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i815 3D Build

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First post, by psychz

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It was high time I built a proper 3D gaming rig. I had lots of trouble making a CUV4X+Radeon 9600+Voodoo2 build, got a lot of crashes and display corruption, and I thought that VIA chipsets were to blame, so I went with 440BX/nVidia instead, making quite a few sacrifices (100MHz FSB, ATA-66, WinME). A few days ago I got my first working i815 Solano motherboard, unfortunately without an I/O panel. There we go:

M/B: Mitac 6515WU (HP-branded, from a Vectra VL400)
CPU: Pentium III 1000EB / 133MHz FSB, Thermaltake "Golden Orb" s370 cooler
RAM: 1x256MB @ 133MHz
HDD: Seagate SpinPoint 60GB
GPU: HIS ATi Radeon 9600 Pro/256MB
PCI: 2x Creative Voodoo2 12MB with stock SLI cable
Sound: On-board Cirrus Logic AC97 (Crystal CS4277)
OS: Windows 98 Second Edition (finally)

Had some trouble getting it to boot 😢 This motherboard needs fans in all its connectors, so you have to jumper the + with the tach signal pin (red with yellow), otherwise it won't start 😵 After installing the ATI and then the Voodoo2 drivers, I was still getting lots of display corruption and crashes, which were eventually solved, after serious googling sessions, with this fix (mentioned here). No custom drivers this time, installed almost everything HP supplied for their VL400 back then, chipset drivers straight from Intel, stock Catalysts and reference 3dfx drivers. Small motherboard - too few slots; can't add a soundcard without blocking Radeon's fan. Thank god it has an integrated 3C905 and I don't need another PCI slot for networking. Board(chipset?) also features an Ultra100 IDE controller. Was in doubt whether a PCI ATA133 controller would be useful or bottleneck the bus, in the end just went with the integrated one. Tomorrow I'll be adding fans, looking for a CRT 😈 , installing USB mass storage support and some old games to check it out. Sorry for the quality of the pics, were taken with my old phone under relatively low light. 3DMark tests were at 1024x768x16 this time. Not bad, huh?

Todo: Might look for a 1GHz Coppermine with 100MHz FSB to use in the 6BA+IV SLI build, just for comparison.

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Stojke wrote:

Its not like components found in trash after 20 years in rain dont still work flawlessly.

:: chemical reaction :: athens in love || reality is absent || spectrality || meteoron || the lie you believe

Reply 1 of 10, by luisile

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Is not the score in 3dmark 99 too low? I have on celerom 1.1ghz and geforce 2 mx400 higher score. I think the cpu score i have over 15000 and 3d score over 6000. And you have piii in it so i think something is bottlenecking it...

Reply 2 of 10, by psychz

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Maybe, I'm not really familiar with 3DM99 scores. What motherboard/chipset do you use? Other specs?

Stojke wrote:

Its not like components found in trash after 20 years in rain dont still work flawlessly.

:: chemical reaction :: athens in love || reality is absent || spectrality || meteoron || the lie you believe

Reply 3 of 10, by luisile

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Its only my test rig
Abit st6- i815 chipset
Celeron tualatin 1100mhz
256mb ram
Manli geforce2 mx400 ddr
Windows me

As i say is only my teat rig for now. Im currently not at home . tomorow night im coming home so i can post here pics with results.

Reply 4 of 10, by melbar

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Nice to see the "Golden Orb"...

Back in the day i had one "Silver Orb" first, then later i had two of them. The Silver version was for socket A/462, but i was mounting them on socket 370's 😊

#1 K6-2/500, #2 Athlon1200, #3 Celeron1000A, #4 A64-3700, #5 P4HT-3200, #6 P4-2800, #7 Am486DX2-66

Reply 5 of 10, by luisile

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So here are my test. Sorry for poor picture quality. So this is the system i mentioned in my previous post. So definitely something is bottlenecking you.

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    800x600x16. Geforce2 mx400 ddr
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Reply 6 of 10, by psychz

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I see, thanks. So how can I troubleshoot this? Could it be hardware-related or software, e.g. some driver causing latency?

Stojke wrote:

Its not like components found in trash after 20 years in rain dont still work flawlessly.

:: chemical reaction :: athens in love || reality is absent || spectrality || meteoron || the lie you believe

Reply 8 of 10, by Tetrium

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Those orb HSFs were an interesting design. We used to work with quite a few of some variant with either a copper base or make of pure aluminium (which were a lot lighter).
Your system seems like a very decent rig, not much to say about it otherwise.
Voodoo2 SLI is nice to have, I've used several Radeon 9600s for several years with great pleasure (though I made them work hard and they didn't always like this).
You could fit a case fan btw, your case is basically asking for one 😜
And it will help keep things a little bit cooler. Maybe even add a LED fan, maing it easy to see if it's turned on or not 😜

There is one thing though, your PSU? I wouln't use a Premier in basically..anything!
I happened to having been busy doing a bit of tidying up and found a 300W Premier PSU in a forgotten corner (probably from one of the rigs I gotten and recently disassembled) and it's so light, it will almost float up into the air on its own 🤣! It's very cheaply build and it may damage your hardware.
I hope you know what you're doing 😜

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My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
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Reply 9 of 10, by psychz

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Hehe I already added fans 😉 This PSU wasn't supposed to be used there at all, but it's all I'm left with at the moment 🙁 It will be replaced eventually. Currently looking for time to spare to work on the software part...

Stojke wrote:

Its not like components found in trash after 20 years in rain dont still work flawlessly.

:: chemical reaction :: athens in love || reality is absent || spectrality || meteoron || the lie you believe

Reply 10 of 10, by dr.zeissler

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i815 3D yeah! I am using the intel onboard GPU with my XS-build PIII-600EB @133FSB.
It's a lot faster in Q2 then the also build in 3dfx-Voodoo1 card.

Great gpu 😀

Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines

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