Updated Motherboard and old video and audio cards

[Alb]

Hello,

I noticed on this forum that the Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2 R2.0 motherboard works with Windows 98 SE, so I wanted to install it (along 2 GB RAM, a dual core processor and a bigger hard disk) on my daughter's old PC (Pentium III 500 MHZ, 256 MB RAM, two hard disks: 13 and 20 GB, Windows 98 SE and Mandriva Linux + LXDE OSs).

As I am an absolute beginner in these things, I'll be grateful to you if you let me know if there could be problems with the present (old) video card that is Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 and audio card that is Aureal Vortex AU8830.

Best Regards

[NothingMuchHereToSay]

Hey, it's one of the same motherboards I have.

The Geforce FX series GFX cards are compatible with Windows 98, afaik on their website. The audio card, I'm not so sure of.

[dencorso]

Welcome to MSFN!

The GeForce FX 5200 will work OK with 9x/ME.

Search this forum a little, and you'll find lots of info for what you are intending to do.

There is a sticky on important threads, that has pointers to many threads that'll interest you.

And the link to the left in my signature covers what's known on running with 2 GiB.

Good reading!

[glocK_94]

Nice board. I have one too and it works just fine with my Q6600.

You'll need drivers for the Aureal sound card tough. They're not easy to find if you lost the CD but look what I found here.

You shoud not have any problems if you disable the motherboard integrated sound card in the BIOS and follow Dencorso's link about using 2gb of RAM.

[Alb]

Hello! Thank you all for the precious advice! I'll follow it. As for the Aureal sound card I have still its drivers CD.

Besides: my CD/DVD LG reader and my Aopen CD writer are both IDE ones, the bigger new hard disk I want to buy is a SATA one. Is that a problem with the above mentioned motherboard?

[dencorso]

It may be, yes.

Consider buying either:

1) RLoew's >137 GB Patch + SATA Patch (find more about them here). No additional hardware is needed in this case.

or

2) A hardware SATA to IDE converter, and then use the free LLXX >137 GB patch. (More info through the link to the right side of my signature).

1) SATA to ATA converter

At first it was not not a good choice, because the motherboard built in controlled detected the connection as 40pin cable. So, the mode was reduced to just UDMA2. But, I've learned, the 80 pin connection is recognized by the pin 34 of the IDE connector. If it is grounded, the controller complains about 40 wire connection, no longer. After modifying the adapter the UDMA5 mode kicked in, and the overal performance was higher than with the PCI SATA controller.