What's wrong with the Maxtor? Anything you would run on a 400 Celeron would be fairly small and load up pretty quick huh?

I would say a Voodoo 3 would be the best 1 card solution, or you could go for a TNT2 or a earlier GeForce and throw a Voodoo 2 in there.

Welcome to Vogons! I've had a Celeron 400 myself for a while (before I messed something up while replacing the board with another Celeron board with AGP slot).
The Celeron's not getting as much love as the (similarly in performance) Super 7 systems, but I like them 😀

As for suggestions for the graphics card, the best all round graphics card would be a Voodoo 3 (even the 2000 variant), or an AGP card with, say, 16MB ram and a Voodoo 2.

I dislike Maxtor myself, they are noisy and produce a lot of heat. The only nice Maxtor I ever tried was some 60GB variant.
Personally I think 20GB is perfectly ok with such a rig. What OS are you running?

As for a second 5.25in drive, I'd suggest to either leave it as is, or put in a DVD drive if you have a spare, or a CDR drive if you like switching disks a lot (like me, I often use 2 drives if I want to play games so I can leave the game disk in) and listen to a music CD. The DVD I'd use only so I can read DVD on it, if I'd want to, but it's not necessary on a system with these specs.

If you use ZIP already (for instance, for transferring files in a more retro-ish style...like me 😁 ) then I suggest you use that instead.

As for harddrives, my personal favorite 20GB drive is the Seagate U series X. Those are amongst the slowest 20GB drives but are very silent (when the bearings haven't worn out).

If it were me, I'd put Windows ME on it. You have the ram for it 😉

What's wrong with the Maxtor?

I dislike Maxtor myself, they are noisy and produce a lot of heat.

That's 2 things... I've had a few get hot to the point where you'll go "OWWW" and drop it 🤣

I think I'll go for the Voodoo 3 in the AGP slot, and the ZIP in the 5.25 😁

It runs just fine, had 98 SE and ME on it. The only thing I've noticed is with web browsing.... scrolling pages seems to have some sort of lag on it, perhaps that was down to the ATI Rage 2 I was testing it with?

PeteUK wrote:

It runs just fine, had 98 SE and ME on it. The only thing I've noticed is with web browsing.... scrolling pages seems to have some sort of lag on it, perhaps that was down to the ATI Rage 2 I was testing it with?

I would say it's your CPU. Surly your Maxtor is faster then your nets, unless of course it can't even write 1mb per second. Then yes, it's garbage. 🤣 But you don't plan to browse the web with it do you?

bushwack wrote:

PeteUK wrote:

It runs just fine, had 98 SE and ME on it. The only thing I've noticed is with web browsing.... scrolling pages seems to have some sort of lag on it, perhaps that was down to the ATI Rage 2 I was testing it with?

I would say it's your CPU. Surly your Maxtor is faster then your nets, unless of course it can't even write 1mb per second. Then yes, it's garbage. 🤣 But you don't plan to browse the web with it do you?

On 50mb Fiber Cable here, with a gigabit lan, so no way it can be that. The option to browse the web does come in useful...

As for harddrives, my personal favorite 20GB drive is the Seagate U series X. Those are amongst the slowest 20GB drives but are very silent (when the bearings haven't worn out).

I'm tempted to stick a 8.5Gb Western Digital in there, their legacy drives are a personal favourite. I once had a 635mb WD Caviar that survived a 5ft drop and bounce across the floor...

PeteUK wrote:

On 50mb Fiber Cable here, with a gigabit lan, so no way it can be that. The option to browse the web does come in useful...

I'm tempted to stick a 8.5Gb Western Digital in there, their legacy drives are a personal favourite. I once had a 635mb WD Caviar that survived a 5ft drop and bounce across the floor...

50 megabit or 50 megabyte? 🤣 Wonder why ISPs label their data rates with megabits? Perhaps the same reason cheap stereo companies use MAX PEAK POWER! instead of it's real RMS output huh? But really I want your connection.

The 8.5gb would be a better "match" I would think for your 400 Celly.
I'm partial to IBM drives, I have them in all of my 3 retro rigs. I've had 2 WDs die on me but only 1 IBM. 😎

Megabytes 😁

The equivelent IBM drive for that era would have been a Deskstar 75GXP... then I read how notorious that drive was at the time!

If you get a Voodoo 3, I recommend putting a fan in the front of your case, it will brow across the card. They get pretty toasty.

You know your going to have to paint that power supply to match too right? 😉

No chassis fan header on that board, so I'll need to grab a molex powered fan for that.

And the drive fronts!... I could always return to "appliance white" for the front and leave the rear black...

Voodoo 3 is kind of an overkill for that machine but what the hell.

I would have gone with a TNT or TNT2 for a single video card in that box. Anything faster will be CPU bound and not likely show any huge performance gains. The only thing a later card would do is add newer features.

TNT2 - £4.50 / $9.00

Voodoo 3 - £13.00 / $26.00

With regards to the lag in web browsing, it mostly comes down to CPU speed... the video card does have an effect on the GUI speed to a certain extent, but the Rage II is fast enough for 2D, and web page rendering is a separate matter anyway.

However, it may also depend somewhat on the software you're using... FWIW, I set up a 433mhz Celeron box for somebody not too long ago, and I managed to make it tolerable with 98SE, updated with the unofficial service pack, running Opera 10.5 with fanboy's adblock list. With KernelEX, it would even run Flash 10.1, though it didn't have the horsepower for smooth playback on Youtube, or anything like that. However, even with all that, I can confirm that the old Celerons have a little bit of a lag to 'em on the modern web, even compared to a 'full' PII.

Wonder why ISPs label their data rates with megabits?

Data transfer has always been measured in bits, for the entire history of computers. It is the most appropriate form of measurement, since it describes the behavior of the binary electrical signals going through the line. Not everything works in neatly packaged 8-bit bytes, you know.

However, even with all that, I can confirm that the old Celerons have a little bit of a lag to 'em on the modern web, even compared to a 'full' PII.

I'm guessing thats down to the difference in cache size? Celerons/PII's shared the same 66mhz FSB did they not?

PII went to 100 MHz FSB once they broke 350 MHz. Cache might have some affect too though because 64KB is such a small amount, even if it is faster than the PII's.

Voodoo3 does Glide and so it's more useful than TNT2 in general. 16-bit color mode on it might be better than a TNT2's 16-bit too because of 3dfx's RAMDAC filter tricks. I did a super huge comparison of 3D cards a few months ago with screenshots (see my sig). 😉 But you can't see the 3dfx RAMDAC filter in screenshots because they get captured before that process.

I do have a soft spot for those cards, the Voodoo 3 3000 PCI was the first I bought new some years ago.

Why the hate for Maxtor? They are my drive of preference actually. Haven't had a single failure from them in 15 years.

The cache on those Celerons is actually 128K 😉

Btw, those IBM deathstars are nice drives. Silent, very fast and thus very useful until they die! Which is something they're good at 😜

I don't think the Celeron's 66Mhz fsb mattered much. Only when Celeron went Coppermine did it become a truly noticable bottleneck.

sgt76 wrote:

Why the hate for Maxtor? They are my drive of preference actually. Haven't had a single failure from them in 15 years.

Down to personal experiences I guess, but WD drives are the only ones I've had good fortune with over a long period of time.

The max on the board is UDMA-33... So even that 8.4Gb WD would be happy in there 😁