Nice find Skyscraper (and a great job on the cleanup \^^/). My youngest sister still has her old PC, an HP P3 700MHz that her kids now use for school homework and old educational CD-ROM games. I don't remember exactly what motherboard it has (I think it's an Intel 810), but it has the same Rage Pro Turbo video, a 20GB Maxtor hard drive, 512MB of PC100 ram, Phoenix BIOS, and Windows XP Home. It doesn't have the "melty" case though 😀

If you can get a P3 600 or even a 700MHz CPU to work then it will be a good fit with the Voodoo 3 2000; the Radeon 7000 is also good. You could also try a GF256 or GF2 PCI if you have them. The crossflash was a daring move (I don't think I would have tried something like that), but it worked and gave you more flexibility with the BIOS options. The AWE32 is a great addition as well.

A neat job on your dumpster find so far. Keep it up! 😎

Nice job.

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

My youngest sister still has her old PC, an HP P3 700MHz that her kids now use for school homework and old educational CD-ROM games...

... If you can get a P3 600 or even a 700MHz CPU to work then it will be a good... ...The crossflash was a daring move (I don't think I would have tried something like that), but it worked and gave you more flexibility with the BIOS options.

A neat job on your dumpster find so far. Keep it up! 😎

Thanks!

Its good to hear that some "normal" people still find use for slow machines like a P3 700 😀

I have tested the P3 600 and it works good. The Katmai brought the performace more in line with the K6-3+ @ 5*120MHz and Im sure it will be even faster in games.

The crossflash lets me slow the system down a bit. Here is a P2 300 @ 100 MHz without L2 running Super PI 1M.

125 MHz with L2, Super Pi 1M

Here is the Katmai 600 running Super Pi 1M

P3 Katmai 600MHz CPU mark 99

Katmai 600 MHz Sisoft Sandra 99

Katmai 600 MHz ATI Rage Pro Turbo 3dmark99

Katmai 600 MHz ATI Rage Pro Turbo runng GL Quake 512*384, 35.6 FPS 😀

Katmai 600 MHz ATI Rage Pro Turbo runng GL Quake 640*480, 23.7 FPS

Here is your motherboard manual... http://www.motherboards.org/files/manuals/1/p2b98xv-200.pdf

Robin4 wrote:

Here is your motherboard manual... http://www.motherboards.org/files/manuals/1/p2b98xv-200.pdf

Thanks.

Asus still hosts both the manual, bios and drivers for the board.

Nice find! Probably wouldn't be a bad Voodoo2 SLI/Voodoo3 system. Also, is it just me or does the case look like it's been painted at some point?

Sutekh94 wrote:

Nice find! Probably wouldn't be a bad Voodoo2 SLI/Voodoo3 system. Also, is it just me or does the case look like it's been painted at some point?

Yes that is very likely, otherwise I want to speak with the people at HPs design department.

On "the Internet" I have read that this board can not run Coppermines because its supposedly one of few Asus BX boards that lack VRM8.4 support.
VRM8.3 should be able to provide 1.8V which too me is close enough but according to the source below this does not work with this exact board either for reasons not given.
http://www.maxperience.com/en/asus-motherboar … asus-p2b-p3-600

I am not satisfied with reading some unverified information on the Internet saying it wont work, I have to try it my self.

For a "non working" CPU the Coppermine Celeron 1100 runs Super Pi pretty fast.

The Sandra 99 scores looks good.

The CPUmark 99 score is also good, the Celeron beats the K6-3+ @ 5*120 (The K6-3+ got 59 as the best score)

The 3dmark99 CPU score is a bit higher with the Celeron.

Time to play some Turok Dinosaur Hunter using the mighty ATi Rage Pro before I add a PCI video card.

Nice save there. On the fan failure thing - I have an Asus/HP board with a similar feature - it doesn't need anything special, just a 3-wire connector to whichever sensor it's tied to (usually chassis/system fan) so that it can read tach from it. It will very likely adjust the RPMs to keep the machine relatively quiet too.

It looks like this is probably what the case was like before painting:
http://pcman.sinzy.net/upload/2004/12/HP-1.jpg

The "melty-ness" is runs in the paint; it was painted poorly with a spray-can. If it bothers you, sand it down, prime it, and re-paint it with whatever color you like. 😀 The front cover you'll need paint that can bond to plastics, but you shouldn't have to sand it.

obobskivich wrote:

Nice save there. On the fan failure thing - I have an Asus/HP board with a similar feature - it doesn't need anything special, j […]
Show full quote

Nice save there. On the fan failure thing - I have an Asus/HP board with a similar feature - it doesn't need anything special, just a 3-wire connector to whichever sensor it's tied to (usually chassis/system fan) so that it can read tach from it. It will very likely adjust the RPMs to keep the machine relatively quiet too.

It looks like this is probably what the case was like before painting:
http://pcman.sinzy.net/upload/2004/12/HP-1.jpg

The "melty-ness" is runs in the paint; it was painted poorly with a spray-can. If it bothers you, sand it down, prime it, and re-paint it with whatever color you like. 😀 The front cover you'll need paint that can bond to plastics, but you shouldn't have to sand it.

Thanks 😀. The board has one 3 pin fan header and one odd 4 pin header, It would not be hard to figure out what pin goes where on the 4 pin header but its now a non issue 😀

The new look dosnt bother me much, it masks the HP look 😜

It is time to turn up the heat!

I managed to get the Radeon 7000 PCI (some OEM card) going.
There is no option to disable the Rage Pro in the BIOS setup so lets just say there were some catch 22 moments and Kafka feelings involved.

3dmark 99. Not good not bad.

3dmark 2000. A little bit slow.

GL-Quake 640*480 32bit. 86.2 FPS

GL-Quake 1024*768 32bit. 41.5 FPS. A few more FPS would not hurt.

Lets see if we can speed things up.

I found the problem, it shows green.

If speed has a colour, it must be red!

Did the overclocking yield any benefits?

3dmark 99. Not a huge gain.

3dmark 2000. Here we see a larger gain.

GL-Quake 640*480 32bit. 98.8 FPS.

GL-Quake 1024*768 32bit. 51.9 FPS. Much better.

Very nice with the 7000! I wonder if a PCI 92xx would do much better? (iirc all of them are R200 based, similar-ish to the 8500LE).

And no idea on the 4-pin; I thought PWM didn't come into being for years after Pentium 3-era (modern PWM fans use 4-pin headers; I don't know if that's what you have there or not though). On the Asus/HP I have it has 3 fan headers: CPU, CHS, and PSFan - PSFan doesn't appear to do anything (you can connect it, not connect it, etc it doesn't matter), the other two will halt the machine if they aren't hooked up to a fan, and the board does control speed on both of them. But they're all 3-pin like most any other motherboard, and will hook up to fairly standard fans (I say fairly because the board tends not to like 120mm fans that want to run at <1000 RPM).

Great results so far Skyscraper! Looks like the Asus board is much more capable than what I anticipated. And overclocking the Radeon 7000 that far yields nice speed gains as well 😁 . Now I really wonder what the Voodoo 3 can do.

obobskivich wrote:

The "melty-ness" is runs in the paint; it was painted poorly with a spray-can.

I suspected as much. Looks like someone tried some sort of "artistic expression" with the HP case, but only made it half-way through the process 😜

obobskivich wrote:

Very nice with the 7000! I wonder if a PCI 92xx would do much better? (iirc all of them are R200 based, similar-ish to the 8500LE).

Im sure the Radeon 92xx would be faster, they are rare around here though.

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

Great results so far Skyscraper! Looks like the Asus board is much more capable than what I anticipated. And overclocking the Radeon 7000 that far yields nice speed gains as well 😁 . Now I really wonder what the Voodoo 3 can do.

The Voodoo will crush the Radeon 7000 in games that support Glide and probably even be faster in some games when running Open GL but I doubt its faster in Direct 3D and it wont do 32 bit colour.
I will probably try out the Voodoo 3 in this system but I have a feeling the Radeon is the card that will end up in this box.

The Voodoo 2000 PCI is in my "Unreal build" that I used for playing Unreal last year 😀

That box happens to be a Celeron 1100 and this box is a Celeron 1100...
I think I am too lazy to move the Voodoo 3 to this build but I need to check the PSU in the other box for bad caps and perhaps upgrade that system a bit.
I might aswell bench a little while Im at it.

The end result of this build is a very fast Windows 98 system that runs all Windows games from 1997 to 2000 but would struggle with many games from 2001 and 2002.

Here is a really bad video of a restart to get an idea how snappy the system is, the HDD is an old 10GB IBM IDE drive with a distinct sound...

http://www.filedropper.com/cimg0325

Nice save! With a case looking like that I'm not sure I would have bothered...yeh OK open any computer I come across.
At first I was thinking killer dos PC with a P2, isa but no AGP but looks like you have a real nice voodoo PC. or at the very least having fun with PCI video cards

The coppermine support is probably the same situation as with many of the older revision P2B and P3B boards. Up until a certain point, Asus didn't guarantee what VRM the board would have installed. Yours apparently has a coppermine capable voltage regulator.

If it were an older VRM, it wouldn't recognize the VID code that the processor requests. In principle, this could cause a completely incorrect voltage to be supplied, destroying the CPU (it wouldn't just be 1.8v). In actual practice, many(most?) of the incompatible VRM chips will refuse to provide power if they don't recognize the VID, so nothing destructive would happen. At least that's been my experience so far, and I've seen that behavior documented in some datasheets.
However, in case anybody is getting ideas from this - when dealing with an unknown, the safest approach would be to research the VRM chip rather than trusting that a failsafe has been implemented. It might not be. You can also test with an empty slocket, using jumpers to select a Coppermine voltage, and use a multimeter to measure what voltage it's actually providing.

shamino wrote:

The coppermine support is probably the same situation as with many of the older revision P2B and P3B boards. Up until a certain point, Asus didn't guarantee what VRM the board would have installed. Yours apparently has a coppermine capable voltage regulator.

If it were an older VRM, it wouldn't recognize the VID code that the processor requests. In principle, this could cause a completely incorrect voltage to be supplied, destroying the CPU (it wouldn't just be 1.8v). In actual practice, many(most?) of the incompatible VRM chips will refuse to provide power if they don't recognize the VID, so nothing destructive would happen. At least that's been my experience so far, and I've seen that behavior documented in some datasheets.
However, in case anybody is getting ideas from this - when dealing with an unknown, the safest approach would be to research the VRM chip rather than trusting that a failsafe has been implemented. It might not be. You can also test with an empty slocket, using jumpers to select a Coppermine voltage, and use a multimeter to measure what voltage it's actually providing.

This is why I jumpered the slotket for 1.8V which is the lowest voltage the VRM 8.4 normally supports.
(VRM 8.5 supports the whole Coppermine voltage range)

Doing the research before tinkering with beloved systems is very good advice.