brassicGamer wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

brassicGamer wrote:

The only reason I'm using a P4 is because the board I'm using to test a buttload of graphics cards and games has AGP and PCIe and is socket 478. It's a 3.2GHz HT CPU so it can handle most things of that era and was my main gaming machine for a long time (until DX10 happened).

Which board is that? I have an LGA775 board with both AGP and PCIe (limited to x4) as well as DDR and DDR2:
http://www.asrock.com/mb/VIA/4CoreDual-VSTA/

Pretty much same board except for the socket:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/VIA/P4Dual-880Pro/

Cool. I didn't realize they made a 478 version. This was my main board from about 2006-7 until 2012. I tried it as an XP retro PC a couple of months ago and just wasn't happy enough with it. CPU performance was measurably lower than most other boards and the x4 limitation on PCIe was a bottleneck for the 8800GTX I wanted to use on it. On the other hand, it was a decent overclocker--I ran a Pentium E2180 (2.0Ghz) at 2.7Ghz easily. There was almost no performance difference between DDR1 and DDR2 (DDR2 was maybe 1% faster). And that RAM chipset limitation was weird. It takes and recognizes 4GB, but only 3328MB is usable, regardless of whether or not the OS is 64-bit. Very neat, flexible board, as I imagine yours is too.

clueless1 wrote:

Cool. I didn't realize they made a 478 version. This was my main board from about 2006-7 until 2012. I tried it as an XP retro PC a couple of months ago and just wasn't happy enough with it. CPU performance was measurably lower than most other boards and the x4 limitation on PCIe was a bottleneck for the 8800GTX I wanted to use on it.

I was using a lowly 8500GT so if there was a bottleneck it wouldn't have been noticeable. It was all I could afford at the time (I'm always at least a generation behind). I read about the board in Custom PC and it only cost me £35. It was an upgrade from an SDRAM-based board so I could use the same Northwood CPU until I could afford a newer one.

As I'm not using it as a gaming machine performance isn't critical. I'm group testing my late AGP and early PCIe graphics cards so as long as I don't put anything too kick-ass in there, it will serve as the perfect 1-variable benchmarking system.

clueless1 wrote:

On the other hand, it was a decent overclocker--I ran a Pentium E2180 (2.0Ghz) at 2.7Ghz easily.

Definitely a strength of the ASRock boards. I think I may have killed mine running it too hot for too long as I had to recap it recently. Hourly they are of better quality!

Had to necro this thread because I have a wildly different experience than everyone here: built a P4 system for native DOS-->W98SE games all the way up to 2003 (NFSU, NFSHP2 etc.). It plays them all extremely well and I can boot into DOS and play games smoothly with perfect sound and no scrolling issues or scrambled text. Specs:

Asus P4P800-VM
2.8GHz 533 FSB no HT
512Mb 3200 (2x 256)
Asus Geforce4 Ti 4600 AGP4x (important) 128Mb
Soundblaster Live! PCI
IDE HDD

The solution was to use 45.23 drivers for the Geforce4 and to follow this guide for the SB Live!:

https://www.philscomputerlab.com/sound-blaster-live.html

Now I have working SB16 sound in DOS (either booting directly into DOS or shutdown to DOS. I had to reserve IRQ5 in the Bios and toggle PnP so I could set the IRQ in software. Got it working with this output:

C:\>SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330
C:\>SET CTSYN=C: \WINDOWS
C:\>C:\PROGRA*1\CREATIVE\DOSDRV\SBEINIT.COM

Creative SB16 Emulation Driver, Version 5.00
Copyright (c) 1996-2001, Creative Technology Ltd., All Rights Reserved.

Creative Audio & Port df80, IRQ 10
Initialization Complete.

I just had to manually select I5 D1 H5 in W98 under device manager for the SB16 emulation and restart. Now all DOS games find the SB16 there flawlessly.

The GPU driver 45.23 was the only driver that didn't scramble the text in DOS games. Apparently it's important to have the AGP4x Geforce4 board, since the later 8x boards have glitches with older games due to requiring newer drivers (quote from other Vogons user, I never tried a 8x AGP). Getting absolutely stunning smooth scrolling in Jazz Jackrabbit (something I'm unable to achieve in DOSBox). And rocksolid fps in games up to 2003. Only speed sensitive DOS games don't work of course, but all others work very nice and fast (Duke3D, Quake, TR). And any DOS/W98 hybrid game installs and runs perfectly, like GTA, C&C RA1, Warcraft2, Starcraft, LEGO Racers, all those funky games that need lots of patching and compatibility modes to run in XP.

Loving my P4 retro PC.

I even added a large 55mm 8Ohm 0.5W speaker to the motherboard and installed it in the case where it gets good acoustics, so I get great sounding DOS speaker sounds from games like Grand Prix Circuit and the first few Commander Keens, something I was missing in DOSBox, loving the native DOS on this machine.

And the SB16 emulation works with every game I've thrown at it and has zero issues, unlike my experience with my PIII build with native ISA AWE64.. never managed to run all games perfectly with that build.. crackling sound in JJ1..