Pull out the sound card and could you then test again?

Quake II is the easiest one / most consistent. What FPS are you then getting at 640x480x16?

Moving to a GeForce card with TnL, you should a small boost in Quake II also.

As for the BIOS, I just went with the Turbo BIOS defaults.

I would check if the cache is working and try with a single 128 MB stick of memory also.

i tested on a K6-3 with 450Mhz and i couldnt get any benefit from Dual Voodoo 2's except higher Resolutions.
Also 3DMark Scores for Voodoo 2's and Radeon 7000 are very similar.
The K6-3 has a weak FPU, don't excpect Wonders.

EDIT:
Oh, this is already MVP3 =)
Did you install AGP Drivers from VIA?
And you did use a Older Version of the Chipset Driver ? not the most recent avaible ? if you use newest Version you will not get maximum performance.
Are K6 MTRR's enabled ?

Check if the Radeon has AGP really running, I couldn't get to enable it with mvp3 and 7200.

I run 430TX with PCI Radeon, so no AGP issues 😀

i suggest you first run superpi to check out whether the cpu-cache-ram subsystem performance is up to standard. if its slower than 5:30 then something is wrong within this subsystem, or else check out agp and video drivers and settings.

I used to have this board first time around paired with a K6-2 400 and a TNT2 M64.

These boards are so picky on the Via 4in1 drivers, they work terribly without them and unstable with certain revisions. I think I tested 4.41 as the best all round drivers.

What FSB are you running? 100mhz?

Edit - It may of been the Via 4in1 Version 4.28 driver.

I suspect he is overestimating the capability of the K6-3+. It's not a good platform for GPUs with the throughput of Voodoo2 SLI.

Can the board cache 256mb?

brostenen wrote:

Can the board cache 256mb?

Exactly what I was thinking, but does the board matter when using a CPU with integrated cache?

Aideka wrote:

Exactly what I was thinking, but does the board matter when using a CPU with integrated cache?

i think those with integrated cache handle almost any amount of ram well;
also my k6-2 was faster at quake 2 than his pc, and i had worse hardware overall;
measuring synthetic performace for cpu/memory/hd/graphics in 2d and 3d might help for starters imho

I was just wondering, as I know about this on the Ali-V, just not how the K6-III CPU are working with cache on MVP3.
There are differences between running the cache as write-through and write-back on K6-II.
How this affect's the MVP3, when running K6-III and K6-III+ is something I don't know.

I was just asking if somebody know if that setup can cache 256mb or not.

Thanks for the replies guys.

Firstly I made a huge mistake in my original post - the system is actually using an Acorp 5ALI61 motherboard! Not sure quite how I got the two mixed up, but my excuse is I have both boards and have swapped them out several times. This uses an Ali Aladdin chipset, for which I am using the 1.9 ALI AGP drivers.

Anyway, I uninstalled/removed my sound card, dropped down to a single 128mb RAM module and ran a few more benchmarks with Quake 2:

Voodoo 2 SLI
640x480x16 - 35.1
1024x768x16 - 33.8

TNT2
640x480x16 - 38.5
1024x768x16 - 41.6

So those are immediately kind of interesting, as the Voodoo2s aren't really showing the kind of scaling you might expect and the TNT2 actually loses some performance going to a lower resolution! That to me suggests something in the system is getting swamped by the graphics cards output and totally failing to cope with it.

CPU is running at 5.5 x 100 - I did a run of SuperPi and it took 5:35; seems reasonable?

I did initially ignore the lower performance as me overestimating how well these machines used to run, but there are plenty of benchmarks of Voodoo2s/TNT2s with K6-2/3 CPUs which indicate this performance really isn't what you'd expect.

so what would you expect here?
what about other benchmarks?

I could see NVidia OpenGL outperforming 3dfx OpenGL. Lower CPU overhead is allowing the TNT2 to beat the Voodoo2 SLI on the slow CPU.

There is a Quake2 3DNow patch you should be using that is tailored around Voodoo2.

I've now done all my 3dfx cards on that same SS7 platform.

Even the Banshee does 64 fps at 640x480x16 in Quake II. A V3 2000, which is pretty much on the level of V2 SLI, gets 60+ at all resolutions.

The Nvidia cards run into the same CPU limit, but with the GeForce 256 and higher, are getting a speed boost because TnL kicks in with OpenGL.

So yea, you definitely have something holding back your system big time.

AaronAsh, if you can attach your SuperPi software and tell me what test to run, I can run it later to compare.

Also double check that V-Sync is turned off. With V2 cards, you need an external tool to accomplish this. You can run FRAPS to observer this, or run GLQuake at 512 x 368 resolution and see if you're running into the refresh rate limit.

A Geforce2 won't help with Deus Ex though 🤣

Usually the enjoyment of a Geforce on a SS7 is to crank up the res to 1280x1024, or FSAA to x4 and take in the image quality while you can't go any faster.

I really got to get myself that game, it's getting mentioned all the time 😀

But yes, that game seems a bit too new and demanding.

Thanks Phil - I ran a 1M test on SuperPi, using the version from this thread: The All-amazing super-de-douper SuperPi thread!

Will have a tinker with v-sync settings and see if any of them are interfering - the tool for the Voodoo2s you mentioned is the one that adds the overclocking tab in display settings? Fairly sure I already tried that.

Try VoodooControl V1.82 Beta from here: http://www.falconfly.de/tools.htm