m1so wrote:

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I ran a Covington 300 in my Deskpro 4000 a while back just to see how slow it would be. It was really bad. Windows 2000 took forever to load and it really killed game performance as well. The mouse pointer also skipped around the screen during heavy disk usage. My PII-300 felt a good 4-5x faster in the same machine.
My DP4000 uses the 440FX chipset and 60ns EDO memory--probably a combination Intel never imagined the cacheless Covington would have to deal with. I'd be really interested to know well your Celeron performs with much faster SDRAM.

I don't think Windows 2000 is a good idea for that system, or ANY gaming system for that matter.

I dual boot Win95 and 2K on it. General Win95 performance was actually quite good with the Covington. Only Win2000 took a massive performance hit without any L2.

I'm a big fan of Win2000. Like another poster mentioned, it does run many games faster than 9x.

It's been a while since I updated here.
Here are a couple of shots of the ISA PCMCIA controller card and netgear card.
It works just great, if not a tad slow at times.
http://1drv.ms/1g3bQ2b
It's also interesting to note that the original 230w Compace psu dates from 1992 approx and the Toshiba CD rom drive from 1995, neither of which have failed me yet (touch wood).
Even though the mobo is PC Chips, it has some longevity and I was able to connect up to the PS2/USB header with a small daughter(?)board which gives some nice flexibility.
Edit:here's a shot of CPU-Z showing the CPU that I changed.

Splinter wrote:

Even though the mobo is PC Chips, it has some longevity and I was able to connect up to the PS2/USB header with a small daughter(?)board which gives some nice flexibility.

I never had much luck with PCChips, but sometimes you get a good one. I wouldn't trust a PCChips for anything important, but for a retro game machine it's no big deal.
I've occasionally seen some okay boards under the ECS brand, but if I had a choice I'd avoid them.

Update: Had a rummage and found a box of P2's which I thought I had lost in the move last year.
Changed the Celeron for a PII 266/512 which is showing up as 300Mhz, even though I can't see any way of tweaking in the BIOS.

I can't see the OneDrive picture, but it probably is an unlocked 266MHz Klamath processor that has an unlocked multiplier. Many of the earlier P2s aren't locked.
Your board probably sets the multiplier with jumpers, not in the BIOS. The jumpers are probably set for 4.5x because of the 300MHz Celeron that was in it. If your P2-266 isn't locked, then because of the jumpers it will boot at 300MHz. They are usually stable like this.

I've seen gaming tests on the big review sites that showed the cacheless Celeron wasn't as hopeless in games as you guys seem to be implying. Games back then typically didn't make heavy use of the cache, but applications did and it was in application benchmarks where they started to fall behind. Lack of the cache also made overclocking easier because cache memory speeds hadn't yet caught up with processor speeds so not having it meant you could clock the CPU to the moon without worrying about the cache glitching or burning up and spoiling the fun.

http://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/celeron-bh6.html

"its lack of an L2 cache--also made it easy for creative individuals to clock the chip from its rated 266MHz all the way up to 400MHz."

"Although it doesn't do as well as a "real" Pentium II in business applications, it comes within an inch of matching the P2-400 in 3D gaming, which is arguably the only reason to upgrade to a new CPU anyway."

I'm kind of surprised that out of the 50+ slot-1 CPUs that I've had/sold/accumulated, I've never seen a slot-1 Celeron. Not a single one. Surely they must have been common.

Sorry about the OneDrive link.
This should work:

And the PCMCIA card and drive:

Those 5 1/4 to 3 1/2 adaptors in old Compaq machines are handy, but I've run out of them.

That's really cool, I've never seen a PCMCIA->ISA adapter before. I'm surprised it takes so much circuitry for the card to adapt them though. I thought PCMCIA and ISA were basically the same thing in different form factors, but I guess there's a lot more to it than that.

sprcorreia wrote:

And it says 8MB for frame buffer memory, right? So 16MB total. You have 2 x 8MB Voodoo2 (each 8MB voodoo2 has 4MB frame buffer + 4MB texture).

Its not 16MB total, every card uses its own memory.. So they still use 8MB then.

It works the same on crossfire, and the new SLI.