Okay so I made a breakthrough ! I still couldn't get it to work and after the like 9th format I decided to try the final option; I even had my Hercules Gamesurround Fortissimo II ready to replace the Live! Because I got sick of it.
So the final option: put it in another PCI slot and guess what: all of my issues suddenly vanished and the card installed and runs fine. Software errors on Creative's install packages are also gone. So I'm now installing/testing/removing all kinds of Creative software without issues.
I might do a 10th format now, once I know what works and what not, but this time it'll be with a smile on my face. And after that I still want to flash to latest BIOS too and start playing with the system 😀

Aha another update, again from the iphone from the couch in front of the tv haha 😀
The machine is purring in the background doing its final install. I gave up on getting any of the 9x Creative software to work on 2k because I failed of course. So I'm going to use a later 5.1 installation CD, dated 2003, to get all of the features working.
I also flashed to BIOS 1008 beta 1 successfully !

So once it finishes the 2k install I can get to test and play fully !!

I'll update with more pics and info as it goes.

In the meantime a pic I took when I was assembling it

AzzKickr wrote:

SP1 ? I'm on SP4 already ? Does that still apply then ?

Yup, this one http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/micro … ate_rollup.html

Actually it's updates after SP4, it doesn't have anything to do with SP1

sebaz_ri wrote:

AzzKickr wrote:

SP1 ? I'm on SP4 already ? Does that still apply then ?

Yup, this one http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/micro … ate_rollup.html

Actually it's updates after SP4, it doesn't have anything to do with SP1

Yup, I looked it up and installed it. Thanks for the tip !The only thing left for me to install now, is that "unofficial" SP5 so I'm as updated as I can get.

Okay so that unofficial SP is a no-go because it's not available in my native install language.

I did take some pics though;

Good thing the case is a version without side window haha 😁

And what better way to experience the glory of old with the proper input equipment 😎

Okay so I'm having a blast with this revived Rambus P4T ! I went online to search for a list of 2000-2001 era games to play and saw RTCW was a late 2001 title. Hoppedieday: let's play ! 😀

Installation went fine of course, installed the latest patch to support widescreen. Now for some reason the performance was really low. Very odd behavior. I thought to myself why is it running so bad ? Are the memories clouding my judgment and don't I remember it running this way in the past ? I was looking at 30 fps on full detail 720p. I admit I was a little disappointed so I went upstairs to the treasure room ( 😜 ) to see what else was in my collection that I could replace the Gen.1 Radeon with.

These turned up 😎

I was going to look at the Radeon 7500 to stay in the same time/performance era and was completely surprised when I opened up the box !!
This is an actual press release version with the press kit inside still !!

But before I was going to put it in, I wanted to give some overclocking a shot. So downloaded Powerstrip and got to work. I increased from 166Mhz to 175Mhz and fired up RTCW again. There was some improvement but not enough by far. So I kept playing it for a couple minutes until I reached the third level. All of a sudden the performance I knew it should have, was there !!! The fps counter floated in the 100+fps area as soon as the third level was loaded !!
So now I'm baffled ... I played a couple of minutes and the performance was just awesome, as already was in Q3 on this machine. I went back to Powerstrip and pushed for the 183Mhz of the Retail cards, which my OEM card handled just fine. Q3 Timedemo shows a hefty 82fps 1024*768*32 😎

So I'm going to look into the performance issue in the first two levels again just to get an ease of mind.

I also noticed that RTCW supports Truform; a feature I forgot all about. So those Radeon 8500's might come in handy in the next build 😀

And just for the porn value I'll share this one too: