Interesting. Will keep an eye out for this setting.

Boxpressed, you might enjoy this old VA-503 page. That BIOS setting was discussed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030412183857/ht … aprok.net/dave/

I had a VA-503+ long ago... I tend to prefer the ASUS P5A though. My K6-3+ clocks higher on it for some reason.

swaaye wrote:

Boxpressed, you might enjoy this old VA-503 page. That BIOS setting was discussed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030412183857/ht … aprok.net/dave/

I had a VA-503+ long ago... I tend to prefer the ASUS P5A though. My K6-3+ clocks higher on it for some reason.

Thanks! Very informative. My preference for the VA-503+ is completely sentimental -- it was the basis of my rig during the period when I was gaming the most. Returning to it now, I can see why the relationship was so love/hate. BX-based P2/P3 98SE setups are a piece of cake to get running fast and stable. The MVP3 + AMD combo builds character.

I did not install the VIA drivers for bus mastering and AGP. Everything seems to be working fine without them, except for having to disable "Write Cache Pipeline" of course. I have to say that everything has been rock solid since disabling that function. And the system does not seem any more sluggish.

A Voodoo 3 is the K6-2's best friend, I discovered.

Yeah there's no doubt that Super 7 can make you crazy at times. Voodoo3 does work very well by keeping fancy AGP features out of the equation. Though some of the Super 7 motherboards actually have problems with Voodoo3's power requirements. And indeed Voodoo3 isn't exactly exceptionally power consuming so other AGP cards suffered too.

440BX can have problems with some PCI cards and combinations of PCI cards. It's not quite as flawless as internet sentiment can make you believe. 😉 Its AGP and USB work a lot better than that of other chipsets of the time though.

The "unofficial VA-503+ FAQ" on the site is very informative. The passage below is a bit worrisome concerning Voodoo 3 and TNT 2 Ultra and Geforce cards (the only video cards I happened to test with 🤣 ).

However, I still have not installed any of the VIA drivers, including the AGP driver, and everything is still running smoothly with WCP disabled. The FAQ also mentioned that if you have 64MB or less memory, disabling WCP will result in a noticeable performance hit. It said that those with 128MB or more should be fine. It would be nice to know why the amount of memory makes a difference.

I've heard that some FIC Super Seven boards have trouble with the newer 3d accelarators (Voodoo 3 2000/3000 and TNT2 Ultra). Can […]
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I've heard that some FIC Super Seven boards have trouble with the newer 3d accelarators (Voodoo 3 2000/3000 and TNT2 Ultra). Can I safely use the Voodoo 3 2000/3000, TNT2 Ultra, Nvidia GeForce, etc. in the VA-503+ or what?

UPDATE

First things first. FIC has acknowledged that the PA-2013 (the "big sister" board to the VA-503+, so to speak) cannot handle the voltage requirements of the AGP V3 3000. The PA-2013 will literally burn out under the stress. There is even a warning to this effect in the PA-2013 faq. Thankfully, there is no such warning in the VA-503+ faq. Moreover, the general verdict of FIC newsgroup posters is that recent VA-503+'s (i.e., made within the last 6-9 months) are NOT subject to being fried by Voodoo 3 3000 video cards. Apparently there is no problem whatsoever with v3 2000 AGP cards.

Now, as far as 32MB TNT2 Ultra cards and the upcoming Nvidia GeForce based cards are concerned, the following cryptic blurb recently appeared in the Official FIC FAQ:

"Q: What kinds of AGP I can use for PA-2013, or VA-503+ board?(10/19/99)
A: There are more and more high-end AGP device rolled out to market now, except our previous warning of VooDoo3 3000/3500 with PA-2013 PCB 2.0, here we suggest in general that do not implement AGP device with on board memory more than 16MB, and do not waste 4X mode AGP devices on it."

Since this suggestion comes directly from FIC I guess the answer is that TNT2 Ultras and the like are out. 🙁

Still, a number of people seem to be using these cards successfully. I'm not sure what's going on.

I decided to test to see if disabling WCP penalized Glide performance. I fired up Unreal Gold at 1024x768.

There was virtually no difference between WCP disabled (34.3 FPS) and WCP enabled (34.5 FPS) when it comes to framerate in this game.

What's funny is that when I rebooted to test with WCP enabled, I immediately received a page fault error for my Vortex 2 card. It did not replicate the next time around. However, I got one of Unreal's "General Protection Faults" after about 4 cycles of the demo.

Given that this will be a game machine, I see no reason to enable WCP and risk these weird, random page fault errors from programs that would otherwise run just fine.

boxpressed wrote:

I decided to test to see if disabling WCP penalized Glide performance. I fired up Unreal Gold at 1024x768. […]
Show full quote

I decided to test to see if disabling WCP penalized Glide performance. I fired up Unreal Gold at 1024x768.

There was virtually no difference between WCP disabled (34.3 FPS) and WCP enabled (34.5 FPS) when it comes to framerate in this game.

What's funny is that when I rebooted to test with WCP enabled, I immediately received a page fault error for my Vortex 2 card. It did not replicate the next time around. However, I got one of Unreal's "General Protection Faults" after about 4 cycles of the demo.

Given that this will be a game machine, I see no reason to enable WCP and risk these weird, random page fault errors from programs that would otherwise run just fine.

which setting is it?