Well I'm almost ready to assemble the new "tower of power" computer that will be just used for gaming! I'm getting ready for HF2/Doom3 and the new Thief game and it was time to upgrade.

The following parts were ordered up that met my price/performance ratio-

Gigabyte 848 single channel P4 board
1 gig of DDR 400 Kingston ram
Boxed P4 2.8 with 800 mhz bus
ATI 9800 pro 128 meg
WD RAPTOR 10k rpm 36gig HD with active copper cooler
480 watt power supply
Sony OEM DVD-RW
Antec fan card that will have external duct to keep video cool.

Other then that I'm re-using my Creative live card and floppy and have a pair of V2's to load up.

The problem- All my games were suppose to be loaded up on this freeing the work box BUT testing on the bench shows that the ATI Win98SE & Me drivers really suck. Blue screens of death are not part of the program.

So.. the plan is to load up Win2000 because I can't stand XP... but.... I don't have any experiance with 2000!

(or even XP except for using it a few times, the dumbest OS I have ever seen)

Driver & game issues feedback welcome!!

Gary

Quote:

1 gig of DDR 400 Kingston ram

Well, at least under Win98/98SE/ ME there's a problem :
Without tricks, they only work with max. 512MB RAM.

If you limit the Vcache (which can otherwise fill up critical address high space, causing errors in Win9x Memory Management), you might get it to work with more, but that is basically an unsupported workaround.

http://www.dewassoc.com/support/win98/win9x_512memory.htm
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/14/54640.aspx

There's an inofficial Service Pack (Collection of official Patches, bundeled with a series of HotFixes including the 512MB limit) as well.
Available here :
http://beefy.nucleardays.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=439

Personally, I never had any big Problem with the Catalyst or OmegaDrivers in the past, when I still used Win98SE w/ a Radeon 9700pro. Basically, it should work, although the ATI Win9x Drivers won't be developed much longer IMHO.

wrote on 26.05.04 at 18:50:36:

Well, at least under Win98/98SE/ ME there's a problem : Without tricks, they only work with max. 512MB RAM.

Yes I'm aware of that and made the adjustments including the non-microsoft S.P.2.

When I loaded a GF2 and Nvidia drivers the problems went away, load the 9800 and the ATI drivers and the computer would crash when opening the graphics display panel. Uninstalling the ATI control panel applet would stop the crashing but leave me with no way to adjust advanced graphics options!

Tried both the supplied Powercolor drivers and the latest from ATI.

Hence I'm heading off to Win2000 for this box which brings us back to the question- Problems and pitfalls in running Win 95/98 games in 2000 with a pair of Voodoo 2's?

Odd behaviour with your Radeon there, although several Users even have been totally unable to make a Radeon cooperate with Voodoo2's in one machine.
(worked like a charm in my case though)

Win2000 will take away Direct3D capability from the Voodoo2's, but with a powerful Direct3D/OpenGL capable card available already, the Glide Titles should still run perfect.

Just make sure you install the Voodoo2's after the Radeon, otherwise the Voodoo2 OpenGL will be registered as the Primary OpenGL Renderer.

wrote on 26.05.04 at 22:09:52:

Odd behaviour with your Radeon there, although several Users even have been totally unable to make a Radeon cooperate with Voodoo2's in one machine. (worked like a charm in my case though)

Reloaded Win98SE twice with just the drivers needed and the card, did the same thing in both cases. I was wondering if it was a card issue, installing a trial version of XP seem to make the problem vanish.

Yup, just want the V2's for the glide titles.

1) Vantac "fan card" works great! I was thinking about an upgraded heatsink & fan combo for the 9800pro but have not run accross anything I liked. The big heatpipe units seem to be awful large to be hanging from the AGP slot!

http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/3dfx_fancard.jpg

This fan card was good for a 30F temp drop! Great investment and the stock fans always seem to die after a few months. Even if the stock fan does die the fan card will keep everything frosty.

2) Graphics in Doom- I can't wait for the release this summer... based off the leaked alpha I don't think I'll have any problems at all ;-)

Well, I'm using Win 2k on my main gaming box and love it. Boot up is slower then XP but if you take out the Windows sound scheme and disable some services you can speed this up some. Win 2K, at least for me, is way more stable then XP and just in general seems to run smoother. XP does have some better back wards compatibility with older games (Vampire- The Masqurades for example won't install under 2K but will install and play under XP). When you install 2K, do it in this order (some might disagree but I've had the best luck doing it this way). Load Win 2k. Load network drivers if it didn't find the card automatically, install SP 4, install all the latest windows up dates (make sure to check the recommend updates as well because there is some NTFS drive issues, along with an all around drivers patch), after all the updates are installed, then do chipset drivers using latest ones, then Direct X 9.0b and then latest drivers for video card.


Have to add, that I have not tried 2K with my V2 much less a couple of them. I'm not sure how it's going to work for you. My banshee card seems to work ok with Win 2K but that's the oldest card I've tried to get to work with.

wrote on 01.06.04 at 16:13:20:

Well, I'm using Win 2k on my main gaming box and love it. Boot up is slower then XP but if you take out the Windows sound scheme and disable some services you can speed this up some. .

Sounds good to me- I run a lean box anyways, I suspect that is why my Win98SE machines have always been so stable and fast.

systray, explorer and the logitech mouse driver are it when the machine boots, nothing else.


Quote:

XP does have some better back wards compatibility with older games (Vampire- The Masqurades for example won't install under 2K but will install and play under XP).

Not real worried about that since I can still play some older titles on the "work" pc ;-) or one of the other 98SE boxes on the network here.


Quote:

When you install 2K, do it in this order (some might disagree but I've had the best luck doing it this way). Load Win 2k. Load network drivers if it didn't find the card automatically, install SP 4, install all the latest windows up dates (make sure to check the recommend updates as well because there is some NTFS drive issues, along with an all around drivers patch), after all the updates are installed, then do chipset drivers using latest ones, then Direct X 9.0b and then latest drivers for video card.

Sounds like a reasonable order to do things, is Fat32 an option under 2000? I know it is with XP.


Quote:

Have to add, that I have not tried 2K with my V2 much less a couple of them. I'm not sure how it's going to work for you.

Chances are I'll run a single to reduce the chances of a problem, I might consider using the X-24 though =)

Gary

http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/3dfx_new_pc_off.jpg

Still not done yet- Have an ATA-66 drive with WinXP installed just do do some benchmarks. Tonight I hope to get down to my buddies house and we will get the 37 gig SATA Raptor drive in and install 2000 and get rid of the 66 drive. The sheetmetal on the right where the drives sit is going to get covered with polished aluminum. Playing with the onboard sound at the moment, but I suspect I will install my Soundblaster Live card though.

Power plug on the lower right is for the side fans which come with the case, oddly enough blowing the wrong direction but that was easy to fix. I was going to make a outside fresh air duct for the fan card but as it turns out the rearmost side cover fan huffs fresh air right under the fan card making a duct unnecessary.

http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/3dfx_new_pc_on.jpg

Case is a Raidmax that Newegg had on sale for $29.99!

An impressive black and silver case for the price and tasteful to boot. Some newer causes are far to gaudy for my liking.  All the edges are rolled and it's well made, with the only thing missing IMHO a removable tray. The no name power supply was yanked 5 minutes after it showed up and the 480 watt Thermaltake unit with ajustable fan speed installed. I still have to black out the DVD and floppy drive to match the case, will do so later this week. Going to see if I can find a small blue cold cathode light for the top and I have copper heatsinks for the video ram on order.

Been about 4-5  years since I built a new PC from scratch, I'm having fun =)

Fat 32 is an option, but recommend using NTFS especially if your using a bigger hard drive and if your planning on setting up RAID or have security in mind at all. I think it works on a Fat 32 partition but not sure. I've been using NTFS so couldn't tell you if it works or not.

wrote on 01.06.04 at 18:42:41:

Fat 32 is an option, but recommend using NTFS especially if your using a bigger hard drive and if your planning on setting up RAID or have security in mind at all. I think it works on a Fat 32 partition but not sure. I've been using NTFS so couldn't tell you if it works or not.

1) Just using the single 37 gig Raptor

2) Computer will be just for local gaming with no internet access, this may change *if* I get DSL in my area.

That's cool. if your on dial up, I'd suggest bringing it over to a friends to do all the windows updates, could take you a couple of hours to do all that otherwise. Updating IE to version 6.0 is a 11 meg download just by itself and I know that SP4 is like 35 -40 megs maybe more, I don't remember. I know the network version is 128 megs but it'll also detect 2K server as well. Just a heads up, that's all.

wrote on 01.06.04 at 19:26:28:

That's cool. if your on dial up, I'd suggest bringing it over to a friends to do all the windows updates, could take you a couple of hours to do all that otherwise. Updating IE to version 6.0 is a 11 meg download just by itself and I know that SP4 is like 35 -40 megs maybe more, I don't remember. I know the network version is 128 megs but it'll also detect 2K server as well. Just a heads up, that's all.

I have all the current MS updates on a CD-ROM disc!

Downloading a pile of updates on a modem sucks!

@ gdonovan

You spoke about an active copper cooler for the raptor HD. I will buy a raptor soon, can you tell me where to get that cooler ?

The one I have came from a trade show I was attending. It's made by Galaxy Products and I'll shoot a picture of it later. The fan really moves some air!

Newegg.com also has a number of HD coolers, you can spot the good ones due to the positive buyer reviews.

Could it be this one ?
http://www.hardwarecooling.com/images/sfhdc.jpg

Yes and it works very well!

This video card rocks! Like my heatsinks? One for the back of the core was a PITA to cut down to fit.

http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/3dfx_aticard.jpg

Default speed 9800Pro ($213) 380 mhz core, 340 mhz ram
Default speed 9800XT  ($400+)  412 mhz core, 365 mhz ram

Max *dead stable* speed my card-  435 mhz core, 376 mhz ram! That's about 10 mhz below on both where errors would start to be detected in ATI-Tool after a long run testing.

Falconfly is right- The rendering of these new cards is amazing! I loaded up MaxPayne2 last night and started a run through at 1024 x 768 x 32 with 2x AA and 6 X filtering and the graphics are just downright fantastic compared to the last card I played the game on.

Screenshots do NOT do these cards justice, the shifting reflections and fluid of play is fantastic.

Need to get some heatsinks on the DDR-400 ram next, they clear 120F while in use! Yikes.