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 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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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
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...
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!
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
BTW I got around to recapping that S370 board with the ISA slot. At least starting it anyway. My desoldering gun was really struggling with melting the solder. There were a couple of traces running close to the pin on the second cap, and after a few tries to desolder the pin, it tore up the traces. It's easy to see where they go to/from, so it shouldn't be too hard to fix, but I decided to put the board aside until I've got enough time to be more careful.
Add some leaded solder to the joint first, let it melt nice and good, but not with too high of a temperature setting. Also, set your de-soldering gun to a lower temperature because even a bit too much heat will cause traces to burn right off. Good luck.
Yeah always add flux and solder before desoldering (it's like 10 x easier and faster then). I like to use an 80 W Weller soldering iron, 50 W isn't enough for big ground contacts. 2x 80 W soldering irons for hard parts. Solder quick and not too hot.
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
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.
Happy Friday Phil! Glad to hear you are going to focus on retro hardware and gaming under 98 & XP. It’s what makes me look forward to your Friday videos! Also, I can confirm 100% that Pentium III and Pentium 4 (478 and 775) systems have less issues with hardware compatibility and performance under 98 and XP. I’ve probably purchased and played with at least 40-50 motherboards over the last 6-8 years to arrive at this conclusion. My best retro builds are systems with Intel chipsets with a few exceptions of boards that just work flawlessly but have VIA chipsets. I do have a couple socket 754 and 939 boards that work fine under Win9x, but without a doubt my Intel based boards have better compatibility with a wider range of graphics cards by both NVidia and ATI/AMD. Sound card wise I too love the Sound Blaster Live, Audigy, and X-Fi series cards, but lately I’ve been messing around with the AudioPCI based cards with Ensoniq (or Creative updated) chips (1370, 1371, 1373, 5880.) Many of these are OEM cards, but they work pretty good other than FM emulation that is lackluster depending on which games you play. Many of them are low profile but with high profile brackets, so I’m working on solutions to make my own low profile brackets so I can use these cards in some of my retro SFF systems that otherwise have sucky onboard audio.
I can confirm that. My retro build is using an ATI 9800 pro (the big Sapphire Atlantis chonker with a passive heatsink), 2x voodoo2, SBlive on an intel P4 2.8Ghz HT proc on an Abit is7 board(intel chipset). When I built the system I originally was using an ATI9600 SE card. Everything installed and worked without issue. I only swapped the 9600 card for the 9800 because I wanted a bit more performance in games when not using the 2x voodoo2 cards. I use a drive caddy that I swap win98, winXP, Win7, Win Vista OS's. No issues. Cheers!
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 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 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.
I love your dedication and your over all style of videos Phil that much hasn't changed in those 9 something years i'm subscribed to you but if you feel like reviewing or testing out newer hardware or other stuff you should definetly do. You shouldn't stray away to far of course as it's just more pleasant and convenient to instantly know the channels content but i for one do enjoy both of these worlds as long as the focus is on something affordable and realisticly applicable.
ASUS A8V deluxe, yes, VIA chipset had some issues on some sata iii ssd drives. Promise integrated controller worked fine for me. It needs a bit of research and usage of nlite software to integrate this driver for windows xp installation. I also have a promise pci sata ii controller to use in some cases with retro PCs, but if you use promise pci sata ii controller under windows 98, you will encounter some issues if your drive is NTFS formated even if you try different NTFS drivers. p.s. i avoid using ide-to-sata converters, i prefer Kingspec ide SSDs.
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.
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.
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!
I wish Gog would have several versions of their games available so you can choose which operating system to run it on especially when a game has versions that can run on older operating systems
You are right! They could include the original CD images also. In some cases they did the right thing, for example some DOS games. Under Windows using ScummVM but inside a subfolder they put the DOS executables, so you can run it in DOSBox or a real DOS PC.
They also could add higher bitrate music, when ripping CD audioor just keep the wave files. I mean space nowadays really isn't any problem anymore. You can still hear the difference between 320 kbps to 1411 kbps, if you directly compare it (more bass with higher bitrate), but going below 320 kbps for no real reason we don't like. It substracts valuable bass and overall character from the music. I think about to re-rip some ogg files in some games from my old CDs.
if you want to look deeper into that generation of graphics cards, you really have to try the third party unofficial omega drivers package. they were far superior to the stock ones.
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 ;)
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
I actually had that card back in the days. I do remember that I had one PC during that time frame which was quite sensitive in terms of chipset drivers (was an AMD Duron I believe and VIA chipset). 1.17 comes to mind as a version number and it was the only one which would make that PC stable. Not sure if I had the 9600 SE in that PC, though - just something I remembered off the top of my head for some reason.
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.
A gold standard for space fighter sim is TIE Fighter (which has 2 campaign expansions). X-Wing is older but still quite good (and inspired a series of books by Michael A Stockpile)
Haha, projects that dont go to plan🤔, sounds like the story of my retro life 😁. Interesting to see the 9600se as I'm currently messing around with a 9800se which unless I'm wrong was manufacturers like sapphire and herculese' answer to ati's 9600le? That bit of 'X beyond the frontier' looks suspiciously like the training level in X Wing!
Haha yes, very likely it's mimicking the old X-Wing training level. I tried X3 Albion Prelude. It was a bit flaky, once ran very slow on my mate's 2x4 core Xeon E5 workstation with GTX 960, which put any fastest i7 to shame, but ran very very fluid on my slow Core2Duo E8400 with a slow GT 1030 GDDR5. Well, X3 looks stunning, but it's definitely not for instant action like X-Wing, Tie-Fighter, Comanche, Gun Metal, AOP, AOE, Red Baron, IL-2 1946, LO-MAC, DCS v1 Black Shark, DCS v1 A-10 and such action games.
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
You're not alone. I had nothing but problems (mainly instability) with VIA chipsets.
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 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.
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.
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.
Very good test
Excellent content as usual Phil. I’ve learned a lot from your channel. Love your website and all it’s resources 👍🏻
I remember the 9xxx series. 9800 Pro was awesome. A mate had the 9600 wishing he got the 9800 Pro
LMAO That intro. 😂 That was a nice touch, man. Nicely done.
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
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.
Which version of ATI Tray Tools works with 98?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
I love your videos Phil! Greetings from burning Canada!!!
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...
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!
Gotta love the 865 chipset. Super stable and fast!
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
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.
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.
My morning routine includes Phil's Computer Lab while eating breakfast.
Best retro channel in youtube
😊😀
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!
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.
That is nuts dood!
I've still got that card and a Nvidia 32mb as well as an All-In-Wonder graphics card/TV card.
Awesome Phil as usuall mate .
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
Best in the business!
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 had that card !
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
Ahh the memories!! My 9600xt bravo edition was a beast back then.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
(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.
I had the 9600 pro version and it was great value for the money.
That intro! Wow so good
Good video. Doom 3 is playable on the 9800 pro but not much less in the 9000 series.
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.
I always enjoy watching your videos and there is a lot to learn from the diagnosis when you run into some problems. Keep up the great work.
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.
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 😍
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.
great intro edit, vid well done again!
Another great video, thanks Phil!
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
Well done😊
Thanks 😊
Hi Phils I love the AsrocK 775i65G, ATI Radeons and your retrovideos!!!
Thank you!
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 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.
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 haven't laughed this much to a video intro in a long time! haha.
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 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 🙂
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.
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+.
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.
BTW I got around to recapping that S370 board with the ISA slot. At least starting it anyway. My desoldering gun was really struggling with melting the solder. There were a couple of traces running close to the pin on the second cap, and after a few tries to desolder the pin, it tore up the traces. It's easy to see where they go to/from, so it shouldn't be too hard to fix, but I decided to put the board aside until I've got enough time to be more careful.
Add some leaded solder to the joint first, let it melt nice and good, but not with too high of a temperature setting. Also, set your de-soldering gun to a lower temperature because even a bit too much heat will cause traces to burn right off. Good luck.
Yeah always add flux and solder before desoldering (it's like 10 x easier and faster then). I like to use an 80 W Weller soldering iron, 50 W isn't enough for big ground contacts. 2x 80 W soldering irons for hard parts. Solder quick and not too hot.
Pcem is something I want to get more into
This was my first GPU and I loved it
Very nice troubleshooting
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
Never had a problem with the ATi All in Wonder 9700 Pro
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.
Happy Friday Phil! Glad to hear you are going to focus on retro hardware and gaming under 98 & XP. It’s what makes me look forward to your Friday videos! Also, I can confirm 100% that Pentium III and Pentium 4 (478 and 775) systems have less issues with hardware compatibility and performance under 98 and XP. I’ve probably purchased and played with at least 40-50 motherboards over the last 6-8 years to arrive at this conclusion. My best retro builds are systems with Intel chipsets with a few exceptions of boards that just work flawlessly but have VIA chipsets. I do have a couple socket 754 and 939 boards that work fine under Win9x, but without a doubt my Intel based boards have better compatibility with a wider range of graphics cards by both NVidia and ATI/AMD. Sound card wise I too love the Sound Blaster Live, Audigy, and X-Fi series cards, but lately I’ve been messing around with the AudioPCI based cards with Ensoniq (or Creative updated) chips (1370, 1371, 1373, 5880.) Many of these are OEM cards, but they work pretty good other than FM emulation that is lackluster depending on which games you play. Many of them are low profile but with high profile brackets, so I’m working on solutions to make my own low profile brackets so I can use these cards in some of my retro SFF systems that otherwise have sucky onboard audio.
I can confirm that. My retro build is using an ATI 9800 pro (the big Sapphire Atlantis chonker with a passive heatsink), 2x voodoo2, SBlive on an intel P4 2.8Ghz HT proc on an Abit is7 board(intel chipset). When I built the system I originally was using an ATI9600 SE card. Everything installed and worked without issue. I only swapped the 9600 card for the 9800 because I wanted a bit more performance in games when not using the 2x voodoo2 cards. I use a drive caddy that I swap win98, winXP, Win7, Win Vista OS's. No issues.
Cheers!
Do you 3D print the brackets or cut them from blanks?
I love this video this is the kind of stuff that always happens to me and I enjoy watching people work through their setbacks with retro computers.
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
06:50 33fps @ 1024x768 was WAY PLAYABLE back then!!
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 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.
I love your dedication and your over all style of videos Phil that much hasn't changed in those 9 something years i'm subscribed to you but if you feel like reviewing or testing out newer hardware or other stuff you should definetly do. You shouldn't stray away to far of course as it's just more pleasant and convenient to instantly know the channels content but i for one do enjoy both of these worlds as long as the focus is on something affordable and realisticly applicable.
Thank you! I will focus on the older stuff going forward, for a range of reasons 🙂
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 😂😂
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?
ASUS A8V deluxe, yes, VIA chipset had some issues on some sata iii ssd drives. Promise integrated controller worked fine for me. It needs a bit of research and usage of nlite software to integrate this driver for windows xp installation. I also have a promise pci sata ii controller to use in some cases with retro PCs, but if you use promise pci sata ii controller under windows 98, you will encounter some issues if your drive is NTFS formated even if you try different NTFS drivers.
p.s. i avoid using ide-to-sata converters, i prefer Kingspec ide SSDs.
Yea I tried various SATA drivers for the promise but no luck...
Hello followed like your channel I am a computer nerd and I love channels like yours LGR and miketech who look at retro technology 🤓
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!
Ah, Thief 2.. One of my favorite games ever made. The EAX accelerated sounded effects were amazing in these games back in the day.
Yes EAX adds a bit of atmosphere.
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.
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!
I wish Gog would have several versions of their games available so you can choose which operating system to run it on especially when a game has versions that can run on older operating systems
You are right! They could include the original CD images also. In some cases they did the right thing, for example some DOS games. Under Windows using ScummVM but inside a subfolder they put the DOS executables, so you can run it in DOSBox or a real DOS PC.
They also could add higher bitrate music, when ripping CD audioor just keep the wave files. I mean space nowadays really isn't any problem anymore.
You can still hear the difference between 320 kbps to 1411 kbps, if you directly compare it (more bass with higher bitrate), but going below 320 kbps for no real reason we don't like. It substracts valuable bass and overall character from the music.
I think about to re-rip some ogg files in some games from my old CDs.
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
VIA motherboards are your problem. VIA chipsets. The chipset drivers would help but there were limits to what they could do
if you want to look deeper into that generation of graphics cards, you really have to try the third party unofficial omega drivers package. they were far superior to the stock ones.
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 ;)
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
I actually had that card back in the days. I do remember that I had one PC during that time frame which was quite sensitive in terms of chipset drivers (was an AMD Duron I believe and VIA chipset). 1.17 comes to mind as a version number and it was the only one which would make that PC stable. Not sure if I had the 9600 SE in that PC, though - just something I remembered off the top of my head for some reason.
A small correction, the black port gives you not only S-Video but Component and RGB 15Khz output
RGB also? Like with a Scart adapter?
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.
A gold standard for space fighter sim is TIE Fighter (which has 2 campaign expansions). X-Wing is older but still quite good (and inspired a series of books by Michael A Stockpile)
Haha, projects that dont go to plan🤔, sounds like the story of my retro life 😁. Interesting to see the 9600se as I'm currently messing around with a 9800se which unless I'm wrong was manufacturers like sapphire and herculese' answer to ati's 9600le? That bit of 'X beyond the frontier' looks suspiciously like the training level in X Wing!
Haha yes, very likely it's mimicking the old X-Wing training level.
I tried X3 Albion Prelude. It was a bit flaky, once ran very slow on my mate's 2x4 core Xeon E5 workstation with GTX 960, which put any fastest i7 to shame, but ran very very fluid on my slow Core2Duo E8400 with a slow GT 1030 GDDR5.
Well, X3 looks stunning, but it's definitely not for instant action like X-Wing, Tie-Fighter, Comanche, Gun Metal, AOP, AOE, Red Baron, IL-2 1946, LO-MAC, DCS v1 Black Shark, DCS v1 A-10 and such action games.