First post, by d1stortion
Saw this interesting looking rig and decided to pick it up, since the board sounded like quality. Specs when I bought it were:
Intel Pentium 200 MMX
Gigabyte GA-586TX3 (512 KB L2 cache)
128 MB PC100 SDRAM
ATi 3D Rage II+DVD 4 MB
Ensoniq AudioPCI ES1370
Some Wifi PCI card
Maxtor 6 GB HDD
NEC 3.5" floppy
LG 48x CD-ROM
Made some changes to it of course... replaced the Ensoniq card with an AWE64 CT4520 and installed a Diamond Monster 3D instead of the Wifi card. For the graphics card I think a Matrox Millennium would have a higher coolness factor, but the Rage does kinda fit the bill for a "1997 budget" rig... the hardware is generally period correct if it weren't for the fast CD-ROM and the SDRAM. For now I installed 98 SE, purely for convenience.
Some general insights:
- First thing I noticed is that the memory is only being detected as 32 MB, which could be actually a good thing considering that the chipset can't cache more than 64 MB. Still I'd rather have 64 MB... maybe I'll try other SDRAMs, or look for EDO if the prices aren't insane.
- I installed the newest 2.420 drivers for the Rage card. When trying to access the settings from Device Manager all I get is a blank tab, and in diagnostics I get "Failed to initialize the Diagnostics Module". No clue what this is all about.
2D performance for the card seems good, at least 1024x768 is sharp and fast. Not much experience with DOS compatibility but all games worked so far. 3D of course is not so great as expected. It's not as hilariously bad as some other chips but bad enough to call the card useless for 3D.
- AIDA64 doesn't like this machine at all. Before installing the drivers most things actually worked, save for some non-functioning benchmarks and no Rage information. After I installed the video drivers things like SPD, L2 cache, Voodoo information etc simply aren't shown anymore. I use this fine on a 440BX rig, so unless it's an issue with the newest versions I would say that a Pentium II/III system is minimum to use this utility.
- 98 SE on 32 MB is workable, but of course it does swap a lot.
- Not really related to this build, but I hate how I always have to adjust the monitor when a game is using some other resolution etc. I'm using a 15" LCD... even though I could hook my retro PCs up to a modern LCD with a better panel I think that some low resolutions look better when upscaled on a small screen compared to a big LCD, and there are no black borders. Additionally my newer LCD can't handle 320x200 properly, it doesn't stretch it to 4:3... Eventually I will switch to a good CRT.
- This PC has a USB bracket with two USB slots. It works just fine with a USB mouse, but a USB flash drive I couldn't get to work even with NUSB. Actually I'm glad mine still works, because when I plugged it in it started to get insanely hot instead of being detected, plus the mouse stopped working 🙄 I have a USB PCI card somewhere though, so I'll probably just install that sometime later.
- Not sure yet if I'll look for a 233 MMX or attempt overclocking, or even both. Of course slower CPUs would be an option as well. I don't think I was able to get anywhere near DX2-66 performance out of this by disabling caches, with L1+L2 it must have been way below that (didn't benchmark it)...
- The Maxtor drive has that nice high pitched sound 🤣 I really want to just put a CF in there, but with effectively 64 MB RAM max probably not the best idea when disabling swap file. Probably going to stick to HDDs for this build.
- Default gamma on the Voodoo is UGLY. What were they thinking with this. I set it to about 1.0 or so and even then the colors look more washed out than on Voodoo3-5.
Windows Games/Benchmarks:
- 3DMark99 MAX was the first I attempted and all it gives me on the Voodoo is a flickering mess. I instantly thought the card is broken. It also does give a swapping warning about having only 32 megs, but the benchmark runs as expected on the Rage. Absolutely no clue on this. Default DX6.1 from 98 SE is installed so that can't be the problem.
- Final Reality ran as expected and gave the following scores:
Voodoo:
2D image processing: 1.92 RM
3D performance: 2.64 RM
Bus transfer rate: 2.61 RM
Overall: 2.42 RM
Rage:
2D image processing: 1.92 RM
3D performance: 1.35 RM
Bus transfer rate: 2.14 RM
Overall: 1.64 RM
- Turok 1.01 demo: Game is playable in Glide. TMARK gave 40.1 FPS on Glide and 33.8 on D3D (both Voodoo). Ignore V-Blanks on, all options checked for D3D, 640x480. Tomshardware had the exact same benchmark on the same CPU and had a big 10 FPS more in Glide... no idea if he had more cache, more memory or if the planetary aligment was just more suitable on that day. Using newest reference drivers.
D3D feels very bad in this game. The framerate difference in benchmarks doesn't do it justice. It has these bouts where it seems to run 10 fps and in other areas it runs way too fast while Glide keeps a consistent framerate (and looks correct, but this is expected and documented in the tomshardware article). I then set D3D to 60Hz (normally have all set to 75Hz, since it's what my monitor is capable of) and it Turok seemed to run a bit better in that mode, but still I don't get how anyone could play this in D3D back then, seeing how even on Voodoo it doesn't look or run correctly...
Furthermore, the demo is a completely bugged mess. When starting it after booting I can't choose what accelerator to run this on. When I run some other game that accesses multiple 3D accelerators, and run Turok after that suddenly all the choices are displayed. Plus sometimes when benchmarking the sound simply disappears after a few seconds. Etc, etc...
- Turok 2 1.01 demo: Gives a "CreateFileMapping" error when having played other stuff before it, so needs restart... not really playable on this rig. Really wonder if memory subsystem, CPU or 3D card is the biggest bottleneck here. T2MARK scored 25.4 FPS in Glide, mipmapping and bilinear filtering on, other options off. Doesn't seem horrible, but of course the game always dips sub-20 and even sub-15. Awesome how you have to kill the benchmark via task manager btw...
- Half-Life Uplink: very sluggish on 3dfx MiniGL. Maybe barely playable with a lot of good will, but why would I sit through that... 🤣 again I can't really select a device for D3D/OGL, but when I tried to run OGL it said that the card (i.e. Rage) doesn't support it. I tried D3D just for kicks, on 640x480 it simply hangs at the loading screen (or loads for 10 hours, who knows, I restarted the PC after one minute). On 400x300 it runs with about 5 FPS... that dithering is a true sight to behold 🤣
- Expendable demo: unplayable slideshow, I don't know why this particular one is so bad. Didn't feel like fiddling with the countless settings, but low detail didn't do much. About 3 FPS with Rage and 6 with Voodoo (estimated).
- Age of Empires demo: Surprisingly sluggish, has to swap a lot when drawing the cursor over the map, plus when selecting a unit for the first time the MIDI music stutters for a fraction of a second... seems like a 32 meg system is a bad call for this.
- Forsaken demo: overall well playable. With VSync off I get 80-90 FPS when flying around and about 40 when shooting stuff. With VSync on it's 60 when flying around and 20 when shooting, so a huge performance drop right there...
DOS games/benchmarks:
- Speedsys 4.78 (run from DOS): 151.53 CPU score, L1 369.18 MB/s, L2 186.17 MB/s, memory throughput 124.67 MB/s.
- Tomb Raider 3dfx demo: At first this gave me an out of range error with outputting 76.2 Hz (my LCD is 75 Hz max), but I could fix it with copying glide2x.ovl into the folder. Game runs fine as expected, but one time I had a crazy error where the LCD displayed another out of range error with ludicrous values after playing Turok before.
- Descent shareware: Now this is one game that I was quite interested in trying. It's just slightly too fast when no stuff is going on... from that I would deduct that that something like a P133 is the perfect rig for this game. I also found out how the 3dfx patch doesn't support a mouse for input, so that's quite a waste.
- PCPBENCH (run from DOS): 24.2 FPS. I recall when I ran this on my Pentium III it would display weird stripes etc on the LCD, on this system all works as it should...
- 3DBENCH2 1.0c (run from DOS): 120.4 FPS.
