Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Upgrading My Windows 98 Machine's GPU!

IMG_3485I recently have purchased a ‘new’ nVidia Riva TNT2 M64 graphics card! This card has a whopping 16mb on the GPU’s board with a memory speed of 150 MHz that and the 230 million pixels per second! The TNT2 was one of the first chipset card that had 32-bit frame buffering and high resolution graphics and full 32-bit color with “ahead of it’s time” 3D graphical effects and a pretty fast GPU that can generate 32-bit architecture beautifully! It is a great replacement to a generic PCI 4mb graphics card (Not sure the brand of the card) that I have in currently in my machine. The reason for this upgrade is obvious, I wanted better graphics and higher resolutions because I can’t the resolutions any higher than 640x320 which is only 16-bit color and I can also only go to monochrome… So I had to make this upgrade because when looking at the screen the color doesn’t seem right when I use a program or play a game. So I did my research on graphics cards that are available today and won’t make you break the bank because some vintage cards are expensive these days but you can get lucky if you look for the right card for the right price. I looked at 3Dfx Voodoo graphics cards like the Voodoo 3 Banshee the Voodoo 3 1000. Though, I soon realized that these cards aren’t the best and also for what they are going for on sites like eBay they are too expensive these days with resellers price gauging the cards. I even looked at cards from Diamond and many other brands! I came to the conclusion that nVidia was the best bet. So I discovered the nVidia Riva TNT2 Model 64 on eBay for a great price of $22.00 USD with shipping costs about $9.19 USD so the whole thing was around $31.19. From my own research on this card and knowing that this card is better than the Voodoo 3 cards, I thought this was the better option! So I am very happy to have a new card in my vintage machine! I also went down to my local Micro Centeto pick up a PCI GPU fan to keep the card as cool as possible it may make the machine a bit nosier than it already is but it maybe won’t be that noticeable because it is already noisy enough in my office with all my computers running! I will be posting more about my vintage PC and more about my future upgrades to my Windows 98 PC!

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