The Radeon X600 is an unusual card in retro PC terms. It comes from the early PCI Express era, which immediately makes it suspect for Windows 98 builders, but it’s also close enough to ATi’s better-supported Radeon generations that it can work far better than you’d expect — depending entirely on which machine it ends up in.
What it is
The X600 is an early PCI Express card built on ATi’s RV370 GPU, sold widely through OEM channels like Dell in the mid-2000s. It’s a modest card by later standards, but it landed close enough to the end of ATi’s official Windows 98 driver support window that it’s worth testing rather than dismissing outright.
Specifications
- Released: 2004
- GPU: RV370
- Pixel pipelines: 4
- Memory: 128MB DDR, 128-bit bus
- Core clock: around 400MHz
Windows 98: it depends on the machine
This is the real story of the card — “supported GPU” and “stable GPU” are not the same thing, and the X600 makes that obvious.
- On a Dell OptiPlex 760, it installed quickly with Catalyst 6.2 and worked properly, hardware Direct3D acceleration included. See the full write-up.
- On a Dell Dimension E520, the exact opposite happened — it froze Windows 98 outright as soon as the Catalyst driver loaded, with no difference between Catalyst 6.2 and 9.0c. The Radeon X700 Pro failed identically on the same machine. See the full write-up.
- On a Dell OptiPlex 380, X600-to-X850-era ATi cards are still some of the more interesting Win98 options to test.
Same driver, same GPU family, two very different outcomes depending on the chipset underneath it.
Why I like it
- an early PCIe card that still sits inside ATi’s Windows 98 driver support window
- cheap and common, thanks to years of OEM use
- when it works, it’s a genuinely elegant bridge between classic Win98 gaming and newer hardware
- when it doesn’t, it’s a useful, fast way to find out a platform’s limits
Pros
- fast enough for demanding late Windows 98 and Windows XP games
- inexpensive and easy to find
- official-era ATi driver support
Cons
- platform-dependent to the point of being unpredictable — works perfectly on one machine, freezes another outright
- early PCIe on a late-9x OS is inherently a bit of a gamble
