Great Hierophant wrote:

I am thinking of building a cutting-edge 1999 system

"Pył" was released in 1999, it is a DOS game using glide, and it is not fluent on my PIII 450 with Voodoo3 in 640x480. So I guess you should consider something way faster. I guess nforce2 with isa slots and the fastest cpu possible for that board.

I guess for Win9x games it would be worth to have geforce 6800.

Don't know if there are any Win9x glide only games that would need the power of Voodoo5.

Or maybe run a Celeron 1400 via slotket adapter. 440BX is a nice chipset for 9x and old ISA hardware.

You could swap CPUs for games that run too fast. Very easy with Slot 1.

What is the rating of the vram on your v3 3k pci?

An AGP type Voodoo3 works fine at 89MHz for me. Never experienced any instability.

I also used the PCI Voodoo3, but it has this voltage regulator which gets dangerously hot (burns the skin, be warned), for no real benefit.

I can recommend 440BX boards with 50 to 133MHz FSB speed support, You can put in that Pentium III 600EB and downclock it on the fly to 225MHz with softFSB. Recently I bought a socket 370 Pentium III 533EB for that purpose, which scales down to 200MHz.

If you want to go for performance Tualatin is king, I prefer the Tualatin-S (133MHz FSB, 512kB) over these Tualerons (100MHz FSB, 256kB), but that is because I am more of underclocker then an overclocker. 😁

nforce4max wrote:

What is the rating of the vram on your v3 3k pci?

6ns, which means 166MHz. I should be able to achieve 183 (Voodoo 3 3500 speeds) if I replace the thermal compound and put a fan by it. http://www.firingsquad.com/guides/v3overclocking/page6.asp

I can recommend 440BX boards with 50 to 133MHz FSB speed support, You can put in that Pentium III 600EB and downclock it on the fly to 225MHz with softFSB. Recently I bought a socket 370 Pentium III 533EB for that purpose, which scales down to 200MHz.

Does this softFSB program work even if your BIOS allows FSB speed changes by jumper only? Or in other words, will it work on any BX board?

It works on mainboards of which the PLL IC clock generator is known and compatible with softFSB. A list is attached.

It uses the systems SM-bus or something to communicate with this PLL IC and tell it to change the bus speed, overriding BIOS and Jumper settings until the next boot.

The build the Op mentions in the first post sounds fine for 1999 and prior. FYI some of those Dos glide titles really just don't run that smooth at all regardless of the cpu speed. A Geforce 6800 would be way over doing it. That is more fitting of a dedicated XP build for XP gaming then for Windows 98. Anything that really would need that kinda power would be better off being run in XP for that matter anyway.

A P3 600 will run some 1999 games less than optimally, and lots of oldies too fast. I usually run my P3 1400 @ 1050 on my BX board and never use the middling options I have except for experimentation.

Regarding DOS Glide games, Carmageddon is pretty nice at 600MHz for example, but this game can be tweaked to work with Voodoo3-5 and if you pair that up with a faster CPU it runs exceptionally well. Get that 120Hz CRT out yo.