used the same adapter on the 82.69 driver version and I got no errors.

Using the 82.69 drivers, I managed to run the 3D Mark benchmark. It does seem to bring about a noticeable improvement from the FX 5200 score.

There are several issues I encountered with the card while playing some of the titles I have on the system barring a few games which generally run well on any PC. On AoE 2 I did not run into any significant bugs/glitches and the game actually felt snappier at higher resolutions. Halo CE also loaded to the title screen but I did not actually go in-game. When I played Diablo 2 the game felt smooth, but I did have a few weird audio issues. The music would keep on changing too fast. This could be either due to the Quadro or the fact I had also changed my sound card from a SB live to a SB Audigy 2 ZS.

The most troublesome games were GTA VC which crashed either in the intro scene of Tommy exiting the car or right at the start menu. Another title which was unplayable was Max Payne. The game gave me an error message right after the loading screen. I did not test the card further as I was also having a constant lag after a few minutes of the bootup. A final spot of bother for me was the really loud fan on the quadro.

From my limited testing, I think that this card is probably not fit for Win 98se gaming. I know there are people who have modded Quadros and have done other shenanigans using Riva Tuner but I think my 128-bit FX 5200 is way more compatible and easier to run than this particular Quadro variant with the 82.69 driver. In case anyone has ideas for getting better stability out of the card, I am all ears.