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This forum has nothing to do with PC hardware, but there's some bright people here:

I'm taking a Geforce 4 card from an old PC and putting it in an even older PC (building a heritage gaming machine) which currently has some derisory amount of onboard graphics capability and is running Win98SE

Clearly I need to disable the onboard gfx, but I'm getting very mixed opinions on whether this can be done before/during/after installation of new card, and whether it can be done in Windows or in the dreaded BIOS.

Anyone cleverer than me wish to opine?

Presuming windows is already installed the usual process is remove the old drivers, remove old card, plug in new card which will then start in vga mode, install new drivers.
"remove old card" in this instance could be a jumper on the motherboard or a setting in your bios.
If those don't exist then you could just leave it as is but disable it within windows. Of course my memories a bit fuzzy so I'm can't remember if it's as easy as NT based systems where you just go into the hardware manager and switch off what you don't want.

Why?
I mean, you might need to disable it eventually but why not have both 'cards' in at the same time and see what happens first?
The BIOS might automatically choose to use the plug-in card.
Or it might not, then you can try disabling the on-board one.

Unless it's all ISA then things might be different, I am assuming that at least one card is PCI/AGP, then multiple video cards isn't a problem. Unless you want to use them all at the same time, then it can be a challenge.

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Andrew.

How old is the MoBo ?

Is the "new card" AGP >2 ?

Voltage differences... It'll all fit together ok .. but . Switch on ... Usually.. Bye Bye CPU.

But don't take my word for it... Google it.

AGP Voltages

A new mobo, cpu , ram and Graphix card is dirt cheap. Dont faff around with ancient stuff. It aint worth the hassle.

Dont forget to dump windows and use Kubuntu !!

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The Box said "Windows XP or better" ... So I installed Ubuntu

PCI card, PC is old enough to only have PCI slots...

Well...

Insert the new card in the pci slot...... Switch on and go into bios

Disable onboard graphics.

save & exit bios.

All graphics cards have a "fall back" mode so don't worry that you haven't installed any drivers yet.

Your gonna get an ugly 640 x 480 screen when she boots into desktop. Once you've booted.. then go and insert graphics drivers.

Voila

Hopefully !!

Try googling your motherboard to see if anyone else has done what you intend in doing.

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The Box said "Windows XP or better" ... So I installed Ubuntu