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What could a PCI only mATX PIII board be good for?

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First post, by appiah4

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I recently impulse bought an old beige ATX case PC hoping it would also yield some nice hardware inside. Alas, the case was faulty and the interior was lacklustre. I ended up with a Procomp BST1M-E motherboard and a Coppermine Pentium III 800MHz CPU, along with two sticks of 128MB SDRAM.

med_gallery_60983_11505_414345.jpg

I tried selling this off but there was no interest. Obviously, it locks an AGP port and that immediately limits usefulness. Only two PCI ports is also not great, but at least it has onboard LAN so I can use one for graphics and one for sound.

The issue is that now I have no idea what to do with this. The only PCI graphics card I have available is an S3 Tri64 (The other, a Matrox G200 is in my MMX PC, and I don't want to go through the hassle of replacing it and risking Windows 98SE going to shit) but that would certainly not cut it for anything.

I suppose an idea would be to use a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI, but I already have a Voodoo 3 in a PII(I) 450MHz system, so I was hoping to do something a bit more interesting with this..

What would be a fun and interesting thing to do with this? What PCI cards can I find and throw in for shits and giggles, testing, or maybe early PIII era gaming?

The obvious sound card choice is an SB Live! but is there any other interesting card I could try with this board?

Reply 1 of 9, by Super_Relay

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there were several Geforce FX cards in pci, 5200s and 5500s.

or something more out of the ordinary a powervr kyro

Reply 3 of 9, by appiah4

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Cyrix200+ wrote:

There should be on-board VGA, that might be worth a try?

https://www.google.nl/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc= … jOSSmih5EDjoIXw

Oh, there is onboard VGA indeed, of the SiS 630 variety, but I automatically assumed that it would be totally crap?..

Here's a 3DMark 2001 screenshot from another Vogoner who used a Coppermin 866, almost equal to what I have.

file.php?mode=view&id=15822&sid=e5eea6f7e5dc315abceb661c2013e6fe

See why I want to add a PCI card? 😀

Reply 4 of 9, by Cyrix200+

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appiah4 wrote:
Oh, there is onboard VGA indeed, of the SiS 630 variety, but I automatically assumed that it would be totally crap?.. […]
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Cyrix200+ wrote:

There should be on-board VGA, that might be worth a try?

https://www.google.nl/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc= … jOSSmih5EDjoIXw

Oh, there is onboard VGA indeed, of the SiS 630 variety, but I automatically assumed that it would be totally crap?..

Here's a 3DMark 2001 screenshot from another Vogoner who used a Coppermin 866, almost equal to what I have.

<snip>

See why I want to add a PCI card? 😀

Ouch, that's not going to be enjoyable gaming 😉 Investing in an (relatively) expensive PCI cards also seems a bit of a waste. This is a challenge!

1982 to 2001

Reply 5 of 9, by Deksor

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If you're crazy enough, the board has traces for an agp slot so you could solder one in 🤣 (a long time ago I saw somebody doing this successfuly on a socket A motherboard and it worked ^^)

When I was a kid, we had a celeron 633 computer with no agp and this exact chipset and we managed to play some games. This computer is dead but I'm pretty sure that it would perform worse than the 1998 gaming PC I'm building even though the cpu is a bit faster 🤣

Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative

Reply 7 of 9, by F2bnp

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You could always just add a couple of Voodoo 2 cards.

Reply 8 of 9, by LHN91

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Well, considering I'm fairly certain my old PCI FX5500 wasn't allowing even my old Willamette P4 fully stretch it's legs, I'd say it's be a serviceable match for a relatively high clock speed P3

Reply 9 of 9, by Frasco

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Got the same motherboard. I remember my people running AutoCAD 2000 on it. It's not a republic of gamers. 😒
So I don't think a FX5500 (dx9) will be enough and smooth for these DX games.

V5 5500 for AA, 512MB of RAM (two sticks 256+256), SB Audigy 2 ZS Platinum to doll your case and a 1GHz Coppermine will receive the republic of glide title.

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