Will a 9600gt/9800gt work with Windows 2000?

[brett42]

I'm thinking about upgrading to a 22" monitor in the next couple of months, and I was planning on getting a 4830 to go with it, but it turns out that the drivers are completely incompatible with Windows 2000. I'm not planning on upgrading from win2k until a year or so after Windows 7 comes out, so I'd like to know if anyone has been successful running a 9600 or 9800 series on win2k.

I know that the driver download site doesn't list win2k for newer cards, but I'm running the XP version of the drivers for my 8600gt without problems, and I don't really care if the official support is there as long as it works. So, has anyone seen recent nVidia cards running on win2k? If not, how about 3870s or 4670s?

 

[Denithor]

What version of GeForce drivers are you using with your 8600GT? Unfortunately the latest drivers at nVidia don't list Win2000 for compatibility but you could try the WinXP 32-bit driver & see if your 8600GT still works. If it does, you're gtg.

 

[2Xtreme21]

My guess is you can use the official XP drivers and they'll work fine. No idea though-- why buy an expensive gfx card if you're not planning on upgrading til after Win 7 comes out? Your card might be obsolete before you even get a chance to use it.

 

[brett42]

Most games work on win2k with a little bit of tweaking. Most Valve stuff works out of the box, and recently I got Fallout 3 to work after copying over some dlls. win2kgaming.site90.com is a really good resource. I'd rather spend the 15 minutes copying over dlls than the $86 for a new operating system that doesn't really add any features I need.

 

[brett42]

Well, if anyone else is in the same situation, this guy wasn't able to run a 3850 in win2k, but was able to run a 9600gt.

 

[kmmatney]

I've been able to run recent model ATI cards with windows 2000, but I had to use the Omega drivers.

 

[kmmatney]

Originally posted by: brett42
Well, if anyone else is in the same situation, this guy wasn't able to run a 3850 in win2k, but was able to run a 9600gt.

If you read the thread you linked to, the very last post is:

"Latest Omega works fine for me in W2K and R3850. 3D and 2D works perfectly"

The R3850 is one generation behind, however. The Omega driver sight hasn't been updated for a while, and the last update was before the HD4830 came out, so the 9600GT might be the way to go for now.

 

[nenforcer]

I didn't even know PCI-Express was supported by Win2k. You must be running some fairly new hardware, I assume. What motherboard are you using?