Awesome!) What are you going to play on it?

It's got a couple purposes: to play late Glide games that are still a bit choppy on my Voodoo2 SLI machine, RealMYST being the main example of this that I can think of, and to play older Glide games with cool antialiasing. I really like using my SLI machine and don't care that much about AA, but this is kind of my ultimate Glide system that will get the job done when the less powerful stuff won't. That's why I went with an Athlon XP and not a Tualatin which would probably be a bit more period correct, I think. Also, since I don't really feel comfortable taking my Win98 systems online, I might try out some UT online with this bad boy 😁

I've got drivers all setup, SP2 installed (still have to do SP3), and I installed Unreal Tournament and RealMYST. UT runs amazing at 1280x1024, that's without AA though (I assume you manage AA from the 3DFX Tools? I didn't restart after installing that so I didn't get to mess with it). RealMYST is slightly choppy but very playable and loads better than on my SLI machine.

I've got my RAM upgraded, and simultaneously figured out why I've been having so much RAM trouble with this machine. I bought a nice pair of matched non-parity 512MB PC2700 Samsung sticks, but again, was unable to successfully get the machine to boot to windows using them. After playing with the timings in every possible configuration, I had a realization.

Long story short, the board has two jumpers for RAM voltage. It comes default slightly overvolted per Asus' recommendations. I'd thought it had been set to overvolted and tried setting it to normal, thinking the RAM didn't like being overvolted. Looked it up again, turns out I had misread the jumper settings and it had been set to normal voltage, so what I did accomplished nothing (I'd removed the jumpers since that also sets it to normal voltage). I set it to the factory overvolted setting instead, and now it has been running perfectly since 😀 I dunno why, but apparently this board likes that extra bit of RAM voltage, and the wise Asus people knew this.

I've been testing it with some Unreal Tournament and it's going great (though the new memory doesn't improve my skill any) 🤣

Actually your Athlon XP machine is in the same timeframe as a Tualatin, c. 2002. 😀

On a related note, I think the allure of Tualatin as the "ultimate" Glide platform is slowly but surely dying off, replaced by XP/ P4 machines.

In any case a jolly good machine you have there and if you could, please do post up some 3dmark 2001se and superpi 1m benches for us. Cheers!

Ah good to know; we skipped from Coppermines to P4s so I don't really have much experience with Tualatins or Athlon/XP.

I've got some benchmark scores here (default settings for 3DMark):
SuperPi (1M): 59.946s
3DMark 2000: 5342 3D Marks
3DMark 2001SE: 2683 3D Marks

I'm using that same PSU in one of my rigs. Stable, quiet, low heat.

I agree, it's quite a nice little PSU for the money. I'm quite pleased with it so far. I'd heard some bad things about the TR-2 series, but I think those issues were with the higher-wattage models. A buddy of mine has been using the same PSU in his Q6600 machine (formerly an Athlon X2) for probably close to 5 or so years now with no complaints.

Oh and I got RealMYST running great on this machine now. I had overlooked the configuration utility, and by disabling AA, I'm able to run it at max resolution with the highest texture settings with absolutely no lag. I'll take smooth 1024x768 without AA over choppy 800x600 with AA anyday. Besides, if I wanted to play this game at it's prettiest, I'd do so on a newer machine that would let me use 32 bit color as well as AA.

Other than that I've mostly just been enjoying playing UT in my spare time. I do want to install Driver on this; that game should benefit quite a bit from AA. It runs great on my V2 SLI, so I bet it'd fly on here with AA enabled.