Revolt should be great on a system like that. Don't know about the other two. Stick to 640x480 or 512x384 and you can turn the details up, which runs & looks better than high-res with low detail.

Stuff I think runs pretty well on my K6-2/500+Voodoo3: Descent 3, GLQuake, Quake II, Prince of Persia 3D (well, as well as that game can be said to run in general 😜 ), Need for Speed 2-4, Heroes of Might & Magic 3, Unreal 1 & UT99 (in lower res.) Don't expect "locked at 60" FPS, but it's possible to have a pretty good experience.

For later (2001+) Win98 games, i.e. Serious Sam, it runs out of steam and I use my 1.4GHz Athlon instead.

xjas wrote:

Revolt should be great on a system like that. Don't know about the other two. Stick to 640x480 or 512x384 and you can turn the details up, which runs & looks better than high-res with low detail.

Stuff I think runs pretty well on my K6-2/500+Voodoo3: Descent 3, GLQuake, Quake II, Prince of Persia 3D (well, as well as that game can be said to run in general 😜 ), Need for Speed 2-4, Heroes of Might & Magic 3, Unreal 1 & UT99 (in lower res.) Don't expect "locked at 60" FPS, but it's possible to have a pretty good experience.

For later (2001+) Win98 games, i.e. Serious Sam, it runs out of steam and I use my 1.4GHz Athlon instead.

thanks for all that info. Glad to hear all those games you play on your K6-2 500 run great. I think I'd be happy with that 😀

K6-3+ at 600mhz gets 30-40fps in quake III, Unreal Gold, and Half Life. If your games are less demanding than that you will probably be fine. Keep in mind that a K6-3+ at 600mhz is at least 30% faster than a K6-2 at 500mhz.

I haven't tested many games on my K6-3+ but I'll share what I have. Generally with late 90s 3D games I think my super 7 can do 15-30fps with a Geforce2 MX. That's playable but if you're looking at it from a modern 60fps perspective, it might not cut it. Maybe Voodoo3 would do better, I didn't get that far with it.

K6-3+ 450/100, VIA MVP3 chipset, Geforce2 MX, sound disabled:

In UT99, sound disabled: UTBench.dem was getting 20fps at almost any resolution at 450MHz.

Driver, sound disabled: 17fps at 450MHz, 18-19fps at 550MHz. However it should be better in realistic gameplay and at lower settings. This was on high settings in a specific, maximally demanding scene that I was able to reproduce with lots of cars piled up around me. It was probably a worst case situation.

Ultima 9, sound disabled: 450MHz mostly 9-11fps in a specific scene near the start of the game. It was even slower with some driver versions, that score was with the more optimal ones. But that's a notoriously slow running RPG that nobody cares about. Voodoo3 is probably faster, haven't tried it.

Gabriel Knight 3, sound disabled: Tested a specific scene, not sure how representative it is. 35-65fps depending on resolution and video driver version. 65fps was at 640x480 with NVidia driver 8.05.

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I'd avoid the original K6-3, instead look for a K6-2+ or K6-3+. You have to make sure the board can run them though (Vcore and BIOS support). Lots of boards have unofficial BIOS patches to run them. Lots of boards also have undocumented Vcore settings.
I had a K6-3 since new, but ever since I replaced it with a 3+ I'm a lot happier with that PC. It's a much cooler, more stable, and faster system now (at 100FSB). At 66FSB you won't get any more speed than an original K6-3 can give you (because 6x is the max multiplier), but it's still cooler and more stable anyways, and easier on the motherboard to run it.

My K6-3 was originally a 450MHz 2.2V chip, but it hasn't been stable at those settings since it was 6 months old (if it ever was - back in the 90s we blamed crashes on Windows). Heat was always a hassle with it, and to think most of them were marked for 2.4V, as mine apparently should have been. The K6-3 is the Prescott of socket 7.

Last I was aware, the K6-2+ chips are widely available, but the 3+ are harder to find. Pretty much every "K6-3+" eBay listing is keyword spamming to sell a K6-2+, but there are exceptions where actual K6-3+ chips show up. The K6-2+ are nearly as fast as the 3+, so unless it's going to bother you not to have the very best, then the 2+ is a good option.
Regardless of how AMD rated them, the "+" chips can do around 550MHz at 2.0V or less in a desktop. They're the pinnacle of socket-7 manufacturing.
The original K6-3 are uncommon, expensive, and inferior so they're not worth using IMO unless you really can't run a "+".

Since you already like your socket-7 system, I'd probably go for it because these chips are great for maximizing the range of such a system, especially in DOS. The "+" chips are particularly good because they allow changing the multiplier (and the cache, but not sure if both levels) in software, so you can set up batch files to throttle it down when needed. It's hard to beat these systems for DOS, and if it leaves something in Win9x that you aren't happy with, let that fall to a faster Windows machine.

mothergoose729 wrote:

Half Life.

Isn't a very demanding game with a voodoo 3. At least thats my experience, if you run the game with MesaFX

shamino wrote:

K6-3+ 450/100, VIA MVP3 chipset, Geforce2 MX, sound disabled:

In UT99, sound disabled: UTBench.dem was getting 20fps at almost any resolution at 450MHz.

I see a little higher than that for the most part - my non-Plus K6-2/500 gets almost exactly 30FPS in the city intro benchmark with sound & A3D enabled. In-game is more of a mixed bag, but it does pretty well unless there's a lot of bots/models visible. I'm running Glide on a V3 3000 at 512x384 though.

but I would however like a little more power to be able to play the late 90’s windows 98 games like Revolt, Messiah, and Urban Chaos to name a few.

Able to play - yes.
Comfortable gameplay - no.

Thanks for all the info and opinions and experience from your own setups. I went ahead and bought a K6-2+\550 on ebay that was a good deal. From what I read from these replies it seems like people are having good results with this kind of setup with games that are probably even more demanding than what I’m looking to play. Probably the most demanding game I need it to play is re-volt and that game surprisingly is almost playable with my current setup 🤣.

Re-Volt, Messiah, Urban Chaos, South Park, South Park Rally, and Disney Magical Racing Tour. Those are the games I have and I don’t think any of those are too crazy. Now I just need tp find a good deal on a super 7 that can handle a K6-2+ 😀

Nice, I bought the same chip from (presumably) the same seller. He must have found a crate of them somewhere... Be advised that you'll probably need a new board too, if you were intending to upgrade the system in your sig. Some TX boards have LIMITED K6-2 Plus support (at 75 or 83MHz FSB) but AFAIK no VX ones.

(Also, stay away from 1.05/1.06 revisions of the ASUS P5A or P5A-B with that chip, unless you feel like getting out your soldering iron. 😜 Going through that myself.)

xjas wrote:

Nice, I bought the same chip from (presumably) the same seller. He must have found a crate of them somewhere... Be advised that you'll probably need a new board too, if you were intending to upgrade the system in your sig. Some TX boards have LIMITED K6-2 Plus support (at 75 or 83MHz FSB) but AFAIK no VX ones.

(Also, stay away from 1.05/1.06 revisions of the ASUS P5A or P5A-B with that chip, unless you feel like getting out your soldering iron. 😜 Going through that myself.)

Probably the same seller 🤣 he sold a lot of them but looks like only 1 left now. This will be another separate build for me so I just bought a Soltek SL-54U5 on ebay that does indeed have K6-2+ support. I believe only v3.0 of that Soltek board does. I’m guessing the Asus P5A or B needs some re-wiring to enable support? still the Asus is probably the better board in the end 🤣 I think they’re around $200 on ebay these days...

P5A rev <= 1.04 runs them fine unmodified. It's only the later revisions with G-stepping chipset that need the workaround. This is a unique Asus issue, other boards with G-stepping Aladdin V don't have the same problems.

I put together my K6-2+ 550@600 with a Voodoo 3 3500 TV just a few weeks ago. Played a few hours of UT, Q3A and Half Life on it and to be honest, the experience in this type of game is okay-ish, but not great.
The build is super fun on many levels, but late 90s first person shooters are not its strength.
If I would put together a system for these games, I'd probably go for a S370 or Socket A build with > 1 GHz and a Geforce 2 Ti (or similar). That would give you a better experience at lower cost.

But now that you have started with the SS7 build, proceed on that route, it won't give you maximum fps but an interesting and fun system!

gex85 wrote:

I put together my K6-2+ 550@600 with a Voodoo 3 3500 TV just a few weeks ago. Played a few hours of UT, Q3A and Half Life on it […]
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I put together my K6-2+ 550@600 with a Voodoo 3 3500 TV just a few weeks ago. Played a few hours of UT, Q3A and Half Life on it and to be honest, the experience in this type of game is okay-ish, but not great.
The build is super fun on many levels, but late 90s first person shooters are not its strength.
If I would put together a system for these games, I'd probably go for a S370 or Socket A build with > 1 GHz and a Geforce 2 Ti (or similar). That would give you a better experience at lower cost.

But now that you have started with the SS7 build, proceed on that route, it won't give you maximum fps but an interesting and fun system!

for sure, and worse case I have another really good computer for DOS & Most windows games 🤣

*Edit* I ended up finding 2 old pc towers locally this week. 1 with a ASUS CUBX Socket 370 with Pentium III 500mhz, and the other has a Gigabyte GA-60XM7E socket 370 with Pentium III 700MHz. Currently I'm using the P3 700MHz with a Geforce2 MX400 (voodoo3 3000 on the way) and I'm quite happy with the performance so now I don't know what I'll do with the SS7 parts I bought on ebay. Maybe build another DOS PC with Win95, always wanted to see what all the SS7 fuss was all about anyway 😀