Using PCIe Graphics Cards with Windows 98 SE 

These old Radeon cards look so cool.

Windows 98 and DOS-era retro builds are always my favorite!

E8600 was such a beast of a chip. Even in a locked down Inspiron 530s, it, with 8GB RAM and a GT 1030, kept me going until last year for home theater and retro gaming/emulation use, on Ubuntu with Wine/Proton. It's now a file/Plex/Jellyfin/pihole server, after I sold off the 1030. Wolfdale really feels like the Sandy Bridge of Core 2, being relevant far longer than most would've ever guessed.

_Really_ cool project. This is definitely something I've thought about doing for a long time, but funny enough every time you see people try to get PCI Express working in 98, it's usually with an NVIDIA card. So it's very nice to see this being done with some Radeon GPUs, and you couldn't ask for better results.

I missed the cool cooler designs they used on these. I personally have a diamond multimedia version with Radeon Ruby on it.

Amazing video, I have a Windows 98 and Windows XP dual boot retro gaming PC and I love it. It's a Pentium 4 at 3ghz with an ATI Radeon X800 XT PE AGP (I couldn't find the X850 XT when I built the PC), and the performance in Windows 98 is outstanding. I also achieved to use 2GB of RAM with the patch you mentioned; I bought it from Rudolph directly, and I had no idea that he passed away, what a loss :__( Keep up the good work Phil!

Just finished my "supreme" 775/AGP build with a C2X X6800 and a (silent) FX 5950 Ultra -- Got 25000 points in 3D Mark 2001 SE -- Was very proud -- Until I saw this video -- Thanks Phil ;)

Nice! Answering the questions I didn't know I needed!

Quake 3 Arena

I remember my first duel boot with 98SE and Win2k Pro. Kids these days don't know the struggle we had back then. Great Video! I'm 3D FX, Voodoo Banshee......TnT2 Riva old!!!

Love seeing these "retro" builds. Very well done.

Thanks for the video Phil! Been scratching my head around a K8M890, AM2 board and a Quadro FX 1400 and I thought I was the only one getting issues with Device Manager for the Quadro to work...!

I'm glad that networking will have more focus in the next videos because I've always wanted a networking solution to transfer files between my retro and modern PCs and I've not been completely successful in implementing such a solution yet. I have to keep the USB controller disabled due to resource conflicts with my sound card so file transfer using a flash drive can be a pain sometimes. Very nice video.

Fantastic Video ! -- I loved the comparison and contrast between two different boards. And the conscious decision to show case the reasons for going with a PCI Express versus a traditional AGP motherboard. I aLso LOVED your perspective on DOS/Win98 and XP/Vista/W7 multiboot, or multibuild systems and why you chose one over the other. The driver hacks and the sad legacy contribution of Rudolph Loew's patches were heart rending. Can't wait for the NAS videos to come !!!!!

Great experiment Phil. I just love 775. Sooo versatile.

Awesome Video Phil, Thank You very much

I haven’t heard Phil this excited in awhile lol. As always gr8 work Phil. A Happy New Years as well.

Device Name: *B A N A N A*

Cool! I have a couple of early LGA775 boards that won't support Core 2 Duo processors, thus making them unsuitable to build low end Windows 10 machines. This information makes them good candidates to make Windows 98 systems instead of the LGA478 boards I have been using. Thanks as always for your great videos!

TRULY THE ULTIMATE WINDOWS 98 SE RETRO MACHINE: DUAL CORE, DDR2, PCIe GPU, SSD, AND SB WITH DOS COMPATIBILITY.

Good video! I've had some success doing the Win98/XP dual boot systems, and your parts used here are a pretty close match. The South Bridge being an early ICH5 is generally the only one to support both 98 and XP, with the earlier North Bridges like i865G also working well. Congrats on the PCIE success! I've never been able to make that work.

I really enjoy these sorts of videos you do, finding other options for retro hardware. And thank you for sharing the link for the RAM patch, it's going to be very useful

19:15 Cheap as chips until a video is made about them hehe =)

omg phil.... you r the best win98 retro pc youtuber

I'm really looking forward to seeing how you manage to network everything. I have a fileserver that I will be running Unraid on and this would be so useful for my retro builds.

Great fun to watch, nice work!

Nvidia cards up to 6800 works with default drivers. Its the 7000 and 8000 cards you can get working with modified drivers!

For those that want to mess with AGP and PCIE on 775 a good choice would be the 4CoreDual-VSTA board by Asrock as it supported both DDR1 and 2 as well as AGP and PCIE, it was what we used at the shop to test parts during the changeover from AGP to PCIE. It supported from P4 all the way to C2Q so we could test a ton of gear on it and while IIRC out of the box it didn't have Win98 drivers it used a bog standard Via chipset so standard Via Win98 drivers worked. It was a great test bed platform and looking on eBay they sell for around $60 USD with a CPU so not bad for an LGA 775 that can run anything.

Great video Phil as always!

Another brilliant video. Happy New Year Phil.

Some time ago I buid a "modern" W98 using a motherboard with Intel 945 chipset and modded drivers and an nVidia 7600 GT and more modded drivers, surprisigly once everybody was installed it runs flawlessly and of course very fast for a W98 machine. It was an experiment more than anything else and I ended up selling all the parts once I have the system up and running.

Funny thing about the ATI X800 series of cards. They were designed to run with a PCIe bus. Even the AGP model. If you look just above the AGP port on the card you will see the chip that converts PCIe to AGP. I believe that ATI called it PCIe to AGP bridge

Works great wirh my P5KPL-AM EPU mainboard. But i had also to deactivate the Standard Display Adapter (VGA) as well. Big Thanx to Phil!

Just wanted to thank you for this video. I was able to test a similar setup recently: ASUS P5KPL-AM EPU / Core2 e8400 / Hynix DDR2 5300u @ 667 / Radeon x800 XT My average 3D Mark 2001 score was 34280, but I had several system and PCI devices that are not supported or do not have drivers. So I tried something else... With these parts, I was able to get 3D Mark 2001 scores in the 23500 range on an ASRock ALIVESATA2-GLAN and Athlon 64 4000+ with 1mb cache overclocked from 2.6 GHz to 2.88 GHz. The AM2 board used a VIA chipset with working drivers for everything except an ACPI motherboard resource. Also got in the 22500 range on a Fujitsu-Siemens D2030-A Socket 939 board with an Athlon 64 3700+, SiS chipsets, fully supported with all drivers. Fun projects, all PCI Express, all working with the caveats mentioned for the AM2 and 775 boards.

Awesome experiment, phil! Got a new use for that old q6600 build I had collecting dust somewhere :)

This Asus P5KPL-AM SE is very capable for light overclocking. My C2D E8400 and C2Q Q9400 ran stable with 400 Mhz FSB on this board.

Love the vid, Phil. I had pretty good success using the ATI X850 XT PE vid card, ASUS P5KPL-AM SE motherboard and the other hardware listed (other than using an Audigy 2 ZS instead of a Live! which I also have but prefer the Audigy better). This is maybe the 15th Win98 system I've built over the years. However it's been tricky getting it to boot consistently when using over 512 MB of RAM even with Rudolph Loew's patchmem installed. With 1 GB or 2 GB installed sometimes it boots, but usually it just starts to load Windows and the reboots before the login. With a single 512 MB stick of RAM it's super rock-solid and is most stable Win98 system I've had in 20+ years. I ordered some different RAM so I'll have to see how that works out.

Been a couple videos since I commented I think: Happy Philday!

I love your video's.I am busy with a old amd 939 that i will use as a retro pc.Did a mobo upgrade 2 weeks ago.Just been busy with rl before i set her up.Nothing was wrong with the old mobo just the new one has better oc capability.I fitted a custom air cooler and gonna try breach 1000mhz oc on air.People ask what am i to gain for fixing an old pc and my answer is simple.Knowledge.Doesn't matter how much you learn there's always way to improve.

I love these high-end Windows '98 systems.

Great video Phil. Thanks.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay! I've been waiting for this video for so long. (Imagine british soccers fans reaction)

What a video! I can´t wait to see what kind of solutions you´ve come up with Win98 & networking :D

I've been rocking a X3220 and a AGP X850XT for a while now with Win98. Blindingly fast on Win98!

I dig how you're always exploring new ways to dive into 98SE, often making it more accessible and affordable in the process. I also saw Joseph's thread about installing Live cards with Audigy drivers, and a video on that would be cool. And I'd be keen on more networking stuff too. I'm already using FTP on my DOS and W98 machines, which has been game changing. Next item on my wishlist is to set up shares from a NAS that can be mounted on my retro machines. Currently tinkering with EtherDFS for mounting network drives under DOS.

waiting for your video thanks :)

Love those old motherboards that show transition from one technology to another.

This video helped me get a system working with a Geforce 6800 and a Pentium M on an industrial itx 915gm motherboard with all chipset drivers.

ASRock had very interesting boards back then. I had an socket 478 board with AGP and PCIe, the ASRock P4Dual 915GL. Where you could use both at the same time, crazy times.

Great job! I just installed Win98 on my 775Dual-VSTA yesterday. I'm going to attempt PICe on 98/XP like you did. AGP with a voodoo2 for 98/DOS....it'll be interesting!

Phil is my kind of scientist !

Really enjoyed the video. Thanks for these. I would definitely be interested in the networking videos for DOS up through Win98. I would also be interested to see the video on the alternative sound card driver installation.

Nice video, thank you very much for making it. Windows 98 doesn't care whether video card is PCIe or AGP. If chipset drivers are available it will work. Most PCIe boards do not have working chipset drivers. Drivers install, but system is unstable. From my experience anything above Intel 8xx series chipset will be a lot of headache. I'm surprised you got a stable system with G31.

interesting to see how these last gpu cards for win 98se work and learning what are the drawbacks to using them. I'm very curious to see a comparison on how the late nvidia cards (geforce fx 5900/5950 and geforce 6800) also work with 98se, how the 8 bit palletized texture/table fog are affected and also how is the 98se compatibility are affected with later and earlier games using these cards. I did find recently that Nvidia had a table fog emulation available but not sure which software or os. I copied this instruction to find table fog emulation from a battlefront forum circa 2002 posted by user "Schrullenhaft": Start Menu > Settings > Control Panel > Display control panel > Settings tab > Advanced... button > at this point it may vary, NVidia will have a tab with the name of the video card and others may list their advanced configuration tabs here (Direct3D or DirectX tabs for some brands) > Additional Properties button (NVidia) > Direct3D Settings tab (NVidia) > Enable Fog-table Emulation check box (NVidia)

Great job Phil, thanks for that. Pentium 4 mobos with agp slots are still pretty cheap around here, but it's good to have this knowledge. A dificult one to get is a motherboard with universal agp, needed for some voodoo cards.

before watching: PCI, and PCIe are "the same" as far as an OS knows, they're logically the same.

I don't have an actual use for windows 98, as all the games I used to play back then usually work or have patches to work under XP, for dos games all work perfectly fine in dosbox, my retro xp machine has an HD 3650 agp version, performance is similar to this card and gives me that retro feeling I want from an old computer

Great and informative video Phil! I have a X700 PRO AGP Win98 build and performance is excellent compared to NVIDIA FX series, but I did have a few issues. I could not get 1080p working on ATI card and playing DOS games inside Win98 had some graphical issues (Duke3D especially, window displays garbled horizontal lines). I think I was using same drivers as you (cat 6.2)

aaaah the great nostalgia.

He passed?.... :( :( :( What a great fellow for making this patch and props to his family for making it free for everyone to use even after he passed, I think he would have appreciated that from the after life...

Those videos on DOS networking with NAS are going to be great.

Love your videos!

Oh, my God, it's Phil. (Quake's "The Seal of Nehahra" movie reference) On a serious note, this is something I have to try.

More benchmark footage please maybe side by side comparing both setups. Thank you for the content.

It worked for me on my first try with Windows 98 First Edition when disabling the driver and installing the patches and Direct X 5-9!!!

This is amazing! I didn't know this was possible, and now it opens up so many doors! :) Obviously you need to dig into Nvidia cards next. If you can get that working, that'd be huge. The NAS video you hinted about, that sounds great too. I suck at networking stuff, so any guides are welcome, hehe. What a way to open up a new year eh. Cheers Phil, you rock.

I built an 8gb ram w98 machine, being a 32 bit system read only 3.5gb of ram, but anyway it's 8gb ddr2 1200mhz, and all components officially supported. By the way, it's an interesting video because don't have much of these around, I had to find a way to make it work by myself. Using a PCIe 6800XT overclocked BIG LIKE!

Excellent 😊👍

Good job, Buddy👍👍👍👍👍

One board i did managed to get Windows 98 with PCIe GPU working is the Gigabyte GA-EP41-UD3L, Intel G41 based

I had a Nvidia 6600 GT PCI-E running on a dual core motherboard about 10 years ago. Performance was fantastic but i could no longer use DOS. PCI-E cards from Nvidia break DOS in Windows 98. I never tried any ATI PCI-E cards so i can't comment on those. Great video.

Man, I've been hearing about this (pcie gpus supposedly working in Win 98 under some circumstances) for some years now, but this is the first time we actually have a concise video on the topic! What's left now is to try to topple the previously considered to be fastest card in Win 98 (the 7950gt agp with modified drivers from the 6000 series) with its bigger brother - the 7900gtx (that obviously only comes in pcie variant) while at the same time maybe also OC the E8600 (a famously good chip in that regard, known to hit 5.0 Ghz in some cases) sky high. That might be just enough to push some of the games over 1000 fps, lol.

If only 3Dfx lived long enough to make PCIe cards. :) I wonder how the Original Halo on PC would measure up. Although, that might be asking for a lot.

Yeah, a follow-up with Geforce and Quadro cards world be amazing. We could use something like NGlide for 3DFX too.

Win 98 is like wtf is pcie?

I had the XT850 when it came out and it was great at the time.

Great idea , I never knew u could use a PCI e cards . I bought a x800 agp and wasn't cheap. I use Duel boot with xp with athlon 3000+ works well but struggles with grand Prix 4 in xp and 98 need more power lol.

When working on writing drivers for an open source project Im involved in I was surprised to learn that pci express is actually easier and much less work than agp to get working. It's obviously different, but there's a parallel with getting VESA modes in that it doesnt require specific chipset support, but rather a standard (over simplified, but it gets the idea across).

reminds me of oerg866's ultimate 98SE build with a PCIe 7800GT (iirc last nvidia card that had drivers that could be made to work with 98SE). that rig was even able to run minecraft. on 98SE. at playable framerates... mind blown

Just tried using my Radeon X800 GTO (PCIe) with my recently-built Windows 98 rig. Specs are almost the same as yours, with using PCChips P43G (Intel G31 chipset) and Sound Blaster Audigy 1. You can use LoneCrusader's Intel chipset drivers for chipset support. With everything installed, I get a score of 28584 in 3DMark 2001 SE, making it a fantastic performer for a Windows 9x rig.

My 98 machine has a 6800xt (unlocked with Riva Tuner) and it works well.

I am becoming more and more convinced that I need to build a Windows 98 retro gaming PC

I eventually got an ATI All-in-Wonder X800XL PCIe working in Windows 98SE on an Intel 965 chipset based machine using Catalyst 6.2. The trick with that machine was the rloew RAM patch. Before that even with only 256MB installed in the machine I could never get the video driver working.

there are some early LGA775 chipsets like the VIA P4M900 which have native windows 98 drivers and have working PCIe that'll work well with a build with those ati graphics card. the (ASUS P5VD2-VM SE) LGA775 motherboard is one with windows 98 drivers.

Woo Networking stuff!

For the live on XP you can also use the PAX-2005NewYear driver which comes with the Audigy 2 software including some extra bits and updates to make sure every original feature is accessible. The installer will ask which card you have and the Live is an option! It then extracts the Audigy 2 cd contents to the harddrive and modifies it for the selected card. Once the regular setup is finished it will then show you extra options to update it further and install original components back. And at the very end it will remove all the stuff it extracted to leave no junk behind. My method of installing 98 is even more streamlined as i made a boot floppy based on ms-dos 7.1 with all my utilities i use on it. It also contains my own take on the ms-dos super easy so i can just insert the floppy and be good to go. I also made a usb stick version of this which i can easily flash onto a usb stick. On this disk is the partition manager part to easily partition the drive and install either the win9x mbr or a bootmanager. Then i have my own custom setup script which depending on what it detects does different things. All i need to do is put the win98 folder on the stick and boot from it. Run setup C: D: to inform me the target is D: and it will ask to format the drive with the /q /s options making it bootable. After this it automatically copies the files to D:\SOURCE . I can then run another script on the disk to install a memory limiter to drive D: . Now i remove the stick and reboot into a local copy of MS-Dos 7.1 . Type source\setup and resume the regular Win98 setup. Once its all done i reboot to ms-dos inside Win98 so it generates a Reboot to MS-Dos.pif file and boot from the stick again. I once again run setup C: D: and will now be prompted if i want to replace msdos mode or if i wish to format the drive again. Selecting the first option will automatically integrate everything inside msdos mode so from now on my Win98 install has the startup menu and all my dos utilities easily accessible trough the official reboot to msdos menu. The above was designed when i had a T5710 as my retro pc and wanted a streamlined experience. Feel free to ask a copy ill gladly mail you a link to that single floppy project. As for follow up videos on this PCIe driver topic i'd indeed be interested in what the geforce side of things can do, for example the MGDx Driver.

I have built Windows 98 PCs installing Dosbox on my system xD. Despite the DOSBox developers themselves sometimes having said , that putting Windows 98+ was not optimal for DOSBox, my experiences have been outstanding. Raw CPU-performance might be slower than using a virtualization software, but DOSBox offers the best gaming performance I have seen, best compatibility, running super smooth, stable, fast and including anything anyone would expect from a Windows 98(SE) machine, like using Voodoo emulation, the real Roland MT32 soundbanks, best video output filtering and such.

Nice to see network being covered a bit more in the future! Small note though: whatever you do, do NOT mix old Windows machines with your 'daily use' home network. Plit them! Might be a nice topic for a future video as well, to discuss the various options. ie a separate vlan, or a separate switch/router.. You could do all kinds of fun things with it; ie use a simple router/wifi/switch box where you use the rj45 ports for your retro machines and the wifi radio for the internet uplink etc.. Fun :)

That’s nuts!

Recently someone gave me a Foxconn k8m890m2ma-rs2h motherboard with a Sempron 3600+ and a PCIe X300. Just out of curiosity I installed Windows 98 and I was pleasantly surprised. I haven't tested it much, but I've played NFS Porsche Unleashed and it was very quick. VIA drivers installed with no errors, but I do get some unknown devices in device manager, and I had to use a PCI soundcard, as the onboard was not detected.

Good job.

Very cool. Sounds like this was a lot of work. I'd love to see another with Nvidia cards, but I'm betting that'd be even more difficult to get things working.

1:25 that is one gnarly looking motherboard, AGP and PCIe AND a "Future CPU Port"

Need to see a 98 setup with a 7950gt pcie card running. Glad to see radeon pcie cards working though!

Quick question about chipset drivers as you went through it quickly. Is it ok to rely on generic drivers Win98 uses for the system then and just leave ones with question marks as-is?

Oh, yes, GeForce 6600GT and 6800 pcie are extremely good choice for Win98 but I must confess that I love ATI X series for Win98/XP. I believe that from now collectors like me are going to pay more for ATI PCIe cards ☺️

This is very cool

Also recently remembered that a single-core Celeron based on Core 65nm did exist, G440\G450. Possibly to reduce potential issues (if any) with a W98 build.

Very interested in that NAS and the PCI-E possibilities.

Shit I remember when this was top of the line like it was yesterday.