ATI 9600 SE: Mistakes Were Made, So You Can Avoid Them!

we're going to test the ATI Radeon in this video the plan is to in this video I'm hoping we maybe we get to test the so a lot went wrong when testing this video card all in all I tested four different systems I believe with old computer parts it's not always smooth sailing so I have a lot to share and you might find this video interesting it might save you some headaches for your own projects 20 years ago in 2003 anotech reviewed a bunch of budget video cards and the radio 9600 SE as well as the Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 Ultra they both received recommendations and here we have the card the ATI iradeon 9600 SE passively cooled this is very nice makes it very reliable no fans that can collect dust and fail over time it's also noiseless ATP interface right here let's have a look at all the ports we have a VGA port here this one gives you composite and S video out to connect to a old-school TV DVI and you can use a DVI to VGA dongle to connect a second VGA display so let's have a look at the very first system I put together a beautiful main board from Asus this one is for socket 939 we have the model number right here it's the a8v deluxe with a via chipset supports dual Channel memory we have two 512 megabyte modules from Kingston and the processor it's an Athlon 64 4000 plus it had the latest bias version already but I flashed it again just to be sure it turned on just fine and I could go into the BIOS and configure all the settings also without any issues but the SATA ports they gave me issues firstly we have the seller ports from the Via chipset they are not compatible with modern sata 3 drives they only work with SATA OneDrive so I couldn't use that one and then we have a rate controller from promise so I used these two and the drive got detected so that was fine but I had no success installing Windows XP Windows XP even when trying different SATA storage packs simply would not pick up the storage device so as a workaround I'm using a ID to SATA adapter this one is from Star Tech we've been using that in many projects and has worked beautifully in this situation so I was able to install Windows XP without any issues this board has an annoying bug if you have a USB hard drive connected doesn't matter what boot options you have configured in the Bios it will simply not boot from the main storage so every time I shut down the machine I had to pull out the USB hard drive and then plug it back in which was quite annoying on the Windows XP desktop we're getting full HD resolution out of the box so Windows XP seems to have some basic drivers for this video card integrated as always I'm loading the snappy driver installer origin that detects all the devices and installs all the drivers but I deselect the drivers for the graphics card and for the sound card next up was installing Catalyst 10.2 this is the latest driver for this video card you can still download it from the AMD website and that step also worked fine but I ran into issues when trying to install the drivers for the sound card I tried the Sound Blaster X5 this is the sandblaster X5 extreme music and what happened after installing the drivers it would simply freeze when trying to boot into Windows I then tried another sound card this one here this is the otg2 settings but it gave me a the same issue and after swapping PCI slots swapping maybe three sound cards I gave up and I moved on to a different motherboard this is the system that ended up working beautifully with Windows XP we have been using this system in the past it's a motherboard from ASRock the 775i65g very interesting it combines the newer LGA 775 socket with the Intel ATP chipset the Intel 865 and excellent compatibility and performance we're using the same memory two 512 megabyte ddr400 modules from Kingston the processor is an Intel Pentium dual core so much much faster than the f164 and here everything worked fine I didn't have to use the ID to start an adapter because these other ports from Intel also are very compatible work without issues with the sata 3 ssds in the Bios as always I load the BIOS defaults and then I disable some on-board resources that I'm not using but apart from that there was really not much I had to change Windows XP installed without any issues Snappy driver installer origin is next installing all the drivers apart from the OTG sound card drivers and apart from the Radeon graphics drivers then we're loading the dotnet 2 framework because the ATR drivers they require that the ATI drivers are next Catalyst 10.2 and then the Daniel K odg support pack drivers version 8.1 the driver has everything we expect we can change the resolution of course we have GPU scaling we can toggle settings for anti-aliasing and isotropic filtering and vsync so now let's run some benchmarks in 3dmark 2001 SE we're getting 7493 so that seems to be quite low and in 3D Mark 03 this situation doesn't get much better 1977. with that in mind let's test some games we have Far Cry and we're using medium details because this video card is a budget card and it only has 128 megabytes of vram so here we can see Far Cry across various resolutions at 640 by 480 the performance is not too bad but then it quickly drops off even at 800 by 600 we're getting lower than 60 FPS and the higher resolutions are not really playable in Doom 3 the situation gets worse we're using medium details because that's the recommended setting for 128 megabytes of vram and even at 640 by 480 we are barely getting 30 FPS so Doom 3 is a struggle for this graphics card so a big reason why the performance is so low has to do with the memory interface it's only 64-bit which is half of what the full Radeon 9600 has the ram is also clocked pretty low so all that results in a fairly low performance and then I'm testing a few games now this game screamer 4x4 I've been playing quite a lot recently it's from 2001 developed by Channel 42 software developer this is the Gog release you just install it on a modern machine and then copy the folder onto your retro PC it supports opengl direct 3D and the Glide API for Voodoo cards it's an off-road racing simulation quite a fun game with an interesting physics engine and yeah definitely a game I can recommend and here I'm testing Thief 2 and this is surprising Radeon cards are known to have issues with table fog but in Thief 2 under Windows XP yeah fog is displaying perfectly fine on this video card so this will be interesting to check later when we're testing Windows 98 and now we're testing a game that I haven't played before it is X beyond the frontier and yeah it's something I wanted to do recently spend more times playing games not rushing through games and just quickly testing the performance but actually sitting down reading the manual figuring out the controls and yeah spending a bit more time playing the games and sharing my opinions with you so this game launched in 1999 by ego soft and it's the first of many games from the X Series and I thought it's a space Sim like a space shooter like Wing Commander but but it turned out differently we will get to that later it supports the joystick I use a Logitech Logitech joystick it worked fine but the throttle for some reason ended up not working it does show up in the Windows XP control panel but in the game it just doesn't work and yeah initially it starts off with a training mission where you learn all the controls and everything and then you're testing a jump drive but the jump goes wrong and you end up in a totally different location somewhere deep in space and there's an alien ship which puts you into debt and you need to trade your way out of the situation but trading is not really my thing I find it a bit boring it's quite slow paced as well and not quite what I was hoping for I was hoping for a fun space shooter like Wing Commander where you can just yeah blast enemies in space but it's more a trading scene maybe later it develops into a space shooter I'm not sure eager to hear your opinions on this game and if you have any recommendations about space Shooters leave them down below in the comment section so Windows XP performance was not that impressive what about Windows 98 this is my go-to test system for Windows 98 we have a main board from gigabyte it's the G A K 8 vm800m socket 754 processor is a Athlon 64 3400 we have a via chipset and I've been using this main board in many projects for the ram let's have a look what we have this is a 256 megabyte ddr400 module and for storage we're using a SSD from SanDisk with a capacity of 32 gigabytes again using the ID to SATA adapter from static I follow my usual process loading the BIOS defaults on this main board I need to lock in the memory speed to 200 megahertz I disable some resources that we're not using especially on the Windows 98 that can be quite important and then yeah installing Windows 98 that worked without any dramas the Via chipset drivers also installed perfectly fine but after I installed the ATI Radeon drivers yeah we're getting some issues and I tried a few things one of them was going into the BIOS and I changed the ATP from 8X to 4X and yeah initially that sorted everything out I had a beautiful looking desktop and just like under Windows XP as soon as I install the Sound Blaster drivers I'm having issues here we're using the Sound Blaster live this is my go-to Windows 98 sound card my model number ct4830 I've been using the sound card in so many Windows 98 projects it's never given me any issues so I'm really not sure what's going on when things don't work out and you want something that's Ultra compatible ticks all the boxes with the standards go with something from Intel and this is nothing other than the Intel Pentium 4. love it or hate it there's a lot of hate out there but for Retro Gaming these are affordable and really compatible and just works as long as you check the capacitors that everything is okay in that regard this one is from gigabyte here we have the model number it's the ga 8pe 800 in terms of ram we have 256 megabytes of DDR this machine uses DDR 333 so a little bit slower depending four is running at 2.53 gig Hertz no saddle ports on this board only ID but that's all we need we have a heap of PCR slots and AGP of course if it has a bios we will flash it this board came with BIOS version F3 and on the gigabyte website we have BIOS version F9 so I flashed it again the same process load the turbo or recommended defaults and then I disable all the on-board resources like ethernet onboard audio we don't need DC reports we don't need the parallel ports and everything installed perfectly fine we are installing the Intel chipset drivers without any issues the ATI radian video card drivers also no issues whatsoever and for the sound yeah we're using the OTG live again no problems this time everything worked as expected make sure you go into the device manager and turn on dma mode so you get decent performance with storage I then ran the atto disk Benchmark I wanted to see what this chipset can do and here we go here we have the results we're getting around yeah a little bit over 70 megabytes a second for writing and just under 90 megabytes a second for reading so those are excellent numbers a few tweaks tweaking the mixer settings muting all the inputs and also setting the sample rate conversion to high quality and then yeah we are ready to test some benchmarks here we have GL quick and oh my that looks so much better compared to what we saw under Windows 98 so at 640 by 480 over 300 FPS and then as we ramp up the resolution yes the performance drops but even at 1600 by 1200 we're getting 65 FPS which is excellent here we have expandable and again very good performance at the low resolutions we are CPU limited but then as we go higher we can see the video card starts to struggle a little bit 1600 by 1200 is pushing it but 1280 by 1024 perfectly playable Let's test some eye candy features in the driver you can enable 16x and isotropic filtering here you have some footage to show you what that looks like and here we have the Benchmark results basically you're not losing much it's a driver setting I would turn on for all the games just set it to 16x AF and you will not lose much performance at all anti-aliasing is a lot more demanding I configured the driver with 4X anti-aliasing at 640x480 not much of an impact but as we increase the resolution performance quickly goes down and 1280 by 1024 we are already under the 60 FPS Mark so if you want to play with 4X anti-aliasing and maybe up to 1024 by 768 but it's nice to see that even on this budget video card we can use some of these eye candy features with older games I had a closer look in the driver and we can enable Smart Shader effects such as turning the image into black and white inverse the color or even cycling in RGB so yeah not quite sure how useful this is but it's there if you're interested let's test and Light which requires a DirectX 9 GPU which we have and here we can see unreal so firstly it's working fine but I noticed some big status and pauses the machine was definitely struggling and I've noticed this in the past it has to do with the ram now 256 megabytes of RAM is heaps for Windows 98 but for end Glide it's not enough so I upgraded the memory we have a 512 megabyte ddr400 module remember depending 4 on this machine runs at 333 so let's see the result we can see unreal now runs a lot smoother it's not silky smooth 60fps but it runs fairly well and I also tested screamer 4x4 this game supports the Glide API and yeah again it runs okay but of course this game supporting opengl and direct 3D it's better you use those options because you don't go through end Glide which is a wrapper that converts between two apis and now let's test another game that I haven't played before it is gun metal and yeah really weird this game did not launch for me under Windows XP which is weird it's another release from Gog I installed it under Windows 10 and then copied the folder across onto the Retro PC and under Windows XP it just wouldn't launch very strange but under 98 it works just fine released in 2003 so the same year as the video card developed by rage software that's the same the same developers that made incoming and you can definitely see where it's coming from the colors very colorful big focus on the graphics and yeah you play a robot but you can switch into a jet so you can smoothly transition between running around and then flying around so really yeah quite impressive and this is a plain arcade shooter no training no trading you have to do straight into the action so I really enjoyed that it's running at 800 by 600. I have enabled 16x AF in the drivers and it is struggling with the frame rate so the 9600 SE is not a good match for this game but it gave me a good idea the controls out of the box wasd and the mouse so that worked really well I didn't have to spend a lot of time remapping the keys but the controls feels uh feel a little bit jerky maybe this is a game better played with a controller or a joystick and you have various evaporate weapons and yeah all in all really enjoyed it I played the first two missions and had a blast remember when we tested Thief 2 under Windows XP and I was surprised that the fog was working well here we are on the Windows 98 and no fog that is so interesting um so it seems to be something a limitation that's not really with the video card but with the driver so something going on with the Windows 98 drivers now I do remember hearing about some tweaking utility where you can enable that feature in certain driver versions but the details Escape me if you know what I'm talking about please leave your comments down below um yeah I would love to investigate a little bit further but this was interesting so if you want to get table fork with ATI Radeon cards use XP instead of 98 Maybe maybe it will make your games work just fine starting with this video and to help out the PC Retro Gaming Community I have uploaded the BIOS files the drivers the manuals to all these four main boards onto the first computer lab.com website because you never know when these manufacturers pull support so this is one of these projects that look quite straightforward at first but then things go wrong and you end up with four different systems and swapping out Parts trying to figure out what's going on a theme in this project is issues with via chipset main boards from AMD so that is a little bit unexpected in the past I didn't have too many issues especially with that socket 754 board I've been using in many projects but it seems that the combination of a wire chipset maybe with the ATR Radeon and then PCR sound cards there seems to be something that was just not working really well with this combination so one of the takeaways could be that if you go with an Intel chipset main board the compatibility is a little bit better at least that's what I saw in this video both the ASRock main board and the gigabyte mainboard with the socket 775 and socket 478 they had fantastic compatibility no issues whatsoever in terms of performance don't expect too much with Windows XP Retro Gaming games like Doom 3 Far Cry released in 2003 2004 there are just too much for this video card but older games they will run perfectly fine so it could be of interest if you trying to build a hybrid machine with a little bit of Windows XP but a huger a larger focus on Windows 98 Windows 98 moments was excellent in direct 3D as well as opengl and glide was pushing the limits a little bit but because it started X9 compatible at least it runs you might not get that great performance out of it however another interesting takeaway is the table fog under Windows XP that worked beautifully in Thief 2 but Windows 98 no support so that was quite interesting and it's nice for me to have confirmed that I was always curious about that aspect and now I've seen it with my own eyes so yeah there you go when you run into issues with a project sometimes there are more takeaways more lessons to be learned the two games that we looked at in more detail X turned out not to be my cup of tea I'm more into the arcade the space shooter type games the Space Trading it's just a little bit too time consuming for me I don't have too much time so I want to enjoy my time and have some yeah instant gratification so to speak the other game gunmetal that seems much more up my alley the performance was a little bit struggling the 9600 SE is not quite powerful enough but we will soon be looking at a much higher end video card from 2003 so stay tuned I might retest the same games so yeah LGA 775 and the good old Pentium 4 to the rescue they saved this project from being a total disaster and I want to hear from you guys what is your experience with via chipsets AMD main boards and Radeon graphics are there any compatibility issues um yeah let's talk about it another aspect I want to talk about is recently I asked you guys through YouTube Community I opened a poll and I wanted to see what what sort of content do you find most interesting and Windows 98 uh won the race followed by dos Windows XP very closely and the modern stuff not so much so I hear you loud and clear Windows 98 does Windows XP all these topics really interest me and so yeah that's beautiful I will just continue doing what I'm doing in that regard and I will try to tone it down with the more modern stuff I have two more mini PCS that I need to review that I have already arrived in the lab so I have to finish those videos but then going forward I want to tone it down maybe do a Mini PC or something modern you know every few months or something like that I can also see you like the video tutorials that helps you how to set up retro PCS they're already plenty of resources on the website Benchmark packs those starter packs and so on but there's always more that can be done and also emulation um got a few comments dosbox PCM 86 box because yeah old retro Parts some of them are really desirable and prices have gone up so emulation is definitely something that will keep this hobby alive and also help spread the word and get new blood into this awesome community so guys if you're still watching this thank you so much this was a long video and um yeah it was quite frustrating at first but I'm glad I persevered and kept testing new main balls because yeah I actually got quite a few interesting nuggets of information out of this some good experience under the belt and um yeah so I actually ended up really enjoying this time and yeah gotta love that Pentium four love it or hate it it's a really fantastic platform very compatible and definitely will continue playing around with the good old painting for and that's it for me thank you so much for watching leave comments down below give it a thumbs up share the video with your friends and do check your notifications hit that Bell button click on all so you get updates for new releases and that's it I shall see you soon with another one

Channel: PhilsComputerLab

Views: 29,939

Keywords: Radeon 9600 SE, Windows 98, Windows XP, Challenges with Retro PC, When things go wrong, Driver issues Windows 98

Id: OD15HZu4SWA

Length: 26min 50sec (1610 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2023