OK here are some glide benches on the V2 cards in SLi:

- GLQuake 640x480 - 4.4 seconds 219 fps
- Quake 2 640x480 - 4.6 seconds 148.8 fps
- Quake 2 1024x768 - 10.6 seconds 68.4 fps

Just for fun, the GF4 Titanium under default OpenGL:

- Quake 2 640x480 - 1.5 seconds 459.9 fps 🤣
- Quake 2 1280x960 - 2.1 seconds 372.2 fps

Pics: (click for bigger picture)

If anyone is curious about other glide benchmarks or knows other glide benchmark software, please let me know.

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That is some mighty fine Highpowered Win98/XP-Rig you have done.
The XP part is of no interest to me, as I really have no nostalgia feel for it.
The 98-Part is just really awesomme. Good job sir.

What case are you putting you'r "beast" into?

haven't decided yet... I'm leaning toward either a '99-2001 beige case with a spot of color witch I can mod, or a more modern black case with a retro look and good cooling. A have an Antek Three Hundred case somewhere, that might work. I do need something that allows me to install a 120mm side fan to blow over the voodoo cards, and the 300 has that. Otherwise I'll have to do a little modding.

Right now it sits in a Delux MV888. A rather cheap case, but it has room for a 120mm fan in it's side panel to cool the voodoo cards:

The Antek 300 has the side fan as well, but the PSU is mounted on the bottom, and it might be harder to get the main power cable routed around all the expansion cards:

For period correctness... well... back in 2004-2005 when the A64 came out, everyone had some sort of weird looking chinese ATX case with the face of a car in front and a handle on top - not a fan of those. Not sure what brand name ATX case from 2004-2005 I could put it in... there is stuff like the Thelmaltake Soprano, Raidmax Sagitta (sort of brand name - good quality anyway) but sourcing one of those in good condition would be hard.

Advice is welcome on case selection...

Very nice! P4 3.2 GHz was the fastest machine I had V2 SLI running 🤣 Was a fun project, no doubt.Quake 2 performs very solid, very nice.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Very nice! P4 3.2 GHz was the fastest machine I had V2 SLI running 🤣 Was a fun project, no doubt.Quake 2 performs very solid, very nice.

Thanks 😀 took a couple of weeks of researching, building and testing. Had to purchasing the right motherboard (unfortunately I only found an ECS board that met my criteria, but it's more expensive model and it works flawlessly). I started out with a socket 775 machine - a pentium 631 witch I tested on a GA-8IP775. It all worked fine until I installed the voodoo cards. Got them running in XP, most games / benchmarks would hang after 10-20 min. In '98 the machine would bsod after installing the voodoo driver - and I tried all drivers I could find... After that I looked for a socket 775 VIA board, but there were none available for sale with the required number of PCI slots (I need at least four).

I gave up on 775 and went for 754 instead. I already had the motherboard, so I recapped it (most caps near the CPU socket were shot), found a socket 754 Athlon64 3000+ witch I overpaid for, and started testing. Again, no luck in windows 98, but worked fine in XP. Finally I came across the ECS used in the build + the 3200+ for ~12 euro, so I got and used those.

Case with a handle. Ay!!!
Would that have been a codegen 6102 or something like that?

For a case. Try looking for an antec sonata 2 or 3.
Or perhaps a coolermaster praetorian. I would go for cases with these kind of looks.

brostenen wrote:

Case with a handle. Ay!!!
Would that have been a codegen 6102 or something like that?

Yeah, stuff like that. Even worse:

brostenen wrote:

For a case. Try looking for an antec sonata 2 or 3.
Or perhaps a coolermaster praetorian. I would go for cases with these kind of looks.

Not too fond of the sonata... I do like the praetorian tough 😀 especially the version with the transparent side panel. I also have an antec p180 (the chrome version) but it's huge and I like to move my machines around so using that would make moving the computer a pain in the ass... I also have an older Antec case that looks identical to the NSK4482B - http://store.antec.com/1522-thickbox_default/nsk4482b.jpg (except it's all black and lacks USB 3.0 headers) - it's pretty old - 2006 I think - can't remember the model off the top of my head tough... It's currently housing my XP2400+ / Voodoo 3 3500TV rig, but I could move that into a more appropriate beige / blue case and use the antec for this build.

Wow... That is some seriously ugly Benz wannabe case.
I bet the quality is not even half the German standard.
Please just don't get one of those alien cases that are blue,
or red or silver or black. The one with two giant eyes.

They are the absolute worst quality. Thinner plates than Codegen.

Edit:
This http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16811105109

brostenen wrote:

Wow... That is some seriously ugly Benz wannabe case. I bet the quality is not even half the German standard. Please just don't […]
Show full quote

Wow... That is some seriously ugly Benz wannabe case.
I bet the quality is not even half the German standard.
Please just don't get one of those alien cases that are blue,
or red or silver or black. The one with two giant eyes.

They are the absolute worst quality. Thinner plates than Codegen.

Edit:
This http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16811105109

no way in hell i'm getting something like that .

kanecvr wrote:

no way in hell i'm getting something like that .

I remember them from when I build computers for a living. The packaging of the product was the thinnest cardboard and styrofoam ever.
I even bent the side panels on the first maby 3 to 4 cases when unboxing it. And i ripped the door off some of them by accident.
When the power button was pushed, the computer would move across the table. Just a plain awefull case, that I really hated from first encounter.

Your timing on posting this thread couldn't have been better. Just last night I was testing Dungeon Keeper II on my P3 1.4ghz with Geforce 4 TI 4200. I was surprised how poorly it ran. Seemed to be particle effects especially that really dropped the frame rate. I have a FX 5700 on its way to me in the mail so it's a bit of a worry to hear it won't work with DK2.

How does the DK2 menu run on your new system? I was getting a pitiful 13fps. I even saw people with modern CPU mentioning this problem with the GOG version. It is only a menu, but it would be nice to have running smoothly.

Unfortunate you couldn't get the nForce board going. They look so nice, but reliability and compatibility was extremely poor when I tried to use a later one (790i ultra) for my windows XP build. Eventually decided it was more trouble than it was worth.

Nintendawg wrote:

Your timing on posting this thread couldn't have been better. Just last night I was testing Dungeon Keeper II on my P3 1.4ghz with Geforce 4 TI 4200. I was surprised how poorly it ran. Seemed to be particle effects especially that really dropped the frame rate. I have a FX 5700 on its way to me in the mail so it's a bit of a worry to hear it won't work with DK2.

The FX series WILL work with DKII, but you will experience random crash to desktop, witch do not occur with a GF4 or older. In any case, you are not GPU restricted. Using my 5900XT I got exactly the same performance on my P3 rig as I got with my GF4 Ti. The game is CPU limited.

The GoG edition is not hardware accelerated (as far as I remember) witch is why everyone is complaining of horrible performance. Enabling hardware acceleration on modern hardware will cause the black screen issue. Also using later drivers on some old hardware (like the FX 5xxx and 6xxx series) will cause the same cursor visible but black screen issue. I got the game running on my 5900 using forceware 41.09. It also worked with 72.something but it was slow and it crashed a lot. Most 5x.xx drivers cause black screen or game fails to start. [/quote]

Nintendawg wrote:

How does the DK2 menu run on your new system? I was getting a pitiful 13fps. I even saw people with modern CPU mentioning this problem with the GOG version. It is only a menu, but it would be nice to have running smoothly.

The menu runs really well on the 3200+. I'd estimate around 30 fps or more. I'm currently playing the game at 1280x1024, 16bit mode (32 bit causes crashes) with AA and AF forced on trough nvidia control panel. The game looks awesome and runs smooth.

Nintendawg wrote:

Unfortunate you couldn't get the nForce board going. They look so nice, but reliability and compatibility was extremely poor when I tried to use a later one (790i ultra) for my windows XP build. Eventually decided it was more trouble than it was worth.

I've only had problems trying to get nForce boards to work on win98. Never had problems with on in XP. Most nforce 2 socket a boards should work fine in windows98, and drivers are available. The problem is using Voodoo cards with them - in 98, both my Abit NF7-S and my Asrock K7NF2 boards will fail to load 98, bsod or freeze after a couple of minutes ingame with the voodoo drivers installed (regardless of vresion, I tried official and unoficial drivers). On my socket 754 DFI nforce3 board, the machine would hang while installing the voodoo drivers, and I couldn't find a way around it.

From my experience, the fastest most compatible and easy to set up Dungeon Keeper 2 systems are VIA based socket A - either early KT133, 266 or 333 with 3V agp, a fast socket A cpu and a voodoo 3, or a KT400 or later with a fast AGP8x video card, like a GF4 Titanium or a radeon 9xxx + a Barthon CPU and the Athlon Voodoo 2 3.02.02 drivers.

It also helps if you have a Creative sound card - PCI or ISA. Some on-board cards have either crappy drivers or are poor quality and will cause crackling and stuttering, even Q-Sound system related crashes.

kanecvr wrote:

brostenen wrote:

Case with a handle. Ay!!!
Would that have been a codegen 6102 or something like that?

Yeah, stuff like that. Even worse:

computer_atx_case_benz.jpg

Guess I am the only one to actually like that case enough to want to use it with my Athlon 64 3000+ Socket 754 rig. Seriously. 😀

PcBytes wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

brostenen wrote:

Case with a handle. Ay!!!
Would that have been a codegen 6102 or something like that?

Yeah, stuff like that. Even worse:

computer_atx_case_benz.jpg

Guess I am the only one to actually like that case enough to want to use it with my Athlon 64 3000+ Socket 754 rig. Seriously. 😀

Well, you can't account for taste! If you like it, there's no reason not to use it regardless of what others say. I personally prefer more serious looking cases, and will be using my antec 300 untill I find a suitable retro replacement.

kanecvr wrote:

I got the game running on my 5900 using forceware 41.09. It also worked with 72.something but it was slow and it crashed a lot. Most 5x.xx drivers cause black screen or game fails to start.

Cool, I will try 41.09 first. I was planning on using 43.45 cause that was the earliest one to mention anything in the FX series by name.

I did get my nforce second hand so it may have been failing already when it was sold to me. I agree on VIA AMD combo being good. Just need room for another computer. 😎

Just for fun, I turned on "Lock AGP frequency" in bios and set the FSB to 233. Didn't expect it to post, but it did! AGP runs at 66MHz, PCI bus at 33MHz and the CPU runs at 10x233MHz@default voltage. Seems stable. I set the ram at 333Mhz in bios and it runs at 398Mhz with the FSB set to 233.

The part I find weird - I remember reviews from back in the day - most reviews said that this VIA chipset was not OC friendly because you could not lock down the PCI and AGP bus. Apparently it works fine on this board. Will post screenshots in 20-30 minutes 😀

I believe it is the SATA controller that likes throwing a fit. These boards are a lot more overclockable with IDE drives.

Well I couldn't find the time to post some OC screenshots, but I will do it later today or early tomorow.

On the other hand, I did find a great cheap case to house the machine - and it fits all my criteria: The Chieftec Mesh Series CQ-01B-OP

- it's clean looking design
- PSU is on the top
- it has two cutouts on the side for 120mm fans - the bottom most one can be used to actively cool the Voodoo 2 cards (witch get really hot in this system)
- has 3.5" external bay for FDD
- it's cheap- ~24 euro
- thick quality ssec steel and good build quality.

A close second was the Antec VSK-4000B - it fits all the above criteria except it's more expensive then the Chieftec, costing ~40 euro and doesn't have fan slots on the side BUT you CAN fit a fan there. It just won't be as pretty.

http://www.antecindia.co.in/product.php?id=NzA0NDI1

Tell me what you guys think. What case would you use?

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