d1stortion wrote:

Even though I like to go for as much RAM as possible too, more than 512 MB is pretty useless for Win98 gaming. I think everyone here remembers how much RAM PCs had back then 😀 I have that amount in my machine (with the swap file disabled) and it never has ran out of memory so far and no tweaking is needed.

I keep hearing that Morrowind eats through RAM and i don't have a WinXP machine... So my only other option is to beef up my PIII system and hope it runs Morrowind ok. I give up trying to get it to run right with Windows 7 X64 (it looks horrible anyway as it doesn't support 1920x1080 res).

Morrowind should be ok with 512MB on that machine though. Also, you could give Morrowind Overhaul a try for running it on your main rig. If you don't like the updated graphics and features you can remove most of them 😀.

F2bnp wrote:

Morrowind should be ok with 512MB on that machine though. Also, you could give Morrowind Overhaul a try for running it on your main rig. If you don't like the updated graphics and features you can remove most of them 😀.

I have to try and get the game to boot up properly first without randomly crashing 🤣. I've tried all the compatibility modes and admin tricks etc... I just give up! Some people can run it on 64-bit Windows 7, but for some reason it's not working with me. I had a bash on Morrowind earlier with my current PIII config (850MHz, 384MB RAM) and it runs and looks crap using the V5 5500! I might give it another bash later using a GF4 MX440 😁.

I still you should give Morrowind Overhaul a try since it does a lot more than just a graphical update, it might fix things for you. Morrowind does run like crap on the V5, but the V5 was never meant for it, most of the graphical glitches are due to the lack of official DirectX 8.0 drivers AFAIK. It runs fine on a Matrox G400, slow as hell, but no graphical glitches 😉.

It's clear that playing DX8 games on DX6 cards isn't going to suck only in theory. Perhaps there are numerous threads all over the internet with suggestions on how to get this game working on newer computers. If it's a DirectX backwards compatibility issue you can always dualboot to XP on your modern machine for games like these.

I never heard of Morrowind before (don't like swords and sorcery much). I just checked and seen that it is a game from 2002 (Elder Scrolls thing, right?).

As I said, I realy have no idea about the game itself, but a game from 2002 on a windows 98 system is really a good idea? Shouldn't you be trying to put together a decent XP machine, with a P4 mobo and as much DDR RAM as you want, which are a dime a dozen? This might solve all your retro related potantial problems.

I'll wait until i get all the upgrades and try again 😁.

Anyway, i've been looking for a PSU with a stronger 5V rail and have come across a 400W FSP/Fortron FSP400-60GN PSU. It seems a bit weak on the +12V rail though (The GF4 Ti4200 will probably use this too!) :

+3.3V = 28A
+5V = 40A
+12V = 15A

Should i be worried about the +12v rail? I'm pretty sure the Powerleap adapter runs off a 4-pin molex PSU cable too (using the 12V rail?)... It would be good if i could find a list showing what hardware runs of each voltage rail.

We have a very similar PSU. The only difference is that mine delivers 17A on the 12V rail.
This is on a PIII Tually 1266 with a Ti4200 with a couple of Voodoo 2 cards, an SB Live! and an AWE64 Gold, so you should be pretty safe. 😜
In fact, I've used this PSU to run a 6600GT for quite some time so I know it's fine. Your Fortron PSU will be just fine 😀.

tayyare wrote:

I never heard of Morrowind before (don't like swords and sorcery much). I just checked and seen that it is a game from 2002 (Elder Scrolls thing, right?).

As I said, I realy have no idea about the game itself, but a game from 2002 on a windows 98 system is really a good idea? Shouldn't you be trying to put together a decent XP machine, with a P4 mobo and as much DDR RAM as you want, which are a dime a dozen? This might solve all your retro related potantial problems.

I'm actually watching a complete WinXP setup on ebay (pick up only about 10 minutes from me 😀):

AMD Athlon XP-M 2600+ (clocked as a 3200+)
768MB DDR RAM (will definitely need upgrading to 2GB 😀)
Abit NF7-S2 motherboard
BFG Geforce 6800GT AGP graphics
480W Tagan PSU
Massive Chieftec Dragon ATX case (probably a bit too big for my liking!)
200GB SATA HDD
2 x DVDRW drives
WinXP SP3

I'll go for it if it ends up being cheap enough. The only thing that bothers me about the old Athlon XP is the lack of SSE2 😒.

I have a Tualatin setup, a 1.4S @ 1.6ghz, 815E, 512MB, GF3 Ti200 + V2 SLI, Win98se to be exact, so pretty similar to what you're planning. But I use it solely for games up to 2001 only, i.e. stuff more leaning on the Win98 era. It's really great for that, pretty much rock solid stable, with no incompatibilities and everything like SWPR, Kingpin, DK2, etc playing beautifully.

I've tried newer games on it,i.e. post 2002 and can say that I would prefer to run those on an XP machine. Having said that, I would not limit myself to an early XP machine but would try to go as late as possible (factoring in budget, personal preferences, sentimentality for certain hardware, etc.).

Might I suggest that you bump up the XP rig one or two generations ahead to an A64 or Phenom build? Or Intel equivalent if that suits you. With something like a Radeon X1950 or 8800GT it would be a powerhouse for XP era gaming.

sgt76 wrote:

Might I suggest that you bump up the XP rig one or two generations ahead to an A64 or Phenom build? Or Intel equivalent if that suits you. With something like a Radeon X1950 or 8800GT it would be a powerhouse for XP era gaming.

Or how about letting sanity prevail for once and just installing XP on the main system 🤣

d1stortion wrote:

sgt76 wrote:

Might I suggest that you bump up the XP rig one or two generations ahead to an A64 or Phenom build? Or Intel equivalent if that suits you. With something like a Radeon X1950 or 8800GT it would be a powerhouse for XP era gaming.

Or how about letting sanity prevail for once and just installing XP on the main system 🤣

I don't want XP on my main system and it'll still have issues with older XP games due to multi-core problems etc. I think a fast single core CPU is good enough for old WinXP games. Later XP games usually work fine with Vista/7 and made use of more than 1 CPU core... I can run those games on my current i5 3570k gaming PC 😀.

I think the Athlon 64 CPUs were probably the best when it came to single core CPUs (better than the P4)... Maybe i could throw together a cheap A64 PC, or just buy and old OEM one and modify it a bit?

PowerPie5000 wrote:

I don't want XP on my main system and it'll still have issues with older XP games due to multi-core problems etc. I think a fast single core CPU is good enough for old WinXP games. Later XP games usually work fine with Vista/7 and made use of more than 1 CPU core... I can run those games on my current i5 3570k gaming PC 😀.

I think the Athlon 64 CPUs were probably the best when it came to single core CPUs (better than the P4)... Maybe i could throw together a cheap A64 PC, or just buy and old OEM one and modify it a bit?

You hit the nail on the head in para 1 of your post. Personally, I wouldn't waste my Sandy Bridge-e and Ivy Bridge systems running an antiquated OS. Don't wanna dual boot either.I'd just keep it in a retro rig for nostalgia and good ol' times sake.

My personal aims with an XP rig are as follows:
It should have enough CPU + GPU power to handle stuff up to 2006 in full HD, i.e. play XP era defining games like HL2, Far Cry and FEAR. From 2007 onwards games started supporting DX10 widely (e.g. Bioshock/ Crysis), multi-cores and would run best on a modern Win7/8 machine.
Importantly, it should be something I can connect with and feel a certain nostalgia for.

Perhaps I can share my personal experiences based on some of the XP rigs which I've owned to help with your decision. Draw what you may from them.

1) Pentium 4 Northwood 'B' @ 3ghz, SiS 645 chipset, 1.5gb DDR 333, Nvidia Ti 4600, 80gb IDE hard disk. A circa 2002 period correct build. This could handle games up to 2003 brilliantly, except HALO. Struggled with 2004 titles like Far Cry and HL2, which were only playable on low settings @ 1024x768. Conclusion: Usable for games up to 2003, but it fails the HL2 and Far Cry XP era defining limited useful timespan due to cpu and gpu bottlenecks.

2) Pentium 4 Prescott @ 3.6ghz, 865PE chipset, 3gb DDR400, 160gb SATA, Nvidia 6800GS. This was much faster than you'd think compared with rig 1), the HT and near 1000mhz system bus really held with making the system feel modern on the desktop. CPU performance was around an Athlon 64 @ 2ghz, which is OK but I felt it still bottlenecked the 6800GS a little. Played HL2 and Far Cry @ 1280x1024 near 60 fps. FEAR at medium/ high settings 40+ FPS. Black & White 2 was OK. Forget about running Oblivion or Call of Juarez from 2006 on this. Conclusion: Usable for games up to 2005. A more powerful AGP card such as a X1950, 3850, 4650 would have fixed this easily making it usable for games until 2007 even.

3) Pentium E5700 @ 3ghz, P965 chipset, 2gb DDR2 800, Nvidia GTS250, 500gb Samsung F3. This played everything up to 2009 titles as you would expect.
4) X3320 @ 3.0ghz, P35 chipset, 2gb DDR2 800, Radeon 3870X2. Even better than the above.
5) Q6600 @ 3.2ghz, P45 chipset, 4gb DDR2 800, Radeon 6850. Very, very fast, everything playable up to present day.
If you like Core 2 systems than go for them as the platform is really a fine one, without complaints technically.

6) Athlon 64 @ 2.4-2.5ghz, NF4 chipset, 2gb DDR400. I owned 3 such rigs, one with an ECS A939 NForce4, second with a DFI NF3, third and last (so far!) with an Asus A8N-SLI. I used mostly Nvidia 6600GTs with these systems, the last one (A8N-SLI) I used 6600GTs in SLI. The cpu was more than adequate for anything up to 2007, but the 6600GT was a really limited video card even in SLI.
7) Athlon 64 X2 @ 2.7ghz, AMD690 chipset, 2gb DDR2 667, 8800GT. Nice cpu good for everything up to 2008, the 8800GT was really a perfect match for it. Conclusion: A64s should be paired with video cards better than 6600GT/6800GT. Anything less than a X1950 is a waste.
😎 Athlon 7750 @ 3.1ghz, 780 chipset, 4 gb DDR2 800, 8800GT. This cpu is really a cut down Phenom I. Better than rig 7), comparable with Core 2 power and finally allowed my 8800GT to breath freely.
One of the hard disk setups I ran with my A64 systems consisted of 4 SATA hard disks in Raid 0. This resulted in ridiculously fast boot-up and game loading times - fun!

These are just some of them.

PowerPie5000 wrote:

I don't want XP on my main system and it'll still have issues with older XP games due to multi-core problems etc.

ImageCFG and similar tools can be used to temporarily or permanently put specific programs on one core.
I use Win XP 32-bit on a Sandy Bridge, now upgraded to an Ivy Bridge i3, and can run about everything Win16/Win32 that I care for, for now...

Around maybe 9 months ago I was testing Morrowind on a P3-S 1.4GHz system with 512MB RAM. It ran acceptably I thought. I was testing it with a Geforce2 MX which is certainly on the weak side. I was going to compare against other video cards but never got around to it.
With the GF2MX and P3-1.4GHz, I think it was running about 20fps at 800x600 in Balmora. That's from memory, so it could be wrong. Outside Balmora it would be better, I was testing in that city because it's so demanding.
The resolution I'm guessing would scale more with the video card rather than the CPU.

But other than that, Morrowind cares much more about the CPU than it does your video card. A 1.4GHz P3-S is comparable to a 1.8-2.0GHz P4 generally, though I don't know if that holds true in Morrowind specifically. Faster CPU always helps with that game.

Not all mods hurt your framerate. There are even some mods which were designed to improve performance on lower end systems. They have various ways of doing that, one that I remember removed a bunch of superfluous objects from the world. It's all the objects and AI calculations that kill the CPU.
Another I think reduced the texture resolution, which might be an aid to a weak video card. I'm sure there were other tweaks that I don't remember.

My experience with the TI4200 was that it uses a lot of 3.3v power. Didn't have issues on the other rails.
A TI4200 would have been a powerful card in Morrowind's day, and as noted above I don't think video card was much a problem with the game, it was CPU. TI4200 can do the fancy water effects.

Morrowind leaks RAM and will crash when it runs out. The more RAM you have the longer it will run before crashing. I played happily for hours on a 1GB machine, but when I only had 512MB available I started having frequent crashes. That was with some mods though, which probably jacked up the RAM usage.

shamino wrote:

Morrowind leaks RAM and will crash when it runs out. The more RAM you have the longer it will run before crashing. I played happily for hours on a 1GB machine, but when I only had 512MB available I started having frequent crashes. That was with some mods though, which probably jacked up the RAM usage.

Didn't this issue ever get fixed?

PowerPie5000 wrote:

shamino wrote:

Morrowind leaks RAM and will crash when it runs out. The more RAM you have the longer it will run before crashing. I played happily for hours on a 1GB machine, but when I only had 512MB available I started having frequent crashes. That was with some mods though, which probably jacked up the RAM usage.

Didn't this issue ever get fixed?

No, I don't think so. Maybe it used to be worse and they improved it, I couldn't say.
I've always had the final GOTY version of Morrowind. I didn't get the game until long after Oblivion was out.
The way the frequency of crashes reacted with less free RAM strongly suggested to me that a memory leak was involved.

Also, I *think* (not sure) that Morrowind is also the game where I'd get crashes after reloading a save 4 or 5 times. I think the load procedure must be a source of leaks. But again, that's with mods involved, a vanilla install might not leak as quickly since there's less data for it to mess with.

shamino wrote:

No, I don't think so. Maybe it used to be worse and they improved it, I couldn't say. I've always had the final GOTY version of […]
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PowerPie5000 wrote:

shamino wrote:

Morrowind leaks RAM and will crash when it runs out. The more RAM you have the longer it will run before crashing. I played happily for hours on a 1GB machine, but when I only had 512MB available I started having frequent crashes. That was with some mods though, which probably jacked up the RAM usage.

Didn't this issue ever get fixed?

No, I don't think so. Maybe it used to be worse and they improved it, I couldn't say.
I've always had the final GOTY version of Morrowind. I didn't get the game until long after Oblivion was out.
The way the frequency of crashes reacted with less free RAM strongly suggested to me that a memory leak was involved.

Also, I *think* (not sure) that Morrowind is also the game where I'd get crashes after reloading a save 4 or 5 times. I think the load procedure must be a source of leaks. But again, that's with mods involved, a vanilla install might not leak as quickly since there's less data for it to mess with.

Sounds quite familiar to some of the Skyrim bugs (especially the memory problem with the iffy PS3 port).... When will Bethesda ever learn 🙄.

It appears my SE440BX2 motherboard doesn't like Kingston 256MB dimms (just standard non-ECC PC100/133) 🙁. I always thought this board supported upto 768MB RAM, but maybe i was wrong and it only works with 384MB? It's currently running with 3x 128MB Kingston PC133 dimms (running in PC100 mode) and i thought i'd upgrade it with 3 x 256MB Kingston dimms, but it's a no go 😒.

Does it matter if the memory is single sided? My current 128mb dimms are also single sided and work fine.

EDIT: The new dimms are Kingston KVR133X64C3/256 and there seems to be different info regarding the specs. The sticks i have are 32Mx8 single sided, so i'm guessing they're high density (dammit! 🤣)... Guess i need to look for double sided 16Mx16 RAM.

Now i'm really trying to max out my SE440BX2 board (without killing it!)... I have a 1.4GHz Tualatin Celeron 100fsb (via a Powerleap PL-ip3/T adapter) and 768MB of RAM... I'm now considering using a slightly beefier GPU and have the following available (not sure if pixel shading is too important with an old Win98 machine) :

*Geforce 4 MX460 64MB
*Geforce 4 Ti4200 64MB
*Geforce FX5500 128MB
*Geforce FX5600 256MB
*Geforce 6200 128-bit (not sure about this one??)
*Radeon 9500 Pro 128MB

.... Higher end Radeon 9xxx and FX5xxx/6xxx boards are out of the question due to the fact i'm using a moderate 300W PSU and i doubt the AGP slot would cope with power hungry cards anyway. I'm actually leaning towards the Radeon 9500 Pro for a change (hoping they fixed the table fog support with this model). Does anyone know how well it would perform on an old 440BX board (AGP 2x) compared to the Geforce cards?

I'll eventually get there in the end and settle on a single configuration... Theres nothing i can do now with my BX board aside from upgrading the GPU and HDD 😁