I have another extremely strange issue that has plagued my Gateway Tabor III motherboard since I first got it. For some very odd reason, the system will become unstable while playing Half-Life with the nVidia GeForce 2 MX400 64MB AGP GPU in it when I try to render it in OpenGL mode. It will crash within the first 20-30 seconds of play while in the Hazard Course. I have tried software rendering, and it does not crash at all. The GPU itself works great; it ran HL2 while in another motherboard just fine. It's also odd that another GPU, an nVidia GeForce FX 5200 256MB AGP, works just fine on that motherboard with Half-Life in OpenGL mode.

For some reason, the motherboard does not seem to like this GPU at all, and it is quite agitating because I wish to use parts that are the closest to the time frame of the build (around 2001-2002ish), and the nVidia GeForce FX 5200 was released in 2003, not 2001. The GPU works great in normal desktop mode, and had no problems whatsoever.

I originally thought it might be my sound card, seeing as it's fairly low end, a Crystal 4281 PCI sound card. But because it runs just fine in software rendering mode with no crashes, I am inclined to believe that it does not have anything to do with the sound card itself. I will list the complete specs of the system here:

- Gateway Tabor III Slot 1 Motherboard with 100MHz FSB
- Intel Pentium III Katmai Processor @ 500MHz with 100MHz FSB
- 384MB PC100/133 Memory, 1 128MB stick, and 1 256MB stick (there are three RAM slots on this motherboard; I do not know which stick is PC100/PC133, if both sticks are PC100/PC133, etc. There is no real identification on a lot of the PC1xx/PC66 Memory I have.
- Crystal 4281 PCI card in slot three (the motherboard claims a resource conflict when it is in slot 2, and PCI slot 1 is too close to the AGP card for comfort, I'm afraid that any video card there won't be able to deal with being millimeters from a PCI card).
- A generic 3Com 3C905C-TX PCI ethernet card in PCI slot 3
- A Dell OEM nVidia GeForce 2 MX400 GPU (drivers are not the problem; it ran HL2 and Half-Life just fine, with HL2 rendering in DirectX and HL rendering in OpelGL).
- Windows 98 SE (this problem also repeats itself in Windows XP, 2000, and Windows NT 4.0).

I won't mention any storage devices (such as the CD/DVD drive, HDD, floppy drives, etc.) because this problem was with the motherboard in multiple different configurations as far as storage devices were concerned.

I am completely out of ideas at this point, and cannot afford any new GPUs right now. I wanted to use this GPU because I watched PhilsComputerLab's video on the MX400, and I wanted something close in performance with a GeForce 256 like he mentioned, because I certainly do not have the money to grab a genuine GeForce 256 from eBay. If I had my choice in the matter, I'd honestly get an AGP VooDoo or Diamond card of some kind, but both seem to be fairly expensive, and as I said before, I have no way of getting any new GPUs right now. The only other ones I have are a crappy Intel Graphics AGP card, a probably worse S3 Savage 2000, a GeForce something (maybe 2?) but I don't know if it's any good, and of course, that GeForce FX 5200. Out of all the retro parts I have, GPUs are in the most demand and are also in very sparing supply. Any help would be greatly appreciated.