Welcome to the forums! It's good to see more system builders here.

Hmm... personally, my gut feeling is to go the Voodoo 3 route with a processor like that. Don't quote me though, I don't have much experience with building systems from that era. Somebody flesh out why or why not to use Voodoo 🤣 If you're looking for DOS compatibility in addition to good Windows 3D performance, though, I can vouch for that card.

No AGP 4x slots, also a K6-3 will not be able to provide the power needed to use a Geforce3, a Geforce2 Mx400 is about the upper limit, but consider a voodoo card, the drivers use 3dnow more efficently than the Nvidia drivers

as for the VIA chipset, it depends. The ALi chipset has issues with the K6+ cpu's properly with a Revision G chipset.

I myself have an EpoX MVP3c2 Motherboard based on the MVP3 chipset and I havn't noticed any issues with it yet.

K6-3 450 @ 570mhz
384mb PC100
Voodoo Banshee (tested with Geforce2 Ultra and FX 5900XT both work)
Promise ATA133 Controller
VIA USB 2.0 Card
sound blaster AWE 64 Value
Sound Blaster Live 5.1
Sound Blaster Audigy

I find it to be very stable and reliable, I think as long as you stay with quality boards your fine.

My short list of boards that I hear good things about are

ASUS P5A/P5A-B
Gigabyte GA-5AX
FIC PA-2013/FIC VA-503+
Epox MVP3c2

I know there is likely more Super 7 boards but any of these would suit you very well.

Gigabyte GA-5AX or Asus P5A are good boards.
Make shure you have the right revisions though.

For GFX, go for TNT2-Ultra/Pro or Voodoo3-3000/3500.

candle_86 wrote:

K6-3 450 @ 570mhz

I can imagine the temperature...my 2,4v K6-3 400 already seems like an Athlon TB. 😁

For my MVP3 board I get to the conclusion that I don't see so much difference in terms of speed of "time correct" cards so for 3dfx I prefer the Voodoo3 2000 has less power demanding and less heat dissipated but I always think that the Savage4 is not a bad balance too for any K62/+. I never tried the TNT2 Ultra, they seems quiet rare but I remember they were really good.
For the extreme config I prefer the Radeon 7200 64MB SDR. Having the same R100 original Radeon chipset it has all the late-time correct capabilities,'less' power usage, no fan and excellent build quality / vga signal on the K6-2+@550 I'm using now.

I can't quite remember this. What kind of CPU is recommended for a Matrox G400?

OT:
You can go for TNT2-Ultra and pair with V2-SLI.

Thanks for the quick replies!
I gathered my information so far from this website: http://www.amd-k6.com/platform-hardware/
They recommend the Ali Aladdin V chipset and the Nvidia GeForce 3 Ti 200 or Ti500. Would a Voodoo 5 5500 run on an SS7 motherboard? If so, which would be better, a Voodoo 5 5500 or a GeForce Ti500?

The geforce Ti500 is a faster card. Use a Voodoo2 PCI for the glide games.

Pretty much anything from around 1998 through to about 2001/2 is fine, my vote is with a Voodoo 3 agp as it has for a long time been a traditional and period correct choice for more than a decade until recently when the prices sky rocketed. TNT 2 Pro or Ultra if you want period correct from nvidia all the way up to a Geforce 2/3. Don't bother with Geforce 5 FX as they are not all that great and are lacking in some features. ATI is also has some good and very cheap cards that pop up time to time at chicken feed prices on eBay.

Go with a voodoo 3 3000 agp if you can find one under $20 shipped if not look for something else that is fun to play with, don't worry too much about board revisions as the good old days of there being a decent selection ended years ago. Super 7 boards in general are thinning out but there are some low cost oem boards however most lack an agp slot however they are good choices for budget builds while still being flexible and atx.

With regard to plugins, I know Glide can only be run on 3Dfx cards, so that is set, but what about Open3D and Direct3D? Which is used more in games?

Jupiter-18 wrote:

With regard to plugins, I know Glide can only be run on 3Dfx cards, so that is set, but what about Open3D and Direct3D? Which is used more in games?

3DFX cards run all three but if you can't get one at a fair price just get something cheap and a good bit faster in the other two anyway, you can run nglide on another much faster machine without the extra expense.

nforce4max wrote:

3DFX cards run all three but if you can't get one at a fair price just get something cheap and a good bit faster in the other two anyway, you can run nglide on another much faster machine without the extra expense.

Ok. How about this: Voodoo 2 SLI vs Voodoo 5 5500? I'll get both eventually, but which first?

voodoo 2's will work with a K6-3 setup. But will perform better on higher pentium 3. This was a weird time for computer games. 3d was a uncharted wilderness.

what games do you want to play? Once you answer that, the rest will fall into place.

I am using the guide from PhilsComputerLab for a 4-in-1 microsoft gaming pc. I will be able to play microsoft games from the early 1980s to around 2000!

Voodoo 5 is complete overkill on any kind of K6 system. Even with a Voodoo 3, it's severely CPU limited.

Banshee is the best match, IMO. Or G400, TNT2, GeForce, Rage128 with a single Voodoo 2 (SLI not required).

The best SS7 board is one that works and doesn't require taking out a loan 🤣

3dfx cards work well because many boards have flaky AGP chipsets, and the 3dfx AGP cards don't use the AGP cards, think of it as a PCI card if you like. Apparently the drivers work well for AMD too, but I never done any in-depth tests.

So I'd just test out a few cards if you can and see what works for you. TNT2 cards are nice with 32 bit colours, make sure to use older, period correct, drivers though.

I second other posters here in that I would go for a 3dfx card... Voodoo 3 is a good choice as its the cheapest Voodoo card to find used and has decent performance. For early Windows games GLIDE was the API of choice for 3d acceleration 😀

oerk wrote:

Voodoo 5 is complete overkill on any kind of K6 system. Even with a Voodoo 3, it's severely CPU limited.

Banshee is the best match, IMO. Or G400, TNT2, GeForce, Rage128 with a single Voodoo 2 (SLI not required).

I would say that the Voodoo5 would be better to be collected or used on better system cause it would probably perform as the already really limited Voodoo3. I did this thought for the same doubt: cpu limited for cpu limited, then I prefer a gpu that had the closest "next generation" features, like the Geforce or the Radeon that had almost anything a K6-2/3 would ask (already quiet late for the last K6 cpus) and they will probably be more compatible, but no more. To go higher in my opinion is useless, even when there's compatibility I don't see any benefit only technical test to see how newer games ran.

Don't forget the hardware T&L engine of the Radeon and Geforce cards! Although a K6-2/3 will be limiting those cards, some games take profit from the hardware T&L engine.