I ran a few tests on this thing just to see what I can get out of it. The BIOS supports disabling L1/L2 so no dicking around with jumpers here. I ran speedsys with each variation and what I got was:

Both caches on: 1051.87
L1 ON / L2 OFF: 1051.10
L1 OFF / L2 OFF: 2.70

That's uhm...quite a jump down and I'm not sure if that's a fluke or if that's expected, but the little cpu benchmark bar didn't even move, WAY below the benchmarks according to it.

I ran part of Phil's VGA benchmark just to see what happens. I used option 1 to turn on the LFB thingy.

The first bench didn't even work, just looped until infinity so I ignored it.
PCPBench: 234.8
Doom 2139 gametics in 538 realtics
Quake 1 timedemo 969 frames in 6.7 seconds for 144.1 fps
Just for shits and giggles I upped the resolution to 1024x768 and got 969 frames in 109.5 seconds at 8.9 fps!

Even a beastly 933mhz P3 isn't enough to software render quake 1 at that resolution in playable framerate.

Software rendering kills pretty much any CPU above 800x600. Your Pentium 3 tried its best!

Are the speedsys scores normal or did I do something stupid?

What I'm guessing is that the BIOS switch for disabling L2 cache doesn't work on a Coppermine CPU (after all, the board is designed for Slot 1 CPUs with external L2 cache). That would explain the identical score with L2 off.

Any processor would be crawling with L1 off, so the second score should be ok too.

Are there any options for turning off the L2 in software for this kind of setup? I know it's doable if I were to rebuild my SS7 and K6-2 machine, but that's underpowered for what I was going for with this one.

Alright, second rig is up and working beautifully!

This one has been named "Halcyon" as it is intended to be a spiritual stand-in for the machine I had growing up.

Internals of this machine:

Specs:
Generic ATX case
AOpen AX59Pro
Enlight 250W PSU
AMD K6-2 500mhz (Downclocked to 166mhz via FSP/Multi)
16MB 60ns EDO RAM
Matrox Millenium PCI 4MB
Voodoo1 (Cardex Dragon 1000 from what I can tell)
AWE64 Gold
3Com Etherlink III
Seagate Medalist 4GB drive (Only using 2GB)
HP DVD-ROM
Teac 1.44MB Floppy
Teach 1.2MB 5.25" Floppy
CH Flightstick (Joystick)
Same KB/Mouse as it's running through a KVM

This one is loaded with DOS 6.22 and WfW 3.11. My first real machine was a p75 packard bell with this same OS and that's what I remember as the golden days. The first PC I ever played games on.

The parts chosen are simply the best of what I have here and it lets me max it out a bit 😀

Did some testing with this machine in respect to the speed throttling via fsb/multi and caches.

The particular chip doesn't recognize the 2.0x multi and remaps to 6.0x, so the lowest I can get is 66mhz FSB and a 2.5x multi for 166mhz. Not horrible, but I wish I could go lower. I did some research and it looks like I can pop in a K62/3+ and have access to the 2.0x multi for 133mhz and that'll be the best I can do.

Playing with the caches gives me a little room for older DOS games at least.

66mhz FSB / 2.5x Multi = 167MHZ per BIOS boot string for these settings. All results are from speedsys 4.7:

L1 ON, L2 ON = 190.60
L1 ON, L2 OFF = 190.57
L1 OFF, L2 ON = 22.06 (roughly 486DX2/50)
L1 OFF, L2 OFF = 8.16 (roughly 386DX-40)

These are still a little fast for me to hit the magic spot for Wing Commander and a few others, though I should be good with Falcon 3.0 somewhere in that non-cached range.

Here's a pic of both of these machines so far...ignore the mess:

The P3 machine is a pretty decent beast of a machine for Win98, but I've been getting some instabilities with the specific games I've been trying. (X-Wing Alliance, Outlaws, Mech 2 and Mercs)

I was looking at the pile of games I've got and 90% of them are from 99 or earlier. I started reading and looking at the parts I have lying around and I've decided to build up the following.

ASUS P2B-S
P3-500
256mb PC100 Corsair CL2
Diamond Viper V770
Diamond Monster 3D II (8mb)
Techworks Power Vortex2 SuperQuad (AU8830 Vortex2 SuperQuad)

Basically, i just swapped out the mobo/chip/ram/video from the previous P3 in favor of this.

I was going through the CGW Museum archives and I found only a single month where the Killer Rig was based around the P3-500. July 1999 (Issue 180). The specs for that particular month's killer rig just happened to be pretty close to the parts I had, so that's what I'm going with. The magazine went with a P2B-F, a Hercules Dynamite TNT (I wanted to boost that a bit with a TNT2 since it was featured the very next month in the magazine), an Obsidian X24 (Yeah right, not with those prices), and a Diamond MX300. My Vortex card is effectively the same exact thing so close enough. They went with SCSI for drives which I have, but I'll just keep what I've got since I don't have a SCSI DVD drive.

This should prove to be closer to period correct and significantly more stable since the board is the legendary 440BX.

I haven't put it all together yet, but the pics would be pretty much identical to the previous version of this machine since all the changes are internal.

So, what do you think? Would this qualify as a 1999 dream machine?

senrew wrote:

Are there any options for turning off the L2 in software for this kind of setup? I know it's doable if I were to rebuild my SS7 and K6-2 machine, but that's underpowered for what I was going for with this one.

I don't think turning off L2 and leaving L1 on is not very useful. Since L1 cache is 16 + 16kB for P3 and 32 + 32kB for K6-* a lot of code will still run full-speed, especially synthetic benchmarks. Remember that the first Celerons (266 and 300) didn't have any L2 speed and while performance suffered in productivity applications they were still quite capable for gaming. Won't help for performance sensitive games.
What's interesting is to turn off L1 and leave L2, but that only seems to be doable in socket 7 boards with external cache. It seems with all CPU that integrate L2 cache turning off L1 will also turn off L2.

That 5 1/4 drive looks kinda funny in that black/silver case... 😳 It matches the next one a lot better.
Those are some interesting setups you got there.

senrew wrote:

ASUS P2B-S P3-500 256mb PC100 Corsair CL2 Diamond Viper V770 Diamond Monster 3D II (8mb) Techworks Power Vortex2 SuperQuad (AU88 […]
Show full quote

ASUS P2B-S
P3-500
256mb PC100 Corsair CL2
Diamond Viper V770
Diamond Monster 3D II (8mb)
Techworks Power Vortex2 SuperQuad (AU8830 Vortex2 SuperQuad)

So, what do you think? Would this qualify as a 1999 dream machine?

Yep, and it's pretty close to the one I have!
P2B-S
P3-450
256 MB
Riva 128 (looking for something better)
Voodoo II 12MB
AWE 32
...and a bunch of SCSI and IDE drives