Hello and welcome!

The thing with retro stuff is that it's all ancient and glacial compared to an i7 or Ryzen, so you don't need or indeed want to upgrade for the sake of it or for getting the best possible performance, otherwise just buy that new box. It's just about doing whatever you want to do with the old stuff. If what you want to do is some games that run just a bit too slowly on a Katmai, then yes, it makes sense to upgrade to the Coppermine, at least if your motherboard supports them.

As for slot/socket - the performance is identical, but you obviously need a slocket (and one that supports Coppermine) to run an So370 FC-PGA CPU on a Slot 1 board. Conversely, the FC-PGA CuMines are more plentiful and tend to be a lot cheaper than slot versions.

If you're seeing slowdowns at all resolutions, it's an indication something other than the GPU is the bottleneck, something like the CPU. Can't comment on specific versions - I run a radeon 9000 in one system, but that's an nForce3 system with Phenom II quadcore running modern Linux, so a completely different kettle of fish regarding both performance and drivers.

really it depends on what you want to do or what games you wanna play on it

Half Life is heavy also for Coppermine, if you are targeting locked 60+ it might not be the fix.

Hi and thanks for the reply.
As for hl1 i can test it in my other piii 1ghz system, of course the config is different.
What i mean before is if piii coppermine on slocket is better than the slot1 counterpart or viceversa, for motherboard compatibility. Eventually, i have a spare 600mhz coppermine socket 370. I need only the adapter.
I know my mb is coppermine compatible with the latest bios.
I need to understand only if the performance gain are worth the money. There are some katmai vs coppermine benchmarks?
For the radeon 9000 there are also some tweaks i can do for better performance?

Here some 3DMark99 results I harvested over time:
(the 550 is Katmai, the 600E is Coppermine)

cpu points // cpu // motherboard
---------
8378 // 550 MHz SECC // ASUS P3B-F
8397 // 550 MHz SECC // ASUS P3B-F
---------
9151 // 600E MHz SECC /100 // ASUS P3V4X
9317 // 600E MHz SECC /100 // ASUS P2B-S
9347 // 600E MHz SECC /100 // ASUS P3B-F (oem)
9348 // 600E MHz SECC /100 // MSI 6163 Pro
9361 // 600E MHz SECC /100 // ASUS P2B-S
9408 // 600E MHz SECC /100 // ASUS P3B-F (oem)
9417 // 600E MHz SECC /100 // ASUS P3B-F (oem)
9443 // 600E MHz SECC /100 // ASUS P3B-F (oem)
9447 // 600E MHz SECC /100 // ASUS P3B-F (oem)
---------

really not worth the upgrade for 50MHz

Half Life should run very good on that system. Maybe the problem is somewhere else, missing drivers, not enough RAM, bad hardware. What's the exact model of the videocard? Radeon 9000 seems a generic description to me. If it's a 9200SE with slow memory on 64 bit, well, that can be the problem, but even with that HL1 should run more than fine on 640x480. Are you using the original release of the game? Steam version is much slower, but I don't think it runs under Windows 98... not sure though.

Mine is a radeon 9000 series rv250, 128bit, bandwidth 6.4gb/s, system ram is 384mb pc100.
I have installed catalyst 6.2 for windows 98 se; agp driver for i440bx, agp 2x is enabled, and agp aperture size is 64mb.
Half life is cd release 1005, updated to 1016.

Half-Life 1 is really hard on the CPU. A 1Ghz + P3/P4 is the only way to gain better performance. No system tweaking, game tweaks etc. will make a difference.

At 640x480 the original HL1 should run well on a P3 550 Mhz with Radeon 9000. Back in the day I was running the game on a Celeron 600 Mhz, 64 MB RAM and an Intel i810 4mb VRAM GPU and got OK performance (not 60 fps though). So with your system you should play smooth on that res.

Have you tried to run 3Dmark 2001SE on your system? This might give you a good idea about the general 3D performance. As mentioned before they might be something (settings, drivers, ...) holding your performance down.

I cant expect constant 60 fps in this machine, massive slowdowns happen for example with big explosions.
Now i try agp size at 128mb. Ati driver is set to balanced quality, vsync + triple buffering on.
As for 3dmark, which version is better to try?

i have done the first run of 3dmark2001se. I run benchmark without playing with settings, final score is 3536 pts.

Just a thought here.
But do you have DMA activated on your diskdrives ?
Without it any disk activity will result in stutter.

From device manager, yes, both dvd drive and ssd. I have done another test at 640x480, my target resolution, score was around 3800-3900 pts.
As for chipset driver, i have installed the one present in Phil's website.

Ti200 wrote:

Hi and thanks for the reply.
As for hl1 i can test it in my other piii 1ghz system, of course the config is different.
What i mean before is if piii coppermine on slocket is better than the slot1 counterpart or viceversa, for motherboard compatibility.

No, as far as compatibility goes they are identical.

Eventually, i have a spare 600mhz coppermine socket 370. I need only the adapter.

Tbh I wouldn't bother with an upgrade that small. Yes, CuMine is than Katmai on average, but not day-night faster, and 50MHz (<10%) faster clock speeds also aren't going to make a significant difference.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/399/9
A P3-600E is about 7% faster than a P3-550 in Expendable and about 21% faster in Quake 3.

Quake 3 very strongly favours Coppermine, so is a best-case scenario, Expendable shows hardly any improvement from Coppermine, so is a worst-case scenario.

If you're going to go CuMine, I'd recommend at least a P3-800E, which would give you at least 30% better performance.

[...]

I need to understand only if the performance gain are worth the money. There are some katmai vs coppermine benchmarks

Yes, lots - Katmai vs Coppermine vs Athlon was the hot topic in late 1999. See my link above to Anand's benches, but there are lots more out there.

Maybe a silly question, but you have in your signature:
P3 550 | 384MB RAM | R9000 64MB | Creative ES1370 | SSD 120GB | DVD-ROM |
| P3 1000 | 512MB RAM | Ti4200 128MB | Creative SB0220 | HDD 20GB | DVD-ROM |

Why not just play the games that are too demanding for the P3 550 on the P3 1000 machine ?
Everything that you can do to upgrade the hardware of the P3 550 will result in the two more resembling each other.

or just merge it into one machine

I would keep both machine, but on the PIII 550 I would install a V2 and I would keep it for glide games (it should even run old dos glide games).

It's not a solution for me because if I have to use P3-550 i can't not play a specific title on that machine. Obviously I do not demand constant 60fps, nor to play titles which the PC would not be suitable for.
Regarding hl1, I saw a video where it runs on a machine similar to mine, P3-500, but with voodoo2 sli, and it plays very smooth. Will it also be due to highly optimized drivers? I never used a voodoo video card so I can't give my opinion about it.