WOW You'll be ready for a fast BF1942, NOLF2 and UT2003 in no time 😁

That's an epic box! 😁 The Athlon MP was a kick-ass CPU for it's time. 😀

leileilol wrote:

WOW You'll be ready for a fast BF1942, NOLF2 and UT2003 in no time 😁

And some Medal of Honor, Warcraft 3, GTA, NFS Hot Pursuit 2... 😁

Sweet system!

I'd throw a couple 500GB 7200RPM drives in for storage myself. Or a couple 250GB's if you want to be period correct.

RoyBatty wrote:

Sweet system!

I'd throw a couple 500GB 7200RPM drives in for storage myself. Or a couple 250GB's if you want to be period correct.

Thanks!

I've been searching the net and the biggest HD i find that retailed in 2002 seems to be the WD 200GB or the Maxtor 250GB.
Personally i would go for 2 x Seagate 10k 146GB SCSI in RAID 0, but even today they are expensive.

I'll probably throw in two more modern WD Caviar Blue 160GB.
This way i can move on and finish my 1999 rig.

Thats one heck of a machine you got there!

I LOVE YOUR BUILD!!!

Granted, i'm not a fan of the "must be the same year" concept. but you hit the nail on the head. the 2400+'s were released December 02, the video card was the best in '02. The sound card is too new, the best in slot for 02' was the audigy ONE.

I have a similar setup, but I created it around a voodoo 5. Love that system to death. (Q3 4evr!)

Do some benchmarks!

luckybob wrote:

I LOVE YOUR BUILD!!! […]
Show full quote

I LOVE YOUR BUILD!!!

Granted, i'm not a fan of the "must be the same year" concept. but you hit the nail on the head. the 2400+'s were released December 02, the video card was the best in '02. The sound card is too new, the best in slot for 02' was the audigy ONE.

I have a similar setup, but I created it around a voodoo 5. Love that system to death. (Q3 4evr!)

Do some benchmarks!

Thanks!

The sound card was available in December 02, there are reviews of it around and in some magazines. Perhaphs the name is my mistake. It's just Audigy 2, not platinum.

no, you are right, if google is to be believed it was September 2002. I had an audigy 2 zs in my system at the time. I still own it. Sadly it died in a lightning storm a long time ago but I kept it. LOVED that card.

luckybob wrote:

no, you are right, if google is to be believed it was September 2002. I had an audigy 2 zs in my system at the time. I still own it. Sadly it died in a lightning storm a long time ago but I kept it. LOVED that card.

Yep, wiki says it's september 02.

What kind of benchmarks would you be interested?

well, for the video card, I'd suggest 3dmark 2001

http://www.futuremark.com/download/3dmark2001/

for "overall" i suggest pcmark 05

http://www.futuremark.com/download/pcmark05/

and for raw cpu I suggest Wprime set to 32Mil
http://www.wprime.net/

Well, here are the scores.

Please note that this isn't a clean install, running XP PRO SP2.

3dmark01 scores 11347.
3dmark03 scores 4824.
Pcmark05 scores 3501.
Wprime takes 51,357 seconds to calculate 32M (2 threads).

3dmark score seems low...

Your 3dmark is low. I remember back in the day I got 12000 in 3dmark 01 with an 1800+ and a GF4 Ti4200. Your machine has much faster video card and CPU.

Another benchmark you can try (if you can find it) is the Quake 3 Arena Crusher timedemo, that was popular back then.
I remember that upgrading from an Athlon Thunderbird 1333 to an Athlon XP 1800+ pretty much doubled the FPS of the timedemo. The Q3 engine loves SSE it seems

my setup is as follows:

2x 2800+'s
2gb ddr400 ecc/reg
voodoo 5 5500

so my 3d mark of 2696 is HORRID. That being said, it is pretty much standard for a voodoo 5.
pcmark fails on me because i dont have media player 10 installed and i cant install it for reasons I wont go into at the moment....
Wprime come back at 46.26 seconds. I've gotten better when overclocking, but the current heatsinks I have can barely handle stock...

As for quake 3, I have the "latest" with steam. A HORRIBLE mistake as I want to go back to V 1.17 but the included demo gives me a 75 FPS with "default" settings.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/436-13-quak … imedemo-demo001 tells you HOW to run demos if you dont know.

Depending on what motherboard chipset you have, esp on the Athlon XP side, the 3DMark 2k1 score can be affected by up to 2000 points. Basically Nforce 2 was tops during its release periods, and Via and SIS about matched each other during the whole socket A game, staying well below Nforce 2 performance and close to Nforce1 on their original offerings and catching up almost but never equaling Nforce2.

The KT333 and Kt400 when they hit were pretty decent regardless of being a tad behind Nforce2, and the last Socket A SIS offerings like the 741 were not too bad either. The Kt266 really is just average, definitely behind the Kt333 etc, but solid regardless. The 3Dmark 2k3 score the guy got is fine, very normal for a 9700 Pro since that test was more gpu dependent then cpu/motherboard dependent.

On that Voodoo 5 score of 2696, I surpass that slightly on one Athlon XP 2400+ 266 fsb setup. No matter what you put the card in, you cant really even surpass 3500 points on default settings without mad tweaking because the card gets maxed at that point, even pairing a PCI one with a Athlon 64.

Oh I don't feel bad at all with ~2700 in 3dmark01 with a voodoo 5. The main point that I wanted to make is that where his system is essentially a time capsule, mine was designed with pushing a certain video card to the limits. We just happened to both use a dual socket A setup.

I need to do a fresh XP install... I have no less than 7 folders on my desktop with different video drivers in it. Diablo 2 crashes so hard it locks the system up as soon as you try to run it. Q3 keeps putting itself back ti direct3d and not voodoo settings... 🙁 I've just been working on other projects. That and I want to watercool this system.

Real sweet system! I have two P4 rigs around that era as well and consider somewhere around that point to be the "final frontier" for retroness as well (at least at this point- it keeps getting pushed fwd! 🤣 )

What's so special about this? I use a similar machine every day, it is the newest system I have 🤣

ProfessorProfessorson wrote:

Depending on what motherboard chipset you have, esp on the Athlon XP side, the 3DMark 2k1 score can be affected by up to 2000 points...

Back then i had an ASUS Nforce2 ultra board and it was really fast running 3dmark01.
Although 3dmark01 score is a bit low, the system feels great, responsive and gaming is not a problem for games between 2002-2004.

True i can't run NFS Most Wanted (2005) with all bells and whistles, but it runs fine.

In 2005 we already had Athlon 64 X2 4800+, Nforce 4 SLI, Nvidia 7800GTX, so it's ok with me.

sgt76 wrote:

Real sweet system! I have two P4 rigs around that era as well and consider somewhere around that point to be the "final frontier" for retroness as well (at least at this point- it keeps getting pushed fwd! 🤣 )

Thanks! I agree with you. Final frontier for now. But i really don't know if in 2020 i'll want a current rig... Time will tell. 😀

jwt27 wrote:

What's so special about this? I use a similar machine every day, it is the newest system I have 🤣

There is nothing wrong with having a current rig that is old. We all have them (i think), for one purpose or another.

Last night for the kicks i installed Windows 7, and performance was quite good despite being an old rig. WEI scored 4.3 minimum (cpu and ram) and the system was running like a modern (cheap) rig.