That's pretty much the perfect build for Win98 and DOS gaming. Congrats!

With the Voodoo 3 you get 8-bit palletized textures and proper table fog, which ensures that early 3D accelerated games look as intended. And that K6-III can be slowed down as needed using SetMul which makes it a breeze to properly run older, speed sensitive DOS games like Wing Commander.

The only thing that rig might not handle so well could be 640x480 FPS games like Quake and Duke3D running in software mode. Have you done any performance tests with those?

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-02-17, 21:16:

That's pretty much the perfect build for Win98 and DOS gaming. Congrats!

With the Voodoo 3 you get 8-bit palletized textures and proper table fog, which ensures that early 3D accelerated games look as intended. And that K6-III can be slowed down as needed using SetMul which makes it a breeze to properly run older, speed sensitive DOS games like Wing Commander.

The only thing that rig might not handle so well could be 640x480 FPS games like Quake and Duke3D running in software mode. Have you done any performance tests with those?

You are correct in that Quake only gets about 27 FPS at 640x480 in software mode. I have not benched Duke3D yet. Quake was the really the first game that used the FPU in the Pentium series to the max. Without a pipelined FPU, the K6 and Cyrix 6x86 performed poorly in comparison.

That's still pretty decent. Back in the day, I played through the entirety of Quake on my Pentium 133 at 400x300 or some similarly weird resolution, getting barely 10-15 FPS. Still managed to finish it... somehow.

BTW, does your Voodoo 2000 exhibit any artifacting in DOS resolutions like 320x200? This issue seems to crop up on some systems (including mine) but not on others.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-02-17, 22:16:

BTW, does your Voodoo 2000 exhibit any artifacting in DOS resolutions like 320x200? This issue seems to crop up on some systems (including mine) but not on others.

Thankfully, no it does not. That is usually from the chip getting too hot for too long and that is one the results. The chip is damaged by that point and there is no fixing it other than to replace the card. That is why it is a good idea to put an after market cooling solution on a Voodoo3 2000. I have one on mine and it should keep it running good for years. The Voodoo3 3000 and 3500 usually did not have that issue because they contained a much larger heatsink.

Those chipsets overclock to 133mhz easily

Worth a crystal change

rmay635703 wrote on 2020-02-17, 23:42:

Those chipsets overclock to 133mhz easily

Worth a crystal change

I have heard the main issue with that on the SIS 530 is being able to completely disable the onboard video. Only a few boards had a jumper to do that.

This board may be able to run at 133Mhz fsb. The option may be available inside the bios set up for the board. It is not available by jumpers on the board itself. I have a Gigabyte GA 5SMM board and that runs at 133Mhz fsb no problem with a K63+ cpu. So 133 with a 4.5x multiplier. Also the memory performance of the SIS530 chipset is not great, but running at 133Mhz and using the tweaks available through WPCREDIT you can match the performance of the Ali5 and Via MVP chipsets running at 100MHz. WPCREDIT and WPRSET are available at Falconfly.de or at K6plus.com . The pcr file for the SIS 530 chipset should also be available at K6plus. Even enhancing the memory performance by using the tweaks available through WPCREDiT should give you more at just 100MHz fsb. There is a big thread at K6plus on the SIS530 chipset enhancements.

Stedman5040

Stedman5040 wrote on 2020-02-18, 14:30:

This board may be able to run at 133Mhz fsb. The option may be available inside the bios set up for the board. It is not available by jumpers on the board itself. I have a Gigabyte GA 5SMM board and that runs at 133Mhz fsb no problem with a K63+ cpu. So 133 with a 4.5x multiplier. Also the memory performance of the SIS530 chipset is not great, but running at 133Mhz and using the tweaks available through WPCREDIT you can match the performance of the Ali5 and Via MVP chipsets running at 100MHz. WPCREDIT and WPRSET are available at Falconfly.de or at K6plus.com . The pcr file for the SIS 530 chipset should also be available at K6plus. Even enhancing the memory performance by using the tweaks available through WPCREDiT should give you more at just 100MHz fsb. There is a big thread at K6plus on the SIS530 chipset enhancements.

Stedman5040

That is great info to have. Thanks for the heads up and I am definitely going to take a look on k6plus.com.

Just doing a quick followup on how this system has worked out. The ability to change the the K6-III+ multiplier has been a real life saver. I had several programs that would give the dreaded runtime error 200, because they were compiled with Turbo Pascal and the flawed CRT unit. Putting the multiplier to 2.0 completely fixes this. Disabling the L1 & L2 caches runs the system about the speed of a low end 386. Anyone needing to run a spectrum of software from the 386 to Pentium era would be well served with a setup like this. This rig really turned out much better that I had thought it would:)