single or dual cpus ?
pushing on overclock or staying within specs ?

pshipkov wrote on 2023-12-19, 03:11:

single or dual cpus ?
pushing on overclock or staying within specs ?

Dual.

Overclock of course

Real workstation boards don't have overclocking, so only choice is something based on VIA and without PCI-X.

I assume 4gb of ram might be doable?

It's totally doable on ServerWorks chipsets. Well, minus all RAM limit that is reserved for address space, depending on hardware config.

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-12-19, 02:02:

I've been throwing around the idea of making a socket 370 build that would be actually mid 2000's era gamable and maybe even play some late 2000s titles at low settings.

I'm going to assume that such a contraption would be based on dual p3 1.4ghz 512k chips. (were there any faster chips? xeons? I don't think there were.. via 1.6 would be slower I assume?)

Yea, the 1.4T's are pretty much the best you can get until the Socket 603/604 era.

if I recall correctly there were some late p3 mobos with ddr support right? any that had agp?

I think there was one board that had ddr and dual P3. without going through a lot of searching the Asus CUV266-DLS comes to mind.

I assume 4gb of ram might be doable?

AFAIK only on the true-blue server chipsets. I know the ServerWorks ones are capable of 8gb. 2000 server and XP will see the ram, but you should do some research into PAE. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win … dress-extension

hard drive, obv, a 64-bit pcix sata to m.2 sata is in order.

Sounds about right.

OS... maybe win 2k? or would winxp/7 be any advantage?

XP is just 2000 with a bit more polish. PAE on 2000 is limted to the server editions as memory serves, and those editions need a bit of help to play games correctly.

GPU: what are we looking at, 7900? x1900? what was the best that would play nice with 6x86 and drivers/win2x/xp/7

Depends more on the games you want to play. Oh, and the ServerWorks chipset has horrible AGP speeds. Off the top of my head, its limited to 2x speeds, or something. Which was perfectly adequate for the server/CAD workstations these motherboards were marketed towards.

sound: x-fi?

MX300 or the Audigy 2. Again, depends on the Games you are target. As I recall the X-fi dropped support for some of the gaming audio features that were popular in the 2000 era. (A3D)

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-12-19, 03:29:

Overclock of course

YEA.... NO.

Just forget that now.

The L2 cache on the Tualatin chips is massive, and 9/10 times that cache will not take kindly to overclocking. Put a 2nd cpu in there, and you will just compound the issues. The best i've ever gotten is 150mhz fsb and it was NOT stable. Best stable i've gotten is 140mhz.

So via? less ram but faster ram? (DDR) with better agp?

it really doesnt make that much difference.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/715

So long as you stay away from that VIA 133A chip.

inyeresting, looks like rambus is the way to go on intel 840

never played with rambus. what's my capacity limit?

what mobo should I look for?

The Intel OR840 is the most common, but it isnt known for being the most reliable board. There is a thread here about them.

And I think the max ram for that board is 4x 512mb. You get AGP 4x, but you have to use Slot one processors, and you have to fuck around with adapters if you are dead set on Tualatin chips.

Onemilliontimes crazy and glueless build? Take an WORKstation or SERVEr hardware and try to get GAMEstation with overclocking))) You will get shitty results with huge overprice))) Anyway… why not?

There are many dual S370 motherboards with clock gens supporting up to 180MHz.
Most require mods to get beyond the default 100/133 frequencies.

P3 Tualatin-S 1.4GHz can easily operate at 150MHz FSB. With a bit of additional effort - 180MHz.

OR840 based boards are indeed the most boring, but OR820 can be as fun and scalable as 440BX.
VIA Apollo ### are ok too.

Slot1 or S370 ?
It depends if one sees slotkets as annoyance or fun factor.
Otherwise the mobos are quite similar.

Tyan Thunder S2567 or the Supermicro Super P3TDE6 are the top of the line for socket 370. Everything else is a step down or two from either of those two.
The Supermicro board is the better of the two and can still be had. The Tyan can have problems with the Tualatin core CPUs, while the Supermicro can take it all the way to 1.4GHz and yes with 4Gb of dual channel SDR ECC Registered DIMMs.

I have one, had it since new not long after their release. I can highly recommend it, it is so choice 😀

I've seen Crysis being run on a dual Tualatin-S system with HD3850. That's about as close to the peak as you can get. There is an AGP variant to the HD4670, but it's around the same performance level as the 3850.

That's about as close to the peak as you can get.

Can also do better cards with PCI-to-PCIe adapters.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-12-22, 02:58:

That's about as close to the peak as you can get.

Can also do better cards with PCI-to-PCIe adapters.

Did anyone ever make a proper agp to pcie adapter that utilized the higher clock freq of the agp?

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-12-22, 02:58:

That's about as close to the peak as you can get.

Can also do better cards with PCI-to-PCIe adapters.

I guess you can attempt, but is there a point?
I'd expect the graphics card would be severely bandwith limited, even entry level ones. By the time the Tualatin came out even period correct cards were held back by PCI. And even if they wouldn't, they would be CPU limited. Not that the 3800 and 4600 series aren't.

I'd expect the graphics card would be severely bandwith limited, even entry level ones.

Depends on a game. Then again, PCI-X-to-PCIe also exist, which should be more or less equal to AGP, minus some features which are irrelevant if there's enough VRAM.

Yeah you could strap an adapter into that AGP slot (you know the one that doesnt work very well to begin with) and then put a nice GTX 480 into it.
I mean the fact that the CPUs just wont be able to feed it enough information to keep it busy for even a quarter of its duty cycle isnt as important as getting something thats almost completely useless in there just to be able to benchmark it and have the screen shot proof it was done!

Dont forget these boards that required for an Ultimate build, because if your want an ultimate socket 370 then its going to have to be dual CPU otherwise its just an average build, are all crippled by their own AGP slot.
It was as true back then when we used them as it is now, it never got fixed in all these years and thats why none of them ever made good gaming platforms.