Two more updates to the system:

I got a 4 mb Matrox Mystique,to replace the 2 mb one.There is something weird with both cards,altough the writing on the chip is 1064SG which coresponds to the first Mystique chip with 170mhz ramdac,the matrox utility included with the drivers,show it to be a 1164SG with a 220 mhz ramdac,not sure why is that(i,m using latest matrox drivers for the mystique).

Also got 2 3dfx voodoo 2 based videocards,a InnoVision Mighty 3D II and a STB Magic 3D II,both with 12 mb of ram,saddly the InnoVision card is dead.

A couple of updates:

I upgraded the proc to a Intel Pentium MMX 233 mhz

The soundcard was upgraded from a Creative SB Awe 64 Value to a Awe 64 Gold

Also got a generic network card.

So now the inside of the system looks like this

Final specs:
Mb Atrend Atc 5000 intel 430tx
Pentium mmx 233
64 mb ram
Matrox Mystique 4mb ram
Diamond Monster 3d voodoo graphics 4mb ram
Network card
Creative sb awe 64 gold
Quantum Fireball lct 20
Floppy drive and Asus CD writter

Nice rig Nahkri.Though,why didn't you get a USB bracked that had both USB ports combined in one cable?Also,it would be good to have 128MB RAM on this rig.I had a Socket 7 rig too,that was capable of working either VGA or Composite(NTSC though,wish it didn't die,I would have used it in my BX rig as a kind of a PSX system with wireless internet)
Here's what specs it had:
Lucky Tech P5MVP3 v1.3
8.4GB Samsung HDD
BTE IDE5224CDRW CD-ROM (still have it on my BX rig)
Realtek 8019 ISA NIC
Gigabyte GV-R925128DE-RH (a Radeon 9250 it seems,128MB and was capable of outputting composite,NTSC signal though
Sound Blaster 128 PCI soundcard
Pentium 133 CPU (later changed with a Pentium 233MMX CPU,
128MB PC133 Transcend SDRAM
The rig I wrote here died after a cap broke off,and the entire rig was replaced by a Celeron 500MHz(Mendocino,was S370 BTW)with 256MB RAM(I think,it was 1x128 and 2x64)and ran XP on the same 8.4GB Samsung HDD and video card.The board was a Matsonic(better ECS rebrand,was stable than ECS itself) MS-7127C board,was very stable BTW.

Funny enough,every board that other users say are bad,worked really fine for me.
Example boards:
K7S5A,K7VZA(it came as a Matsonic board though),M577,P5MVP3(made by Lucky Tech,one of those Japanese/Chinese companies),5MMVP4(Lucky Star this time),6BX2(current BX rig,I need to find a new CPU though as my P2 350 is dead and the board doesn't work with P3s at all,it just randomly freezes,even on POST)

The only board to not work on me was the K7VZA,the best ones possible are listed here:
1.6BX2
2.K7S5A
3.P5MVP3
4.M577
5.5MMVP4
6.PAG-2103 (FIC board,worked really good)

And here,I end my post.

Very nice! You really put a lot of effort in this build.

Question: Are later AGP based Matrox card also known for their good signal quality? Or have Nvidia and AMD caught up by then?

PcBytes wrote:

Nice rig Nahkri.Though,why didn't you get a USB bracked that had both USB ports combined in one cable?Also,it would be good to have 128MB RAM on this rig.

The cable that's hanging loose from the usb bracket is for the firewire ports,bracket has 2 usb those are connected to the mb,and 2 firewire that hang loose.I don't use 128 mb for 2 reasons:intel 430tx can't cache more then 64mb and for windows 95 and dos,aplication and games 64 mb are more then enough.

Question: Are later AGP based Matrox card also known for their good signal quality? Or have Nvidia and AMD caught up by then?

Can't say,since my mystique is pci,the mb doesn't have agp,from my experience pci mystique has better image quality then a ati mach 64,which in turn has better image quality then a s3 trio 64+ on some cheap taiwanese videocard.
From what i remeber,even latter Matrox cards like the g400 were still praised for the image quality,i also remember ppl complainig about image quality on geforce 2 cards.
The problem comes not from the video chips but the videocard manufacturers,who use cheap components in manufacturing the videocards.

Yes my Geforce 2 can't handle anything greater than 800x600 without getting very ugly in 2D. Looks great for SVGA though!

surprisingly my Hercules branded GF2Ti has pretty decent quality 2D at 1027X768 , although I will say the Voodoo3 PCI does have a somewhat less pixelated picture.

on the other hand, some DOS games dislike the V3 , which cause the image to flicker (the Lion King and Warcraft 1 are two games that do this) , so in those situations the GF2 ends up being the card of choice.

Flicker can be caused by too fast CPU speed as well, in my experience...

but its not happening with the GF2, so I don't think its a CPU issue.

Darkman wrote:

surprisingly my Hercules branded GF2Ti has pretty decent quality 2D at 1027X768 , although I will say the Voodoo3 PCI does have a somewhat less pixelated picture.

on the other hand, some DOS games dislike the V3 , which cause the image to flicker (the Lion King and Warcraft 1 are two games that do this) , so in those situations the GF2 ends up being the card of choice.

What's the flickering you get? I ran it fine on a voodoo 3. From my testing Warcraft 1 needs either a slow cpu or a video card that happens to be bad at whatever 2d the game uses [eg rendition verite v1000], in order to avoid water and building plots flickering madly on fast cpus [ie socket 7 upwards; even 486 may be a bit quick I think]. Socket 7 or Slot A with disabled cache will do it [and probably p2/p3 with disabled cache too] - arguably the game runs best on 386-ish speed. Probably best with a v1000 bottlenecking a faster box. Moslo [de luxe I think is the one I bought] on an athlon/voodoo5 also fixes the flicker for me.

Or is this flickering not what you are referring to? Be really interested if the gf2 somehow doesn't display the water/plot flickering issue with a fast cpu [might explain why I never noticed it years ago when we had a gf440mx 😜].

off topic I guess, oops

dooplicate

I've had strange LCD discharge patterns on PCPBENCH and Fatal Racing/Whiplash when running them on my BX rig w/ 3dfx card, which are not present on my Socket 7 machine. I haven't bothered trying a 3dfx VGA on that Socket 7 rig, but I'd attribute the flickering more to the CPU speed than the video card (maybe in combination with the specific monitor), and I don't think ATi is that much more compatible than 3dfx...

Also too fast animation in games like WC1 is expected as the game is known to be speed sensitive.

ratfink wrote:

What's the flickering you get? I ran it fine on a voodoo 3. From my testing Warcraft 1 needs either a slow cpu or a video card […]
Show full quote

Darkman wrote:

surprisingly my Hercules branded GF2Ti has pretty decent quality 2D at 1027X768 , although I will say the Voodoo3 PCI does have a somewhat less pixelated picture.

on the other hand, some DOS games dislike the V3 , which cause the image to flicker (the Lion King and Warcraft 1 are two games that do this) , so in those situations the GF2 ends up being the card of choice.

What's the flickering you get? I ran it fine on a voodoo 3. From my testing Warcraft 1 needs either a slow cpu or a video card that happens to be bad at whatever 2d the game uses [eg rendition verite v1000], in order to avoid water and building plots flickering madly on fast cpus [ie socket 7 upwards; even 486 may be a bit quick I think]. Socket 7 or Slot A with disabled cache will do it [and probably p2/p3 with disabled cache too] - arguably the game runs best on 386-ish speed. Probably best with a v1000 bottlenecking a faster box. Moslo [de luxe I think is the one I bought] on an athlon/voodoo5 also fixes the flicker for me.

Or is this flickering not what you are referring to? Be really interested if the gf2 somehow doesn't display the water/plot flickering issue with a fast cpu [might explain why I never noticed it years ago when we had a gf440mx 😜].

off topic I guess, oops

no , it doesn't seem to be it, with me its basically very small and faint lines flickering on the screen.

and it seems to happen only during gameplay, the menus and such are fine, with the Lion King, it flickers on the title screen too.

interestingly when I used a Voodoo 3000 AGP as my only GPU , they were fine, but when I switched to a GF2+V3000 PCI , this happened.

Darkman wrote:

no , it doesn't seem to be it, with me its basically very small and faint lines flickering on the screen.

and it seems to happen only during gameplay, the menus and such are fine, with the Lion King, it flickers on the title screen too.

interestingly when I used a Voodoo 3000 AGP as my only GPU , they were fine, but when I switched to a GF2+V3000 PCI , this happened.

Is this like tiny white flashes here and there almost like sparks? If so then I've had that - the only cards that didn't give those symptoms were matrox and 3dlabs; voodoo, s3 and nvidia all had the issue [though not when using dosbox as I recall]. but now my v3 and v5 dont show the problem so I reckon it was some interference or the kvm cable [or maybe a combination], and that matrox and 3dlabs had stronger signals so weren't affected.

interference might be one way of describing it , faint flickering white lines in the center of the screen , its also not affected by either slowing down the CPU, or running the games in DOS.

like I said its no big deal since most games are fine, and they work fine on the GF2, but I wonder if its some sort of conflict seeing as both GPUs are full graphics cards, as a opposed to a GPU+accelerator approach.

Does the stuff you are talking about look like this: download/file.php?id=11165

d1stortion wrote:

Does the stuff you are talking about look like this: download/file.php?id=11165

yes, it looks like this, what's causing it?

Don't know... possibly because of using an LCD, but I can't prove it. It's not in every game either.

It can also be worsened by overclocking the FSB iirc

with me its not an LCD , while I am using one, I was also using it with the AGP V3 which didn't have that issue.

I am overclocking the FSB slightly, so I will check that

I made that vid on a V3 AGP so check again with Descent.