Good you share what's working and what's not! Many people are not willing to share "fuckups". But it is important. I don't have the SE version but when it comes to normal 9600 with a passive heatsink - be careful guys and put some airflow. I have seen maybe 50% of these cards dead as muton - looking as new but dead. Most likely due to the heat. On the other side all! 9600pro and XT with a fan works for me - not a single dead one got in to my hands.
Yeah I'd add a simple 8 cm fan to it or even better, with some cm distance if you can. Also add a 12 cm fan behind your HDD cage to cool the whole SSD/HDD and mainboard silently. Never had a dead HDD after doing this, keeps it way below 40 °C, on some setups even below 30 °C.
I used a Radeon 9600 SE in my retro box for a while, alongside a P4 with Intel chipset, SB audigy 2 ZS and Windows 98. Stability was excellent and the card performed admirably given the price.
I was totally ??? when you were talking about issues and showed the 775i65G. Good that it ended up being the solution! Mine gives me no issues with the same hardware combo: Audigy 2 ZS and Radeon 9600 Pro (ok, sometimes it's a FX 5500 😐). About the Radeon, it's the most stable card I've used on 98. The driver offers as compatibility options alternate pixel center and disabling DXTC. The former helps with text on NFS High Stakes being clearer and the latter simply stops it from crashing to the desktop when launching the game. But like with any Radeon under 98, there's no table fog support, which makes High Stakes and Le Mans 24 Hours look a bit bland and lifeless. Fog gives them a lot of depth. Support for it appeared later on Windows XP, some time after ATI ceased driver development for Windows 98. Quirks are 640x480 @ 60 Hz inexplicably being displayed as 656x496), some resolutions like 1280x960 and 1600x1200 not being compatible with my display (meanwhile 1080p works perfectly, which it never did with Nvidia) and it sending a 640x480 @ 120 Hz to the TV once the drivers are installed. Thanks to a Vogons user I was able to solve this by setting the refresh rate for every resolution on every color depth after installing the drivers: www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1127024#p1127024 And here's the Vogons thread with the registry tweak to enable fog on Windows 98. It didn't work for me on said games, but it's worth a try: www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1057161#p1057161
@@philscomputerlab No, I tend to avoid third party stuff, but the one for Porsche Unleashed fixes texture corruption and broken animations on CPUs with frequency higher than 2,1 GHz. No need to underclock the cpu like I do.
Hi Phil I have the GA-k8VM800M setup running windows 98SE and 512 mb ram and a Semprom CPU running with no issues. The Video card is also a Gigabyte Gv-R9600Pro-C3 a Patriot 120GB SSD and IDE to ssd adapter.I did run the windows update main update program and direct x 9. no issues so far. Thank you for the Video and all the testing you do. your videos have helped me a great deal with my setups
Dosbox on modern hardware, Windows 10 and 11 with RX 5.1,7.1 sound card. Some games run too fast, most run fine. Also using a 13th gen I5-13500 with RTX3070Ti. I had a 9600SE in my Compaq SR1303WM from Walmart back in the day. Also had a Audigy 2 Value with SPDIF out on it, 1 GB memory, and Windows XP. CPU was stock Sempron 3000+ running at 2.0 GHz. Was a good XP rig. Had to be careful with ATI Driver, FSB on CPU was only 333MHz and BIOS was locked. Was my first PC. Hardware shown in the video Reminds me of it. Now I have a more modern XP system. Core 2 Duo Quad 9650 @ 2.98 GHz, 4GB DDR3 1600MHz memory, GTX 750Ti 2GB version, and I think that I have the Audigy 2 Value card in it. It's still using a hard drive. 1TB 2.5" Seagate that I stole out of a external hard drive when they were available at Walmart for 100 USD. Also has a floppy drive and a card reader. Service pack 3 with all of the updates before Microsoft update stopped working. Have a Windows 98SE install disk (bootleg). Wonder what will work with that. Using Windows 11 for everything because it just works as in the modern system I talked about.
Phil I think one way you can incorporate the newer hardware coverage into your channel is by sharing projects, ideas, and tutorials on how to use the newer hardware for retro tasks, i.e. mini computers that do well playing/emulating retro PC games, OS, and software. You could go into some depth on how to maximize modern hardware for upscaled and/or virtualized DOS/Win95/98/XP era games and interesting software. How one could use retro peripherals, floppies, CDs, software, etc with new hardware, as some examples. I think your audience would be on board with that, I would!
I had a rage128 (ATi rage fury) in 1999 and I could *never* get fog working in Thief. Even years later when I had a 9700 pro. I don’t know how that worked but lucky you. Also X:BtF is amazing. I still have my joystick on my desk just for that game. These videos make me want to pull some old hardware out of my storage and test if it still works. Thanks, Phil!
Nice video. I remember that i have ended the game X beyond the frontier, but it was a long time ago, maybe whan i had the pentium 3 800mhz or when i had the Athlon Xp 1400+ :/, really hard to remember i still have the second episode on my shelf when i take out my win 98 system i will give that a try again :D
Recently did a recap on an ASUS A8V Deluxe, with extra caps where there are markings but aren't installed from factory, super reliable and got a 2.7GHz overclock on an A64 X2 3800+ with 270MHz FSB. Also had lots of trouble with the SATA ports, even using a Promise SATA card, had to use a SATA to IDE adapter. I used a Sound Blaster Audigy with the lastest Creative drivers without problems. With an X800XT Far Cry at 1280x720 max settings looks great and always above 60fps.
I had a 9600SE back in the day. I still have a 9600XT that I use in an old Retro PC with an SIS chipset. I gave up on VIA chipset boards during the Socket 462 days as there were just too many hardware conflicts with PCI cards. ISA cards were ok, but PCI cards didn't
This was the first GPU I bought new, to play Half-life 2 on Windows XP. I had no idea how to buy computer parts but the box was covered in HL2 marketing material. After a few years, it was retired to the closet until I revived my P4 machine into a win98 gaming build based on your 10 Reasons for a P4 Win98 Dos Gaming PC video. P.S. I don't mind the modern videos, I think they're cool too and seem to give you some decent sponsorships or parts that support the channel.
Another great video! Kind of makes it look like this is a bad video card. I have an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 128mb AGP card that works great on Win98 and XP. Everything installed without any issues, without any tweaking. It just worked great right away.
I remember the 9600SE not reviewing well at all. It was a pretty big step down in price from a regular 9600 (something like $60 vs $120), but for good reason. The communities I was in at the time treated it like a plague rat. I like the direction your channel has been going. Your videos have honestly been even more enjoyable when you started filming yourself, and the way you're delving deeper into games is a good idea. I guess they just feel more personal now, and sharing more of your own opinions on things helps with that. And doing more retro stuff is always a plus!
The only difference between the SE and the regular 9600 was the memory bus being halved. It crippled performance in games that pushed lots of textures around, but it was mostly fine in older games.
@@GGigabiteM yeah I think 9800 SE vs. 9800 was more of a difference, even when using the Omega drivers to soft-mod it, I had only 4 pixel pipelines available on the 9800 SE.
haha as i read the tech specs at ingram micro partnerpogram i said " oh did apple cutoff their orders ? looking for tnt clubsoda again ? " SE = cutoff brain in buying - only useable for a desktop at these specs - they dont want to hear also let them pay over and over again
@@GGigabiteM half of the pipes in the production did not worked - SE stands for Shithouse Enterprize and then comes the fact of the slowest memory on the market were used. sorry but electronic waste should be named
In the early 00s, I had a Compaq prebuilt minitower with a MSI/Compaq OEM VIA based motherboard and a Athlon XP 2600+ Thoroughbred B 2.16GHz. Less than a couple years into ownership, I upgraded from the stock GeForce 4 440MX to a Radeon X700 Pro. I had an intermittent issue with the VBIOS not loading on boot, and occasional stutters and lockups. There were also occasional graphical artifacts. I replaced the OEM power supply, but the issues persisted. I tried flashing the motherboard BIOS with that of the equivalent retail MSI model, but I suspect that the stripped down Compaq Phoenix BIOS utilized a lower capacity flash ROM IC. The flash failed and bricked the board, so I was forced to hunt for a new Socket A board after they'd very much gone out of fashion. I ended up with a cheap Foxconn branded board with the SiS 741 chipset and it worked like a dream with the X700 Pro. Video would initialize at every power on, no more stutters or lockups, and the BIOS actually let me configure AGP and chipset properties. I don't know if my issues were down to chipset compatibility, a crippled BIOS, or perhaps it could have been the capacitor plague on the OEM motherboard.
That's what I do when I run into an issue, swap parts until things work 😄 It's just very time consuming and not everyone has all the parts just lying around...
It's nice to see an ATI card again. I never saw one of those faster ones w/o a fan. Personally I'd prefer a passive one (because those mostly are using bigger heatsinks OOTB) and just add a simple 8 cm 12 V fan to 5 V internal USB using some plastic strips, so it cools better, is silent and lasts like forever. I had the PowerColor ATI 9800 SE 128 MB only, soft-modded to Pro using the Omega Drivers, because it was faster, tho not using all pixel pipelines the real 9800 Pro card has. I guess it was hit and miss like with AMD 3-4 core CPUs which were locked sold as 2-3 core CPUs. But Farcry 1.3/1.4, FCAM 1.999 and Delta Sector total conversion ran fast on it. FCAM 1.999 isn't compatible with the latest GOG setup, but the 2nd latest one and original setup is. Crysis Maximum was more a slideshow at 30 FPS and even below in some scenes, but it still was fun. I even checked out DX 10 beta and saw the amazing water pearl effects, but it was slower, so I used DX9 in Crysis. As mainboard I had the Asus P4P800 SE Rev. 2.0 with i865PE, S478 Intel Pentium 4 Prescott 3200, 2x512MB 3200 400 MHz Kingston RAM. The CPU ran hot using only a boxed fan, but well, it worked in winters, but restarted on hot summer days or ran just a tad bit below 72 °C when the air inlet temp. was higher than 35 °C. I also had the SB Audigy 2 ZS (bought for ASIO MIDI), later used with EAX 3 and 4.There's an EAX 4 setup which worked. I never experienced the diffs between EAX 3 and 4, but well, it was the new version. The SB Audigy 2 ZS driver installing from CD was a nightmare in Win XP. It needed like 3-4 restarts, crashes, restart of driver setup. I ended up installing all driver parts solely. Sadly I never tried the danielk drivers yet, but I wanna give XP or 7 a go with Core2Duo, Athlon II x2 or even 2-3 gen. i5/7. It's not that picky as Win 9x, hehe. The same USB bug I had with a Gigabyte C2D mainboard. Needs you to unplug the USB device or turn off PC, turn off AC power, wait some secs and cold boot or it sometimes worked on 2nd soft reboot. --------------------------------- Well, you ran the danielk drivers with the 775 mainboard, so that's a whole difference to the SB drivers used on the board before. -------------------------------- One other thing I noticed in Win XP was that regarding to Passmark Performance Test the 2D performance had like 20-30 % and the 3D performance like 5-10 % less with green/blue taskbar and std. setting vs. turning all effects off and using the gray taskbar. You might give that a try. It would be interesting. Somewhere deep on an old HDD I have the ptest files I think. I also compared the P4 3200 with itself @2800 (in another board with locked BIOS), AMD XP 2800+, AMD 4200+, AMD 5200+, C2D E6600 I think. Sometimes I moved the XP drive to a faster PC and changed the HAL.dll using Hiren's BootDVD 15.2 restored v1.1 by Proteus or was it UBCD? There's 8 different HAL.dll in there and you could migrate a Win XP drive from Intel to AMD and vice-versa with some luck. Long before Win 8 had all drivers making migrations easy. ------------------------------- Thinking about Win 9x and seeing your Logitech Joystick I have to think about my Logitech Wingman Extreme Digital, which came bundled with Star Wars X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter (the Academy). This game has no situation-aware iMUSE MIDI sound like the original DOS version, but it has instant action, is quite hard. Is there a way to increase the FPS in this game? -------------------------------- Other good games I remember: Comanche 1, 2, Werewolf, 3 Gold, 4, AOE, AOP, SWAT 3 TGOTY, SWAT 4, NOLF 1+2, SiN + Wages of SiN.
I had very good luck with the 9550 AGP card and never had any driver issues with it. That AsRock motherboard is really the gold standard for XP builds using AGP. I've had good luck with Win98 dual booting with it too. Great choice to go with it. Thanks for the solid video!
I have the Rev 2.0 and found it troublesome with SATA SSDs and the anonymous CMedia sound codec, but chipset is mega, good performance and compatibility, even crazy stuff like Kentsfield Quad Cores (tested with my Q6600, a lotta grunt for an AGP machine).
Te 9550 was much better card than 9600SE. 9550 was by default 128-bit card. It was just underclocked regular 9600 made to compete with the FX5700LE (which was pretty bad), as a result it was really cheap and had huge OC headroom. It was easy to get 9600PRO performance from it. It was in its time best GPU for the money, if you include the OC.
4core dual vsta and another one...they had AGP and PCIe slots. And support quad core 775. Probably rare these days. I had one and it helped me transition from 754 AGP to 775 PCIe without a full upgrade, but it was great for setting AGP GPU benchmark records too. Core 2 Quad plus AGP makes for huge benchmark scores on AGP cards.
Good thing the 9600 and XT exist which have 128 bit bus! I am thinking of getting that card because it is WAY cheaper than the geforce ti 4600 (overpriced) and from what I can tell performs pretty well in hl2 compared to the geforce
If my memories don't play any tricks on me I remember when using maiboards with VIA-chipsets in combination with the 9600 I had to set the AGP-Aperture-Soze to 32MB, disalbe AGP Fast Writes. Can't remember if I set AGP-Speeds to 2x though. If you're into spacesims have a look at the Star Wars-series, eg. X-Wing, TIE-Fighter and/or X-Wing Alliance. They're all up on GOG. Also you could be interested in the Freespace-series up on GOG. Finally you might like to have a look for Freelancer which isn't on GOG.
I know them., I bought a whole box of AGP cards and that Radeon card and some equivalents were in it from a thrift store. Made alot of money on it after testing them all in a Pentium 2 system. Onley 12 failed from all the Matrox, Nvidea, ATI Radeon cards. The one Hercules card worked though. There was one other french sounding brand of wich the name I forgot.
Both my retro-PCs have VIA chipsets for AMD. The first has the VIA K8M800CE & VT8237R+ combination. This runs Windows XP on a s754 Athlon 64 3200+, Radeon X800XT PE, and Audigy 2ZS. Not encountered any issues as of yet. The other has the VIA K8T890 & VT8237A combination. This also runs Windows XP but on a s939 Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (I found one to replace my 4600+!), GeForce Go7950GTX, and Audigy 2 ZS Notebook. Again no issues.
I built a PC in late 2001. All bells and whistles; Athlon Thunderbird 1.4 AYHJA stepping, Abit KG-7 RAID mobo, 1GB DDR, but a GeForce 2 Ti, not an ATI. Nothing but driver issues and instabilities under XP (when it eventually came out). Root cause always seemed to be the Creative drivers not playing well between the Via chipset and the Live 5.1 I was using. Windows 2000 behaved much better but wasn't as good for gaming as 98se or XP. I just remember endless bluescreens. I did manage to get it working stable, after pulling it out of storage and giving it another go around 2015, but it was never the gaming monster I wanted it to be.
Experience with VIA Chipsets... my first own PC, a Thunderbird CPU with an ABIT KT7A-100, VIA KTA-133 came to mind. Unstable, only had trouble with it, froze like twice a day. After that I had two nForce2 boards, it was like day and night, loved these things, especially the simplicity of the drivers. These boards were the reason I have AMD systems in good memory. While AMD makes good CPUs, after 25 years of PC experience, I can say that the software, drivers or firmware so often have some sort of problem, even to this day. Intel and nVidia might not always be progressive or good value, but I trust in their drivers. The only time I had issues with an Intel system, it was a hardware defect, a wonky USB controller. After 2 generations of AMD Ryzen, my next System will probably be Intel again.
I also had good experiences with nForce back in the day, but recently when I used old boards, all of them had issues. I feel the chipsets slowly die over time and they are also not friendly with slowdown tools or PCI sound cards for DOS. But yea, back in the day, I had nForce Socket 754 and 939 boards and they were amazing.
The best space shooter i can recommend is freespace 2, guarantee you will love it. There is an opensource project which makes it better on modern systems
Hey Phill, excellent video as always!! I believe you need a drivers disk to point the Promise SATA drivers to windows XP installation (F6 button). I haven't tried on XP, but on Windows 7 I need to use the drivers disk for windows to recognise the controller and then the drive
VIA = BUGGY SHIT IN SIGHT. those i865 chipset was designed for Socket 478 - look at Intel D865GBF/D865PERC and compare it with such like shit just like gagga-8ipe775-g and you see the fraud at customer from the seller which sold it
9600SE was always card to avoid, same as 9200SE due to both having 64-bit memory bus, and sometimes even cut down memory capacity. Budget choice back then was Radeon 9550, which had 128-bit bus. If you were really lucky and could find 4ns memory chips on your card, after little of overclocking with Ati Tools would let you to have full fat 9600 at minimum, 9600Pro, and sometimes with really good examples even 9600XT performance.
Ofc. those are slower, but good enough for retro gaming for older games in nowadays' perspectives. You also can use the Omega Drivers, which are faster, also soft-modding may increase the speed (in my case it did, with 9800 SE to Pro mod) but not adding more pipelines). I still have a GT 1030 GDDR5 in my newest PC I bought in 2017, not running the newest games or only at 720 60 FPS or 1080 30 FPS, but for any old games it's super fast and stays very cool. Fast memory chips and maybe reballing RAM from partly defective cards may increase performance ofc. I mean if you have some defective cards now and many parts, you could make a DIY mix, double the RAM and things like that. Maybe need to flash the BIOS. Surely not as worthwile as with 3dfx and other rare older cards, but why not, out of fun? Repairing things makes one happy and proud also.
Freespace 1 and 2 are must haves for anyone that likes Space Shooters. Also Freelancer, Starlancer, The Darklight Conflict, Tachyon The Fringe are good to have in your collection
I have built multiple high-end retro rigs but haven't touched them in years. This makes me want to clear out the workbench. I remember there is a Piii-1.4/GF4-4200, A64-3200+/x800Pro, and I think a P2-450/GF2-MX200.
I still have a Radeon 9600 Pro "LZ" here, it's the model with 200 MHz/400 MT memory. Performance follows these results pretty much. Ran it for a while on my Pentium III with VIA chipset, was stable, but when I moved that over to a i815 board I saw a noticeable uptick in performance. It also ran better when installing Catalyst 6.3 instead of 6.2, or rather installing 6.3 over 6.2
18:28 Rage Software? I remember these guy only from eRacer and Off-Road game that they made... Interesting. From my side Athlon 64 seems to be working very fine with 98 and XP, I didn't have to go through that trouble as you did in the video - Seems like perhaps the PC gods (Idk what is it, so that's why I'm calling that xD) decided I'm worthy of having an Athlon 64 Retro PC or something, I'm not sure, it's weird to me to say the least xD
Modern stuff tossed in the mix is fine really. The gear straddling the line between retro and modern is especially cool like your 8-12 year old xeon builds with decent graphics. It's a nice distraction when I'm lost in the weeds on my pentium iii windows 98 or other xp projects. Recently picked up a mac pro 4,1(flashed to 5,1) that I've gotten to run monterrey. will be adding a vega 64 and another xeon to it. It should run windows 10 and some modern games at okay frame rates, the old x58 xeons are no slouch even today.
Ugh brings back memories from 2003 as I upgraded Radeon Ve to 9200 with Amd XP 2400+ on Via kt400a and Audigy 2 Zs. If I remember AGP gart disbled and 2x settings were necessary to keep it stable and some sort of via chipset hotpatch but after that it was rock solid
i had 9550 if i'm correct and for that6 time it was pretty cool; btw i still have some retro parts p2 333 (slot 1) with mb, some athlons xp 1900 with mb, riva tnt from creative, geforce 5200 and so on ;)
I noticed a pretty significant increase in performance using the catalyst 6.2 and 6.3 drivers vs. newer ones. For example newer catalyst versions would run Half-Life 2 at almost unplayable framerates (l18-25 FPS) but with 6.2 it would run at approx. 60 FPS with dips to 30-40, the drivers made a huge difference across the board.
Watching your videos got me into retro builds and two accomplishments were achieved: Core2Duo E8200/4GB DDR3@1333/Mobo Intel G41M/nvidia GT430 1GB DDR3/Voodoo2 12MB/Audigy2/WD Velociraptor 500GB/WinXPSP3 in an Alienware Aurora case, which runs everything including Crysis 😊 and the latest build, a PentiumD925@3GHz/2GB DDR2/ATI Radeon Xpress 200/500GB mecha hdd/WinXpSP3
Privateer 2 is a great space shooter. I had a lot of fun with it back in the days. Clive Owen and Jürgen Prochnow can be seen in the cutscenes, and the game offers a lot of options when it comes to earning money for better ships and equipment. Trading, escort missions, bounty hunting, and so on, only to name a few. If I remember correctly, it was even developed by Erin Roberts. He's the brother of the Wing Commander godfather, Chris Roberts.
den karloinkoink mit dem hübschen scarface von der handgranatenübung habe ich ja gänslich vergessen - der war ja auch dabei xD tja die origin engine hatte die besten scifi-shooter - ich fliege heute noch gerne mit ner coladose in die spezialstahlträger vom wtc so nur zum witz wie bekloppt die bei der bildzeitung sind
I had a 9600SE back in the day in my AMD XP system - in my case it did well up until 2006-2007 when I could afford a better system. I'm still wondering, however, if I hit a jackpot in the chip lottery, as mine could take a fairly good overclock, at least on the core. It could take 325 MHz (the 9700's core speed) just fine. I'd suggest giving it a try. It did give my card quite a decent boost for its price point If you can find tweaked Omega drivers, they'll help out as well 🙂 For the record - ran it on the Asus A7N8X-X with nforce chipset. Only on XP, though.
I do remember I had issues with the old SB Live back in the day. It was similar to the issues you saw where it would crash on startup, and I had to boot up in safe mode to remove the driver. I vaguely remember it had something to do with the fact that my card was an OEM model, and the drivers I was using were for the retail model, or something like that. Once I found the right drivers, it worked just fine.
@@shadowopsairman1583 the 700's and 800's are a complete different design - it begins all with pipes those screaming games in the past i was really pissed off from those 9000's - had all cards from those series tested for adobe premiere NLE Realtimeeffect machines with 3DCube processors
Starlancer is the space game you are after. It has trading, but I barely used it on my blast through and enjoyed it. I'm considering doing a trading run also soon. Loved the intro!
Hey! Another winner of a card I had back in the day. Had the 9500, thought it was anemic so I got a 9600. And it TOO was anemic. But I guess you just figured that out lol! Great content, Phil!
(windows XP part of the video) up the AGP Aperture size. maybe also look into the PCE-PCI bridge, under device manager, view by connection, the one that the AGP card is connected through should be AGP-PCI bridge, the drivers usually come with the chipset (i saw this get installed by the VIA chipset driver package in the windows 98 part of the video, this might explain the better performance on windows 98 for that graphics card)
I always upped the AGP Aperture size, despite anyone including the manufacturer's manual wrote to keep it at 64 MB std was the best setting (I guess just to not waste normal mainboard RAM, if the app/game couldn't make use of external memory). But with 1+ GB RAM I think it's always best to increase the value.
SO, here’s something you won’t hear every day…I’m blind and an avid PC user. Back in the aughts, and still to some extent now, the screen reading software cares about what GPU is in the system, and some screen readers hook to some GPUs better than others. When I built my first PC back in 2003, I thought we stopped having to care about this and I built a decent spec machine…Asus P4C800 De Luxe, Pentium 4 2.4/800 FSB, etc…But I shoved a VisionTek GeeForce 4 MX 420 in it just as a display adaptor. The screen reader had issues in certain applications that I worked out was caused by the GPU, so I bought what was supposed to be a 9600SE from ATI. NO other manufacturer listed. The P4 C800 de Luxe, and its Intel 875 Chipset, would not recognize the card when I got sighted help installing it. “System failed CPU test”, but the CPU worked with the other card. We did something else with the BIOS, “System failed VGA test” said post reporter. Finally, in desperation, we pulled the battery to reset the CMOS…and that one act blew the board all together. We were given a piece of crap Asus P4S800MX with a SiS 661FX, and the 9600 did work with that…But the whole machine was less stable. We never bought another Asus motherboard.
Thank you for sharing your experience! SIS chipset can also cause issues, most of the time they worked well for me, but I have run into issues also, especially with DOS.
@@philscomputerlab Oh absolutely. But the thing that I will never understand is how a board with Intel's best chipset, in effect one of Asus's three top consumer boards, wouldn't take this card for any reason. I think both components share the blame, but I'm inclined to blame the motherboard more.
As for space shooters, I cannot recommend enough Freespace 1 and 2. They are on GOG (I played the original back in the day) and they are amazing. Good missions, massive capital ships. It impressed me at that time, a real 3d with good graphics considering the hardware available. If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend them to you.
Have run into that same issue with sound blaster PCI cards in many VIA chipsets when using Voodoo 5500 AGP if swap out for Nvidia card everything works fine it also works fine with Voodoo 3 PCI but very interesting to see same behavior with the 9600 SE. No idea what the cause is or if is work around but have resorted to using C-Media sound card in those systems. Also great video Phil.
My favorite XP gaming system uses the same Asrock motherboard (quickly bought one right after your original video on it, and very glad I did) with a Pentium dual-core 5800 and a Radeon 9800, as well as a X-Fi XtremeMusic card. Works perfectly fine. And you should give X-BTF another try. Yes it starts slow but later it evolves in a very complex game with quite a bit of pew-pew. :) One of my favorite games.
The 9600 is a Direct3d9 GPU so the hardware is capable of perfectly emulating table fog if the hardware doesn't have native support for it. The XP drivers are going to be much more mature than the 98 drivers, so the emulation was likely better tested and enabled by default. Sound Blaster driver nightmare, yeah the drivers for EMU10Kx based cards are absolute trash. Any driver update was a crapshoot back in the day. Once you got a working system do not change the drivers. AS a last resort if creative's drivers don't work the Kx drivers could work.
I had some overclocked version of this card that I bought in early 2004, it was a bit on the slow side, but I was also way more tolerant of low frame rates back then. Played half life 2 fine at 800x600 and even some need for speed underground 1 and 2.
My Windows 98 retro machine has a 9200SE 128MB AGP card. My XP retro machine has a Nvidia 210 at the moment, would love to get a GTX 900 series to replace it. Busy repairing Nvidia 8600 series cards (waiting for fan replacements) but they are PCI-e. I finished cleaning my Riva TNT 32MB and Creative Voodoo 2 8MB cards last week but they are for a totally different build I want to do. Will be testing a few Creative Live sound cards tomorrow.
I actually had no issues with this particular card under Windows 98SE, and actually found it to have really quite decent performance in games from the late 90s. It was completely stable on my setup I used to test (ASUS A7V266A, Athlon XP 2000+ so similar to your one that didn't work well). It's a shame you had issues with the card however.
i had a sapphire radeon 9600xt pro fireblade edition, on a ecs skt 754 mobo with a sempron 3300 64bit cpu and 8 gigs of ram with an evo 33 tower cooler, it kicked ass.....
In those times I recall VIA chipsets, and AMD, were problematic in terms of hardware compatibility. So it's probably not a fault with your hardware specifically, just typical compatibility issues of the era.
also I've had cases those auto installers like snappy driver installing garbage and making me reinstall the system because of random crashes... so... yea...
Even a bit later as late as the amd am2 socket era I found the Nvidia chippers to be Amazing. Had 4 to 5 different am2/am2+ budget boards across a couple pcs. The Foxconn board I had with Nvidia chipset was the best!
The X series is amazing. You really want to play x3 though. Terran Conflict is the best imo, but there is a very steep learning curve to these games. The space combat is there, and you can on occasion acquire new ships by forcing pilots to bail or die. The game used a lot of impressively clever scripting to allow players to manage their trade stations, ships and other things. Its not a space shooter but more of a space sim.
I remember buying this GPU at Aldi back in the day, was so excited to be able to finally play Battlefield 1942 with a decent framerate. Ah the memories!
No mistakes were made watching Phil's Computer Lab
First 🥇
@@philscomputerlab ? ok i guess i need keep eye notifications
Unlike the XP installer saying how Safe,fast and flexible surfing the internet is/was...
@@JohnSmith-xq1pz that was a long time ago
@@captain1334 Not so long ago to excuse XP not having a basic firewall from the start
Good you share what's working and what's not! Many people are not willing to share "fuckups". But it is important. I don't have the SE version but when it comes to normal 9600 with a passive heatsink - be careful guys and put some airflow. I have seen maybe 50% of these cards dead as muton - looking as new but dead. Most likely due to the heat. On the other side all! 9600pro and XT with a fan works for me - not a single dead one got in to my hands.
Yeah I'd add a simple 8 cm fan to it or even better, with some cm distance if you can.
Also add a 12 cm fan behind your HDD cage to cool the whole SSD/HDD and mainboard silently.
Never had a dead HDD after doing this, keeps it way below 40 °C, on some setups even below 30 °C.
I used a Radeon 9600 SE in my retro box for a while, alongside a P4 with Intel chipset, SB audigy 2 ZS and Windows 98. Stability was excellent and the card performed admirably given the price.
similar set just using 9550 and also XP, no problems at all
Intro is amazing... but the sad part is... its true.
I was totally ??? when you were talking about issues and showed the 775i65G. Good that it ended up being the solution! Mine gives me no issues with the same hardware combo: Audigy 2 ZS and Radeon 9600 Pro (ok, sometimes it's a FX 5500 😐).
About the Radeon, it's the most stable card I've used on 98. The driver offers as compatibility options alternate pixel center and disabling DXTC. The former helps with text on NFS High Stakes being clearer and the latter simply stops it from crashing to the desktop when launching the game. But like with any Radeon under 98, there's no table fog support, which makes High Stakes and Le Mans 24 Hours look a bit bland and lifeless. Fog gives them a lot of depth. Support for it appeared later on Windows XP, some time after ATI ceased driver development for Windows 98.
Quirks are 640x480 @ 60 Hz inexplicably being displayed as 656x496), some resolutions like 1280x960 and 1600x1200 not being compatible with my display (meanwhile 1080p works perfectly, which it never did with Nvidia) and it sending a 640x480 @ 120 Hz to the TV once the drivers are installed. Thanks to a Vogons user I was able to solve this by setting the refresh rate for every resolution on every color depth after installing the drivers: www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1127024#p1127024
And here's the Vogons thread with the registry tweak to enable fog on Windows 98. It didn't work for me on said games, but it's worth a try: www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1057161#p1057161
Wow great comment, a lot of tips in that one. Do you use modern patch for NFS games?
@@philscomputerlab No, I tend to avoid third party stuff, but the one for Porsche Unleashed fixes texture corruption and broken animations on CPUs with frequency higher than 2,1 GHz. No need to underclock the cpu like I do.
I had the 9600 pro version and it was great value for the money.
I had that card !
Gotta love the 865 chipset. Super stable and fast!
That Asus A8V is loaded with good caps! (unless a rare defect or it sitting too long) Topcat will love those caps! Athlon 64 is 2004, week 46.
Hi Phil I have the GA-k8VM800M setup running windows 98SE and 512 mb ram and a Semprom CPU running with no issues. The Video card is also a Gigabyte Gv-R9600Pro-C3 a Patriot 120GB SSD and IDE to ssd adapter.I did run the windows update main update program and direct x 9. no issues so far. Thank you for the Video and all the testing you do. your videos have helped me a great deal with my setups
Dosbox on modern hardware, Windows 10 and 11 with RX 5.1,7.1 sound card. Some games run too fast, most run fine. Also using a 13th gen I5-13500 with RTX3070Ti.
I had a 9600SE in my Compaq SR1303WM from Walmart back in the day. Also had a Audigy 2 Value with SPDIF out on it, 1 GB memory, and Windows XP. CPU was stock Sempron 3000+ running at 2.0 GHz. Was a good XP rig. Had to be careful with ATI Driver, FSB on CPU was only 333MHz and BIOS was locked. Was my first PC. Hardware shown in the video Reminds me of it.
Now I have a more modern XP system. Core 2 Duo Quad 9650 @ 2.98 GHz, 4GB DDR3 1600MHz memory, GTX 750Ti 2GB version, and I think that I have the Audigy 2 Value card in it. It's still using a hard drive. 1TB 2.5" Seagate that I stole out of a external hard drive when they were available at Walmart for 100 USD. Also has a floppy drive and a card reader. Service pack 3 with all of the updates before Microsoft update stopped working.
Have a Windows 98SE install disk (bootleg). Wonder what will work with that. Using Windows 11 for everything because it just works as in the modern system I talked about.
Phil I think one way you can incorporate the newer hardware coverage into your channel is by sharing projects, ideas, and tutorials on how to use the newer hardware for retro tasks, i.e. mini computers that do well playing/emulating retro PC games, OS, and software. You could go into some depth on how to maximize modern hardware for upscaled and/or virtualized DOS/Win95/98/XP era games and interesting software. How one could use retro peripherals, floppies, CDs, software, etc with new hardware, as some examples. I think your audience would be on board with that, I would!
The issue what that is it will narrow the target audience even more.
LOL, That intro had me cracking up. I'll say it again, you suffer so that we don't have to and for that we thank you Phil.
I've still got that card and a Nvidia 32mb as well as an All-In-Wonder graphics card/TV card.
My first 3D card was an ATI 9200 SE.
Got it to play Doom 3.
Also remember injection Sata drivers on the XP install disk
I had a rage128 (ATi rage fury) in 1999 and I could *never* get fog working in Thief. Even years later when I had a 9700 pro. I don’t know how that worked but lucky you.
Also X:BtF is amazing. I still have my joystick on my desk just for that game.
These videos make me want to pull some old hardware out of my storage and test if it still works. Thanks, Phil!
Nice video. I remember that i have ended the game X beyond the frontier, but it was a long time ago, maybe whan i had the pentium 3 800mhz or when i had the Athlon Xp 1400+ :/, really hard to remember i still have the second episode on my shelf when i take out my win 98 system i will give that a try again :D
I remember the 9xxx series. 9800 Pro was awesome. A mate had the 9600 wishing he got the 9800 Pro
Recently did a recap on an ASUS A8V Deluxe, with extra caps where there are markings but aren't installed from factory, super reliable and got a 2.7GHz overclock on an A64 X2 3800+ with 270MHz FSB. Also had lots of trouble with the SATA ports, even using a Promise SATA card, had to use a SATA to IDE adapter. I used a Sound Blaster Audigy with the lastest Creative drivers without problems. With an X800XT Far Cry at 1280x720 max settings looks great and always above 60fps.
Best retro channel in youtube
😊😀
I had a 9600SE back in the day. I still have a 9600XT that I use in an old Retro PC with an SIS chipset. I gave up on VIA chipset boards during the Socket 462 days as there were just too many hardware conflicts with PCI cards. ISA cards were ok, but PCI cards didn't
This was the first GPU I bought new, to play Half-life 2 on Windows XP. I had no idea how to buy computer parts but the box was covered in HL2 marketing material. After a few years, it was retired to the closet until I revived my P4 machine into a win98 gaming build based on your 10 Reasons for a P4 Win98 Dos Gaming PC video. P.S. I don't mind the modern videos, I think they're cool too and seem to give you some decent sponsorships or parts that support the channel.
Ah yes, the half-life 2 promotion. Many cards had a coupon I believe.
Ahh the memories!! My 9600xt bravo edition was a beast back then.
Another great video! Kind of makes it look like this is a bad video card. I have an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 128mb AGP card that works great on Win98 and XP. Everything installed without any issues, without any tweaking. It just worked great right away.
Best in the business!
I haven't laughed this much to a video intro in a long time! haha.
That freeze at 4:04, reminds me of when I got a bad PATA cable, LOL. It was one of those round PATA cables, where they were wrapped on the outside.
All sorts of things can go wrong with these old computers. I tend to swap parts until things work LOL
I remember the 9600SE not reviewing well at all. It was a pretty big step down in price from a regular 9600 (something like $60 vs $120), but for good reason. The communities I was in at the time treated it like a plague rat.
I like the direction your channel has been going. Your videos have honestly been even more enjoyable when you started filming yourself, and the way you're delving deeper into games is a good idea. I guess they just feel more personal now, and sharing more of your own opinions on things helps with that. And doing more retro stuff is always a plus!
Thank you 🙂When are you making videos again? I guess life gets in the way of this hobby 😐
The only difference between the SE and the regular 9600 was the memory bus being halved. It crippled performance in games that pushed lots of textures around, but it was mostly fine in older games.
@@GGigabiteM yeah I think 9800 SE vs. 9800 was more of a difference, even when using the Omega drivers to soft-mod it, I had only 4 pixel pipelines available on the 9800 SE.
haha as i read the tech specs at ingram micro partnerpogram i said " oh did apple cutoff their orders ? looking for tnt clubsoda again ? "
SE = cutoff brain in buying - only useable for a desktop at these specs - they dont want to hear also let them pay over and over again
@@GGigabiteM half of the pipes in the production did not worked - SE stands for Shithouse Enterprize and then comes the fact of the slowest memory on the market were used.
sorry but electronic waste should be named
Good video. Doom 3 is playable on the 9800 pro but not much less in the 9000 series.
Hello followed like your channel I am a computer nerd and I love channels like yours LGR and miketech who look at retro technology 🤓
I had a 9550 in a Celeron D machine. That was the computer I played World of Warcraft on in 2004 to 2007. Seriously it was WoW 24/7 for a lot of us 😂😂
In the early 00s, I had a Compaq prebuilt minitower with a MSI/Compaq OEM VIA based motherboard and a Athlon XP 2600+ Thoroughbred B 2.16GHz. Less than a couple years into ownership, I upgraded from the stock GeForce 4 440MX to a Radeon X700 Pro. I had an intermittent issue with the VBIOS not loading on boot, and occasional stutters and lockups. There were also occasional graphical artifacts. I replaced the OEM power supply, but the issues persisted. I tried flashing the motherboard BIOS with that of the equivalent retail MSI model, but I suspect that the stripped down Compaq Phoenix BIOS utilized a lower capacity flash ROM IC. The flash failed and bricked the board, so I was forced to hunt for a new Socket A board after they'd very much gone out of fashion. I ended up with a cheap Foxconn branded board with the SiS 741 chipset and it worked like a dream with the X700 Pro. Video would initialize at every power on, no more stutters or lockups, and the BIOS actually let me configure AGP and chipset properties. I don't know if my issues were down to chipset compatibility, a crippled BIOS, or perhaps it could have been the capacitor plague on the OEM motherboard.
That's what I do when I run into an issue, swap parts until things work 😄 It's just very time consuming and not everyone has all the parts just lying around...
I love your videos Phil! Greetings from burning Canada!!!
Correctly working Table Fog was introduced in Catalyst 7.11 and above. In w98 Ati Tray Tools can enable Table Fog, but fog is a bit glitchy.
ATI Tray Tools, okie I will try that under 98 the next time.
Excellent content as usual Phil. I’ve learned a lot from your channel. Love your website and all it’s resources 👍🏻
It's nice to see an ATI card again. I never saw one of those faster ones w/o a fan.
Personally I'd prefer a passive one (because those mostly are using bigger heatsinks OOTB) and just add a simple 8 cm 12 V fan to 5 V internal USB using some plastic strips, so it cools better, is silent and lasts like forever.
I had the PowerColor ATI 9800 SE 128 MB only, soft-modded to Pro using the Omega Drivers, because it was faster, tho not using all pixel pipelines the real 9800 Pro card has.
I guess it was hit and miss like with AMD 3-4 core CPUs which were locked sold as 2-3 core CPUs.
But Farcry 1.3/1.4, FCAM 1.999 and Delta Sector total conversion ran fast on it. FCAM 1.999 isn't compatible with the latest GOG setup, but the 2nd latest one and original setup is.
Crysis Maximum was more a slideshow at 30 FPS and even below in some scenes, but it still was fun. I even checked out DX 10 beta and saw the amazing water pearl effects, but it was slower, so I used DX9 in Crysis.
As mainboard I had the Asus P4P800 SE Rev. 2.0 with i865PE, S478 Intel Pentium 4 Prescott 3200, 2x512MB 3200 400 MHz Kingston RAM.
The CPU ran hot using only a boxed fan, but well, it worked in winters, but restarted on hot summer days or ran just a tad bit below 72 °C when the air inlet temp. was higher than 35 °C.
I also had the SB Audigy 2 ZS (bought for ASIO MIDI), later used with EAX 3 and 4.There's an EAX 4 setup which worked. I never experienced the diffs between EAX 3 and 4, but well, it was the new version.
The SB Audigy 2 ZS driver installing from CD was a nightmare in Win XP. It needed like 3-4 restarts, crashes, restart of driver setup. I ended up installing all driver parts solely.
Sadly I never tried the danielk drivers yet, but I wanna give XP or 7 a go with Core2Duo, Athlon II x2 or even 2-3 gen. i5/7. It's not that picky as Win 9x, hehe.
The same USB bug I had with a Gigabyte C2D mainboard. Needs you to unplug the USB device or turn off PC, turn off AC power, wait some secs and cold boot or it sometimes worked on 2nd soft reboot.
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Well, you ran the danielk drivers with the 775 mainboard, so that's a whole difference to the SB drivers used on the board before.
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One other thing I noticed in Win XP was that regarding to Passmark Performance Test the 2D performance had like 20-30 % and the 3D performance like 5-10 % less with green/blue taskbar and std. setting vs. turning all effects off and using the gray taskbar. You might give that a try. It would be interesting. Somewhere deep on an old HDD I have the ptest files I think. I also compared the P4 3200 with itself @2800 (in another board with locked BIOS), AMD XP 2800+, AMD 4200+, AMD 5200+, C2D E6600 I think.
Sometimes I moved the XP drive to a faster PC and changed the HAL.dll using Hiren's BootDVD 15.2 restored v1.1 by Proteus or was it UBCD? There's 8 different HAL.dll in there and you could migrate a Win XP drive from Intel to AMD and vice-versa with some luck. Long before Win 8 had all drivers making migrations easy.
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Thinking about Win 9x and seeing your Logitech Joystick I have to think about my Logitech Wingman Extreme Digital, which came bundled with Star Wars X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter (the Academy). This game has no situation-aware iMUSE MIDI sound like the original DOS version, but it has instant action, is quite hard.
Is there a way to increase the FPS in this game?
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Other good games I remember: Comanche 1, 2, Werewolf, 3 Gold, 4, AOE, AOP, SWAT 3 TGOTY, SWAT 4, NOLF 1+2, SiN + Wages of SiN.
Great comment! I did use the same Daniel's driver BTW.
I had very good luck with the 9550 AGP card and never had any driver issues with it. That AsRock motherboard is really the gold standard for XP builds using AGP. I've had good luck with Win98 dual booting with it too. Great choice to go with it. Thanks for the solid video!
I have the Rev 2.0 and found it troublesome with SATA SSDs and the anonymous CMedia sound codec, but chipset is mega, good performance and compatibility, even crazy stuff like Kentsfield Quad Cores (tested with my Q6600, a lotta grunt for an AGP machine).
Te 9550 was much better card than 9600SE. 9550 was by default 128-bit card. It was just underclocked regular 9600 made to compete with the FX5700LE (which was pretty bad), as a result it was really cheap and had huge OC headroom. It was easy to get 9600PRO performance from it. It was in its time best GPU for the money, if you include the OC.
4core dual vsta and another one...they had AGP and PCIe slots. And support quad core 775. Probably rare these days. I had one and it helped me transition from 754 AGP to 775 PCIe without a full upgrade, but it was great for setting AGP GPU benchmark records too. Core 2 Quad plus AGP makes for huge benchmark scores on AGP cards.
Good thing the 9600 and XT exist which have 128 bit bus! I am thinking of getting that card because it is WAY cheaper than the geforce ti 4600 (overpriced) and from what I can tell performs pretty well in hl2 compared to the geforce
If my memories don't play any tricks on me I remember when using maiboards with VIA-chipsets in combination with the 9600 I had to set the AGP-Aperture-Soze to 32MB, disalbe AGP Fast Writes. Can't remember if I set AGP-Speeds to 2x though. If you're into spacesims have a look at the Star Wars-series, eg. X-Wing, TIE-Fighter and/or X-Wing Alliance. They're all up on GOG. Also you could be interested in the Freespace-series up on GOG. Finally you might like to have a look for Freelancer which isn't on GOG.
I know them., I bought a whole box of AGP cards and that Radeon card and some equivalents were in it from a thrift store. Made alot of money on it after testing them all in a Pentium 2 system. Onley 12 failed from all the Matrox, Nvidea, ATI Radeon cards. The one Hercules card worked though. There was one other french sounding brand of wich the name I forgot.
Pcem is something I want to get more into
Both my retro-PCs have VIA chipsets for AMD. The first has the VIA K8M800CE & VT8237R+ combination. This runs Windows XP on a s754 Athlon 64 3200+, Radeon X800XT PE, and Audigy 2ZS. Not encountered any issues as of yet. The other has the VIA K8T890 & VT8237A combination. This also runs Windows XP but on a s939 Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (I found one to replace my 4600+!), GeForce Go7950GTX, and Audigy 2 ZS Notebook. Again no issues.
I built a PC in late 2001. All bells and whistles; Athlon Thunderbird 1.4 AYHJA stepping, Abit KG-7 RAID mobo, 1GB DDR, but a GeForce 2 Ti, not an ATI. Nothing but driver issues and instabilities under XP (when it eventually came out). Root cause always seemed to be the Creative drivers not playing well between the Via chipset and the Live 5.1 I was using. Windows 2000 behaved much better but wasn't as good for gaming as 98se or XP. I just remember endless bluescreens. I did manage to get it working stable, after pulling it out of storage and giving it another go around 2015, but it was never the gaming monster I wanted it to be.
That is nuts dood!
Experience with VIA Chipsets... my first own PC, a Thunderbird CPU with an ABIT KT7A-100, VIA KTA-133 came to mind. Unstable, only had trouble with it, froze like twice a day. After that I had two nForce2 boards, it was like day and night, loved these things, especially the simplicity of the drivers. These boards were the reason I have AMD systems in good memory.
While AMD makes good CPUs, after 25 years of PC experience, I can say that the software, drivers or firmware so often have some sort of problem, even to this day. Intel and nVidia might not always be progressive or good value, but I trust in their drivers. The only time I had issues with an Intel system, it was a hardware defect, a wonky USB controller. After 2 generations of AMD Ryzen, my next System will probably be Intel again.
I also had good experiences with nForce back in the day, but recently when I used old boards, all of them had issues. I feel the chipsets slowly die over time and they are also not friendly with slowdown tools or PCI sound cards for DOS. But yea, back in the day, I had nForce Socket 754 and 939 boards and they were amazing.
The best space shooter i can recommend is freespace 2, guarantee you will love it. There is an opensource project which makes it better on modern systems
I used a 9600pro with svideo with a tunercard to capture my gameplay. Good memories.
The days of connecting to the TV and watching DivX movies 🙂
Hey Phill, excellent video as always!! I believe you need a drivers disk to point the Promise SATA drivers to windows XP installation (F6 button). I haven't tried on XP, but on Windows 7 I need to use the drivers disk for windows to recognise the controller and then the drive
Yea I tried those. They loaded but still nothing showed up. After 10 or so tries, well I have to move on LOL
You're not alone. I had nothing but problems (mainly instability) with VIA chipsets.
VIA = BUGGY SHIT IN SIGHT.
those i865 chipset was designed for Socket 478 - look at Intel D865GBF/D865PERC and compare it with such like shit just like gagga-8ipe775-g and you see the fraud at customer from the seller which sold it
9600SE was always card to avoid, same as 9200SE due to both having 64-bit memory bus, and sometimes even cut down memory capacity.
Budget choice back then was Radeon 9550, which had 128-bit bus. If you were really lucky and could find 4ns memory chips on your card, after little of overclocking with Ati Tools would let you to have full fat 9600 at minimum, 9600Pro, and sometimes with really good examples even 9600XT performance.
Ofc. those are slower, but good enough for retro gaming for older games in nowadays' perspectives.
You also can use the Omega Drivers, which are faster, also soft-modding may increase the speed (in my case it did, with 9800 SE to Pro mod) but not adding more pipelines).
I still have a GT 1030 GDDR5 in my newest PC I bought in 2017, not running the newest games or only at 720 60 FPS or 1080 30 FPS, but for any old games it's super fast and stays very cool.
Fast memory chips and maybe reballing RAM from partly defective cards may increase performance ofc. I mean if you have some defective cards now and many parts, you could make a DIY mix, double the RAM and things like that. Maybe need to flash the BIOS. Surely not as worthwile as with 3dfx and other rare older cards, but why not, out of fun? Repairing things makes one happy and proud also.
Basically any ati "se" card is best avoided
Freespace 1 and 2 are must haves for anyone that likes Space Shooters. Also Freelancer, Starlancer, The Darklight Conflict, Tachyon The Fringe are good to have in your collection
I've been playing Tachyon: The Fringe and it's much more what I'm after. I will add the other games to my list!
Awesome recommendations.
Starlancer is a really fun one that's easy to jump into
Best IT video beginning ever. Im old and grumpy and I LOLd. :0 Sound cards need to be farthest from CPU on the PCI slots in my experience.
😘
I have built multiple high-end retro rigs but haven't touched them in years. This makes me want to clear out the workbench. I remember there is a Piii-1.4/GF4-4200, A64-3200+/x800Pro, and I think a P2-450/GF2-MX200.
Those are excellent parts!
LMAO That intro. 😂 That was a nice touch, man. Nicely done.
What's up Phil!
I still have a Radeon 9600 Pro "LZ" here, it's the model with 200 MHz/400 MT memory. Performance follows these results pretty much. Ran it for a while on my Pentium III with VIA chipset, was stable, but when I moved that over to a i815 board I saw a noticeable uptick in performance. It also ran better when installing Catalyst 6.3 instead of 6.2, or rather installing 6.3 over 6.2
Would love to see a series where you go year by year and cover hardware and software for that year in the dos through XP time frame.
18:28 Rage Software? I remember these guy only from eRacer and Off-Road game that they made... Interesting.
From my side Athlon 64 seems to be working very fine with 98 and XP, I didn't have to go through that trouble as you did in the video - Seems like perhaps the PC gods (Idk what is it, so that's why I'm calling that xD) decided I'm worthy of having an Athlon 64 Retro PC or something, I'm not sure, it's weird to me to say the least xD
Modern stuff tossed in the mix is fine really. The gear straddling the line between retro and modern is especially cool like your 8-12 year old xeon builds with decent graphics. It's a nice distraction when I'm lost in the weeds on my pentium iii windows 98 or other xp projects. Recently picked up a mac pro 4,1(flashed to 5,1) that I've gotten to run monterrey. will be adding a vega 64 and another xeon to it. It should run windows 10 and some modern games at okay frame rates, the old x58 xeons are no slouch even today.
Ugh brings back memories from 2003 as I upgraded Radeon Ve to 9200 with Amd XP 2400+ on Via kt400a and Audigy 2 Zs. If I remember AGP gart disbled and 2x settings were necessary to keep it stable and some sort of via chipset hotpatch but after that it was rock solid
i had 9550 if i'm correct and for that6 time it was pretty cool; btw i still have some retro parts p2 333 (slot 1) with mb, some athlons xp 1900 with mb, riva tnt from creative, geforce 5200 and so on ;)
Awesome Phil as usuall mate .
I noticed a pretty significant increase in performance using the catalyst 6.2 and 6.3 drivers vs. newer ones. For example newer catalyst versions would run Half-Life 2 at almost unplayable framerates (l18-25 FPS) but with 6.2 it would run at approx. 60 FPS with dips to 30-40, the drivers made a huge difference across the board.
Holy shit, I remeber back in 2005 when I wanted to play KotOR on this card. I spend more time debugging driver issues than playing actual game :D
I think this game is known to struggle with ATI cards...
more uncommon/unkown games would be nice!
Watching your videos got me into retro builds and two accomplishments were achieved: Core2Duo E8200/4GB DDR3@1333/Mobo Intel G41M/nvidia GT430 1GB DDR3/Voodoo2 12MB/Audigy2/WD Velociraptor 500GB/WinXPSP3 in an Alienware Aurora case, which runs everything including Crysis 😊 and the latest build, a PentiumD925@3GHz/2GB DDR2/ATI Radeon Xpress 200/500GB mecha hdd/WinXpSP3
Amazing 😍
Never had a problem with the ATi All in Wonder 9700 Pro
My morning routine includes Phil's Computer Lab while eating breakfast.
I remember buying a 9600 card to play Half Life 2, Far Cry and DOOM 3! 2004 was such a fantastic year for FPS games on the PC
used to have 9600se,asus a7n8x and athlon 2500+, had no issues and performed very well for its time. Also it was oc'ed to 3200+.
Privateer 2 is a great space shooter. I had a lot of fun with it back in the days. Clive Owen and Jürgen Prochnow can be seen in the cutscenes, and the game offers a lot of options when it comes to earning money for better ships and equipment. Trading, escort missions, bounty hunting, and so on, only to name a few. If I remember correctly, it was even developed by Erin Roberts. He's the brother of the Wing Commander godfather, Chris Roberts.
den karloinkoink mit dem hübschen scarface von der handgranatenübung habe ich ja gänslich vergessen - der war ja auch dabei xD
tja die origin engine hatte die besten scifi-shooter - ich fliege heute noch gerne mit ner coladose in die spezialstahlträger vom wtc so nur zum witz wie bekloppt die bei der bildzeitung sind
VIA motherboards are your problem. VIA chipsets. The chipset drivers would help but there were limits to what they could do
I had a 9600SE back in the day in my AMD XP system - in my case it did well up until 2006-2007 when I could afford a better system.
I'm still wondering, however, if I hit a jackpot in the chip lottery, as mine could take a fairly good overclock, at least on the core. It could take 325 MHz (the 9700's core speed) just fine. I'd suggest giving it a try. It did give my card quite a decent boost for its price point
If you can find tweaked Omega drivers, they'll help out as well 🙂
For the record - ran it on the Asus A7N8X-X with nforce chipset. Only on XP, though.
I do remember I had issues with the old SB Live back in the day. It was similar to the issues you saw where it would crash on startup, and I had to boot up in safe mode to remove the driver. I vaguely remember it had something to do with the fact that my card was an OEM model, and the drivers I was using were for the retail model, or something like that. Once I found the right drivers, it worked just fine.
Never had a problem with them or Aan ATi All In Wonder Radeon 9700 Pro.
@@shadowopsairman1583 the 700's and 800's are a complete different design - it begins all with pipes those screaming games
in the past i was really pissed off from those 9000's - had all cards from those series tested for adobe premiere NLE Realtimeeffect machines with 3DCube processors
I had the a8v deluxe and a64 3000+ back in the day and it worked pretty well even with Windows 2k/xp. Weird that you had so many problems.
Starlancer is the space game you are after. It has trading, but I barely used it on my blast through and enjoyed it. I'm considering doing a trading run also soon.
Loved the intro!
Ok will check it out! I sine played another one, Tachyon The Fringe. I really like that one ...
@@philscomputerlab Oops I was actually thinking for Freelancer, the sequel. I haven't played the original yet
Hey! Another winner of a card I had back in the day. Had the 9500, thought it was anemic so I got a 9600. And it TOO was anemic. But I guess you just figured that out lol! Great content, Phil!
That intro! Wow so good
I could swear I had that card in a video capture capability edition. It had the big purple adpater chord with it I remember.
All In Wonder?
This was my first GPU and I loved it
(windows XP part of the video)
up the AGP Aperture size.
maybe also look into the PCE-PCI bridge, under device manager, view by connection, the one that the AGP card is connected through should be AGP-PCI bridge, the drivers usually come with the chipset (i saw this get installed by the VIA chipset driver package in the windows 98 part of the video, this might explain the better performance on windows 98 for that graphics card)
I always upped the AGP Aperture size, despite anyone including the manufacturer's manual wrote to keep it at 64 MB std was the best setting (I guess just to not waste normal mainboard RAM, if the app/game couldn't make use of external memory). But with 1+ GB RAM I think it's always best to increase the value.
Very good test
SO, here’s something you won’t hear every day…I’m blind and an avid PC user. Back in the aughts, and still to some extent now, the screen reading software cares about what GPU is in the system, and some screen readers hook to some GPUs better than others. When I built my first PC back in 2003, I thought we stopped having to care about this and I built a decent spec machine…Asus P4C800 De Luxe, Pentium 4 2.4/800 FSB, etc…But I shoved a VisionTek GeeForce 4 MX 420 in it just as a display adaptor. The screen reader had issues in certain applications that I worked out was caused by the GPU, so I bought what was supposed to be a 9600SE from ATI. NO other manufacturer listed. The P4 C800 de Luxe, and its Intel 875 Chipset, would not recognize the card when I got sighted help installing it. “System failed CPU test”, but the CPU worked with the other card. We did something else with the BIOS, “System failed VGA test” said post reporter. Finally, in desperation, we pulled the battery to reset the CMOS…and that one act blew the board all together. We were given a piece of crap Asus P4S800MX with a SiS 661FX, and the 9600 did work with that…But the whole machine was less stable. We never bought another Asus motherboard.
Thank you for sharing your experience! SIS chipset can also cause issues, most of the time they worked well for me, but I have run into issues also, especially with DOS.
@@philscomputerlab Oh absolutely. But the thing that I will never understand is how a board with Intel's best chipset, in effect one of Asus's three top consumer boards, wouldn't take this card for any reason. I think both components share the blame, but I'm inclined to blame the motherboard more.
As for space shooters, I cannot recommend enough Freespace 1 and 2. They are on GOG (I played the original back in the day) and they are amazing. Good missions, massive capital ships. It impressed me at that time, a real 3d with good graphics considering the hardware available. If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend them to you.
Absolutely!
They are on my list of games I want to play in the future, thank you!
Have run into that same issue with sound blaster PCI cards in many VIA chipsets when using Voodoo 5500 AGP if swap out for Nvidia card everything works fine it also works fine with Voodoo 3 PCI but very interesting to see same behavior with the 9600 SE. No idea what the cause is or if is work around but have resorted to using C-Media sound card in those systems. Also great video Phil.
My favorite XP gaming system uses the same Asrock motherboard (quickly bought one right after your original video on it, and very glad I did) with a Pentium dual-core 5800 and a Radeon 9800, as well as a X-Fi XtremeMusic card. Works perfectly fine. And you should give X-BTF another try. Yes it starts slow but later it evolves in a very complex game with quite a bit of pew-pew. :) One of my favorite games.
DAT intro.
The 9600 is a Direct3d9 GPU so the hardware is capable of perfectly emulating table fog if the hardware doesn't have native support for it. The XP drivers are going to be much more mature than the 98 drivers, so the emulation was likely better tested and enabled by default.
Sound Blaster driver nightmare, yeah the drivers for EMU10Kx based cards are absolute trash. Any driver update was a crapshoot back in the day. Once you got a working system do not change the drivers. AS a last resort if creative's drivers don't work the Kx drivers could work.
I had some overclocked version of this card that I bought in early 2004, it was a bit on the slow side, but I was also way more tolerant of low frame rates back then. Played half life 2 fine at 800x600 and even some need for speed underground 1 and 2.
My Windows 98 retro machine has a 9200SE 128MB AGP card. My XP retro machine has a Nvidia 210 at the moment, would love to get a GTX 900 series to replace it. Busy repairing Nvidia 8600 series cards (waiting for fan replacements) but they are PCI-e. I finished cleaning my Riva TNT 32MB and Creative Voodoo 2 8MB cards last week but they are for a totally different build I want to do. Will be testing a few Creative Live sound cards tomorrow.
I actually had no issues with this particular card under Windows 98SE, and actually found it to have really quite decent performance in games from the late 90s. It was completely stable on my setup I used to test (ASUS A7V266A, Athlon XP 2000+ so similar to your one that didn't work well). It's a shame you had issues with the card however.
i had a sapphire radeon 9600xt pro fireblade edition, on a ecs skt 754 mobo with a sempron 3300 64bit cpu and 8 gigs of ram with an evo 33 tower cooler, it kicked ass.....
Hardcore fan here of ms-dos and win9x... however... early winxp stuff is slowly creeping on me, mainly for the hardware. I blame you Phil! 😅
XP is a fantastic era for a heap of really really awesome games. In a away, it was the hight of PC gaming without all these console port issues.
great intro edit, vid well done again!
In those times I recall VIA chipsets, and AMD, were problematic in terms of hardware compatibility. So it's probably not a fault with your hardware specifically, just typical compatibility issues of the era.
Sata3 hdd's werent around when these motherboards were being sold
True. But early radeons were very unstable themselves. It's only now that I trust them again.
@@GconduitYTubeAccount "ATI 9600 SE: Mistakes Were Made" ... "Intel Arc: Hold my beer"
also I've had cases those auto installers like snappy driver installing garbage and making me reinstall the system because of random crashes... so... yea...
Even a bit later as late as the amd am2 socket era I found the Nvidia chippers to be Amazing.
Had 4 to 5 different am2/am2+ budget boards across a couple pcs. The Foxconn board I had with Nvidia chipset was the best!
I am always for the passive cards...so GF3_ti200 (medion) is always a good choice...
06:50 33fps @ 1024x768 was WAY PLAYABLE back then!!
The X series is amazing. You really want to play x3 though. Terran Conflict is the best imo, but there is a very steep learning curve to these games. The space combat is there, and you can on occasion acquire new ships by forcing pilots to bail or die. The game used a lot of impressively clever scripting to allow players to manage their trade stations, ships and other things. Its not a space shooter but more of a space sim.
that card was awesome back in its day.
I remember buying this GPU at Aldi back in the day, was so excited to be able to finally play Battlefield 1942 with a decent framerate. Ah the memories!