vvbee wrote:

A faster video card would be good for the newer games

Not a problem for rally trophy it turns out. For a newer game it's nice to let you turn off mipmapping and texture filtering. Check it out, software mode in your hardware, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqMj-Qb690g. With no texture filtering and minimum track detail there's not much less detail than with filtering on and medium detail, except the sky is obviously different, and there's solid 60 fps only in the former. I love blocky pixels so that's perfect. If some tracks have too much aliasing, there's always the blurry hardware fallback.

Not sure actually if the g400 doesn't have a driver option to disable all texture filtering globally. Not seen it but there's probably a hack somewhere if nothing else.

vvbee wrote:

I've not seen the cpu reach 40 c at 23 c ambient, so there's room for reduced cooling. A fan speed adjuster is next on the list to cut the fan below 5 v with finer control.

Don't have a thermal camera, but a low-res thermal image can be had with a spot contact sensor (ds18b20 in heatshrink) and a simple app to interpolate. Temperature measured from 12 spots on the motherboard, marked on the image in c. Also marked from top to bottom are the cpu, agp slot, mobo chipset, and the sound card's pci slot. The computer ran with 100% passive cooling, idling on the desktop for an hour or so before measuring. There aren't any particular hotspots seen at this resolution. Cpu and chipset were reported at 48 c by speedfan; the back of the gpu was measured as 49 c, and the back of the sound card as 39 c. The computer runs with the side panel off at all times.

The gpu definitely wants to be cooled, and the surroundings of the chipset as well, but really everything should have some forced air over it. At these temperatures, a large slowly rotating fan should be enough, i.e. silence is possible. The fan, off for these measurements, is currently placed to the right of the image, at the level of the chipset and pointing slightly upward toward the gpu and the back of the case, mounted on elastic bands. This brings airflow over much of the system and out the back through ventilation holes.

vvbee wrote:

A faster video card would be good for the newer games, but I've not seen one that would simultaneously match the g400 in 3d image quality in the older games.

Some image quality comparisons between the g400 and some other cards that might've gone into the build, in a couple older games. Screengrabs from encoded capture video, so the quality suffers to some extent. Some of the cards of course would need extra cooling over the g400 as well. The g400 is using the newest matrox drivers.

G400 vs. tnt2 (det 30.82 or so) in colin mcrae rally. The ui elements are notably distorted on the tnt2. The geforce4 also has this problem, and no doubt the gf2 too.

G400 vs. gf2 ti (det 45.23 or whatever) in midtown madness. Obvious issues with the geforce.

G400 vs. gf4 ti4200 8x (det 31.40) in soulbringer. The gf4 corrupts text, and gets texture colors a bit wrong (refer to the bottom left). The gf2 with det 45.23 or whatever has the same issues, but the tnt2 with det ~30.82 doesn't. The text corruption might be fixable.

The tnt2 especially could in theory run with some older drivers that might not have issues like these, but the g400 is a bit faster than the fastest tnt2 anyway.

If your board suports it disable one if the cpu cores. It will lower the heat output if the cpu, amd it will not slowe the system down at all.

Yeh, wanted to do that but the option went away when I patched the bios to a version that officially supported the cpu. I run with cool n quiet off so the second core isn't exactly throttling down effectively either, but with 9 watts tdp overall it's still not too bad.

Cool project. 😎

Thanks for pointing out some problem games for the GeForce series. I'll make a note to test those in future. CMR and Soulbringer look like they might be a texel alignment deal.

Nice, my PII400@448 is silent because I switched from standard cooler to a 5 inch fan and it goes really silent while making alot of wind inside the case.

Replaced the 120 mm yate loon with a fairly high-end 140 mm phanteks f140ts. At 5 volts it's about 12 db, almost inaudible where I'm sitting and with the case open. After 30 minutes of need for speed 5, the cpu is at 36 c, which is well good enough, same thing after half an hour of quake 1 in software. The back of the gpu is at 35 c or so in nfs5, more than fine. Though it's not plugged in, I haven't taken the stock amd fan off the cpu heatsink by the way, so doing that could lower the temperature some, but it's not really worth the hassle.

The maximum speed I can have for the cpu at 0.85 vcore is 1400 mhz, which should come to about 11 w tdp. After 30 minutes of nfs5 at this speed, the cpu sits at 37 c. Might as well keep it at that clock rate. With that, it beats the 1400 mhz p3-s (~30 w tdp) in sandra 2003 and the 1400 mhz pentium m (~20 w tdp) in cinebench 2003. In my own floating-point heavy path_bench, it gets 9 seconds vs. a 1800 mhz athlon xp's 7 seconds and a 386dx/40's 4758 seconds.

Strictly speaking this wasn't to be a dos build, but I wanted to know how ultima 7 would run on it. Seems it runs decent. I patched the game's mainmenu.exe to force cpu cache off, and with the cpu at 1400 mhz, speed in u7 seems comparable to a mid 486. Capture video with cache disabled and enabled, running in dos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2tyyWk766s. You can compare it with e.g. 0blivi0n100's u7 pc video on youtube, where he has the same scene going on a few 486s.

The audigy 2 obviously isn't doing sound in dos, and there's no isa slots on the motherboard. For u7, I'd need an additional and compatible pci sound card that doesn't use an emm in dos. Not that I'd necessarily get one for this build, but it's something to think about.

vvbee wrote:

For u7, I'd need an additional and compatible pci sound card that doesn't use an emm in dos. Not that I'd necessarily get one for this build, but it's something to think about.

Got a cheap fm801 chip, didn't work with the nforce. The fact that the system is quiet enough I keep forgetting to turn it off I take as a sign of goals attainment, so best not to water that down chasing rainbows and just keep it as a pure win 98 build.

Hmm, I've got the same motherboard, but haven't done much testing with it. I never had high hopes of getting any sound in DOS with an nForce chipset. What other PCI sound cards do you have?

Besides the FM801, you could try some of the following:
ESS Solo-1
Avance Logic ALS4000
Vortex 2
Yamaha YMF7x4
CMedia 8x38

I searched around about the models you listed before settling on the 801, chiefly as it was available near me and for just a few $. It doesn't seem like a bad chip, as long as it supports your platform. People seem to say they have more luck with the solo, but not considerably more. In general it doesn't feel that builds with pci audio for dos end up being more than just satisfactory in that regard.