songoffall wrote on 2023-10-16, 08:59:

GeForce 4 MX440 64Mb. I know it's not an amazing card

It is an amazing card, given it's 128bit and you set your expectations right. It's just not valuable/collectible.

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-16, 08:59:

but it should be enough for Windows 98SE gaming.

With a cut-off point at around 2000 or at most 2001 it's fine with games maxed out in resolutions betwee 1024×768 and 1280×960(/1024). That's not much of a problem unless you want to push the limit of Windows 98 itself.

I bet your CPU is not 700MHz T-bird, but indeed XP. The 1999 marking is just the copyright year for Athlon, the manufacturing code has the week and year of manufacturing. If it is indeed a 700MHz Athlon (A0700AxxxB), I’d change it to a faster one and it has only 100MHz FSB and it is on the low end of Athlons. KT266 has naturally its limitations compared to the newer chipsets, but they all should at least officially support Palominos. By the way, that board should have KT266A chipset, not KT266.

You have 333MHz memory although your board supports only 133MHz FSB without OC, which makes 1:1 for memory 266MHz. Drive the FSB/memory 1:1, because it is faster and it is highly unlikely that you get 166MHz out of the KT266A, although not impossible. If your board has good memory controls, you might be able to drive them in tighter latencies increasing performance more.

GF4MX 440 or 460 are great DX7 cards. They are essentially tweaked Geforce2s which provide same or better performance than high-end GF2 cards with better image quality. Of course you could improve the performance and get proper DX8 support with GF3 or some GF4 ti card, but it is not necessary by all means.

Socket A systems are fun! I recently built a 2003 ”dream PC” using my old watercooling gear from the era I still had. I have Barton 2500+@2200MHz, Epox 8rga+nForce2 MB (recapped it), 1GB Corsair XMS3200 CL2, Geforce FX5900@450,800, 512GB SSD with IDE adapter, new old stock Chieftec MX case and Enermax 480W (also recapped). I’m running WinXP on it. It was really fun project, because it had pretty much everything and I had a clear vision what I wanted from it and it brought back so much memories from the era. Now that I mentioned it, I should write a build log to the system specs section of Vogons…

I have bunch of other sA boards and DDR sticks to be tested (and recapped), so there is some fun to be had on the bench. I need to source few more older Athlons to my collection, still.

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-10-16, 09:29:

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-16, 08:59:

GeForce 4 MX440 64Mb. I know it's not an amazing card

It is an amazing card, given it's 128bit and you set your expectations right. It's just not valuable/collectible.

I just mean it wasn't liked by a lot when it came out. More of a GF2 than a GF4, both in features and performance. But, as a former GF2 MX200 user, my expectations are reasonable. Playing "The Neverhood Chronicles" at the moment, I missed this game a lot.

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-10-16, 09:29:

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-16, 08:59:

but it should be enough for Windows 98SE gaming.

With a cut-off point at around 2000 or at most 2001 it's fine with games maxed out in resolutions betwee 1024×768 and 1280×960(/1024). That's not much of a problem unless you want to push the limit of Windows 98 itself.

I'm using a Samsung SyncMaster CRT, and am quite fine with resolutions like 640x480 and 800x600 😀) Pushing the resolution when your textures are low-res kinda defeats the purpose, doesn't it? 😀)

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2023-10-16, 09:45:

I bet your CPU is not 700MHz T-bird, but indeed XP. The 1999 marking is just the copyright year for Athlon, the manufacturing code has the week and year of manufacturing. If it is indeed a 700MHz Athlon (A0700AxxxB), I’d change it to a faster one and it has only 100MHz FSB and it is on the low end of Athlons. KT266 has naturally its limitations compared to the newer chipsets, but they all should at least officially support Palominos. By the way, that board should have KT266A chipset, not KT266.

And I think you'd win that bet.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2023-10-16, 09:45:

You have 333MHz memory although your board supports only 133MHz FSB without OC, which makes 1:1 for memory 266MHz. Drive the FSB/memory 1:1, because it is faster and it is highly unlikely that you get 166MHz out of the KT266A, although not impossible. If your board has good memory controls, you might be able to drive them in tighter latencies increasing performance more.

The reason I went with the 333mts SK Hynix RAM is because it's CL2, the fastest CAS latency the motherboard supports. The other DDR sticks I have are 266mts Kingston Value with CAS2.5.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2023-10-16, 09:45:

GF4MX 440 or 460 are great DX7 cards. They are essentially tweaked Geforce2s which provide same or better performance than high-end GF2 cards with better image quality. Of course you could improve the performance and get proper DX8 support with GF3 or some GF4 ti card, but it is not necessary by all means.

Sourcing old components locally is hell here 😀) but I got a couple of GF4 MX440s for about $6 a piece, an S3 Savage 4, and a Radeon 9250 with a busted cap. So the MX440 seemed both reasonable and more period-accurate.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2023-10-16, 09:45:

Socket A systems are fun! I recently built a 2003 ”dream PC” using my old watercooling gear from the era I still had. I have Barton 2500+@2200MHz, Epox 8rga+nForce2 MB (recapped it), 1GB Corsair XMS3200 CL2, Geforce FX5900@450,800, 512GB SSD with IDE adapter, new old stock Chieftec MX case and Enermax 480W (also recapped). I’m running WinXP on it. It was really fun project, because it had pretty much everything and I had a clear vision what I wanted from it and it brought back so much memories from the era. Now that I mentioned it, I should write a build log to the system specs section of Vogons…

I have bunch of other sA boards and DDR sticks to be tested (and recapped), so there is some fun to be had on the bench. I need to source few more older Athlons to my collection, still.

Cheers 😀) I never got around to building a water-cooled PC, it always seemed to be a bit too expensive. But I remember the GeForce FX cards sounding like a leaf blower and Arctic releasing "Silencer" kits for them.

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-16, 16:53:

The reason I went with the 333mts SK Hynix RAM is because it's CL2, the fastest CAS latency the motherboard supports. The other DDR sticks I have are 266mts Kingston Value with CAS2.5.

It is surely a good choice. What I meant is that if you are running your CPU stock @133 FSB, you should run your memory 1:1, that is @266MHz since it is DDR. However, if you have your memory @333, you get a performance hit due to latency that is introduced when not running in sync. I have personally tested this on nForce2 and with FSB@166 and memory either @333 or @400, 333 wins.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2023-10-16, 17:14:

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-16, 16:53:

The reason I went with the 333mts SK Hynix RAM is because it's CL2, the fastest CAS latency the motherboard supports. The other DDR sticks I have are 266mts Kingston Value with CAS2.5.

It is surely a good choice. What I meant is that if you are running your CPU stock @133 FSB, you should run your memory 1:1, that is @266MHz since it is DDR. However, if you have your memory @333, you get a performance hit due to latency that is introduced when not running in sync. I have personally tested this on nForce2 and with FSB@166 and memory either @333 or @400, 333 wins.

I'll have to look into it. Haven't tweaked the memory beyond CAS latency so far.

This is the noisiest build I've ever made, for the record.

Thermaltake Volcano 6 CU sounds like a jet engine. It does keep the CPU decently cool, though.
I added a tiny fan to the GeForce 4 MX440. Now it's buzzing.
And there's the old Mercury PSU. Piece of crap, if you ask me, but it does have a strong 5v rail for the Athlon XP.

All the fans in this build are reused old parts. I did clean and oil them. They still sound terrible.

I think I might just get a bunch of Noctuas and replace everything, even if it won't be period-appropriate, I'm willing to compromise if it stops the noise.

Modern fans are definitely worth it. That and solid state drives are the one consistent area where I go with modern parts rather than worrying about period correctness.

Another option for the GPU would be using a fanless cooler. I replaced the stock fan & heatsink on my GeForce4 4200 Ti with a NOS Zalman fanless cooler. With enough ambient airflow, it stays relatively cool.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-20, 20:44:

Modern fans are definitely worth it. That and solid state drives are the one consistent area where I go with modern parts rather than worrying about period correctness.

Another option for the GPU would be using a fanless cooler. I replaced the stock fan & heatsink on my GeForce4 4200 Ti with a NOS Zalman fanless cooler. With enough ambient airflow, it stays relatively cool.

Well, I don't think I would have enough ambient airflow - as of now, I'm missing an IO shield and there's no case fans installed.

Most of the noise comes from the CPU cooler and the PSU. I think I'll replace those first and add case fans.

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-16, 08:59:

So, I'm open to suggestions. Any other fun stuff I could do with this build? This is my first AGP build in I think 20 years.

seems fine to me - but if you want to do something different why not one of those front panel cf or sd card reader to ide units? i've been thinking about that, being able to have one system of this vintage and swapping OSes around

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-20, 17:58:

This is the noisiest build I've ever made, for the record. […]
Show full quote

This is the noisiest build I've ever made, for the record.

Thermaltake Volcano 6 CU sounds like a jet engine. It does keep the CPU decently cool, though.
I added a tiny fan to the GeForce 4 MX440. Now it's buzzing.
And there's the old Mercury PSU. Piece of crap, if you ask me, but it does have a strong 5v rail for the Athlon XP.

All the fans in this build are reused old parts. I did clean and oil them. They still sound terrible.

I think I might just get a bunch of Noctuas and replace everything, even if it won't be period-appropriate, I'm willing to compromise if it stops the noise.

Old systems were loud, that's just how they were. Not just fans, but also just buzzing, loud drives, etc. Back in the day, those were just background noise, but when you see videos of someone booting a 486 on YouTube, you can hear all those sounds and then you start to realize you haven't heard them in a while. And they got louder throughout the early 2000s as CPUs got hotter and then when GPUs joined the party. The peak of that craziness, on the GPU side, was probably the FX5800 "dustbuster" dual-slot card.

I had an Abit board, IS7 I think it was, that had a little active fan for the... north?... bridge. Even healthy, that fan made more noise than reasonable. And then it failed after like two years and started making even worse noises.

At some point, there started to be a massive backlash to this (and, relatedly, to high power consumption) and most things started to be designed to i) cut their idle power use (my recollection is that one Nvidia GPU generation cut the idle power consumption at a Vista/7 desktop by 40W compared to its predecessor), and ii) have temperature sensors and fans that would only spin up quickly if it was actually needed. Cases started to be designed for bigger fans - a standard case fan in 2000-1 was 80mm, today it's 120-140mm. And you started to have web sites (both specialized ones like SPCR and the general ones) start to pay attention to power and noise. Biggest drop in idle power consumption actually came between 2005ish and 2009-10 - going from a 90nm hotburst to a 45nm C2D/C2Q just did wonders for idle power consumption. And... less power consumption + bigger, more central fans = much quieter systems.

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-22, 18:43:

Old systems were loud, that's just how they were. Not just fans, but also just buzzing, loud drives, etc. Back in the day, those were just background noise, but when you see videos of someone booting a 486 on YouTube, you can hear all those sounds and then you start to realize you haven't heard them in a while. And they got louder throughout the early 2000s as CPUs got hotter and then when GPUs joined the party. The peak of that craziness, on the GPU side, was probably the FX5800 "dustbuster" dual-slot card.

I had an Abit board, IS7 I think it was, that had a little active fan for the... north?... bridge. Even healthy, that fan made more noise than reasonable. And then it failed after like two years and started making even worse noises.

At some point, there started to be a massive backlash to this (and, relatedly, to high power consumption) and most things started to be designed to i) cut their idle power use (my recollection is that one Nvidia GPU generation cut the idle power consumption at a Vista/7 desktop by 40W compared to its predecessor), and ii) have temperature sensors and fans that would only spin up quickly if it was actually needed. Cases started to be designed for bigger fans - a standard case fan in 2000-1 was 80mm, today it's 120-140mm. And you started to have web sites (both specialized ones like SPCR and the general ones) start to pay attention to power and noise. Biggest drop in idle power consumption actually came between 2005ish and 2009-10 - going from a 90nm hotburst to a 45nm C2D/C2Q just did wonders for idle power consumption. And... less power consumption + bigger, more central fans = much quieter systems.

I know, but I also currently have a Compaq Deskpro 2000 from 1990s. I don't mind the sound of fans and drives too much, and I love the sounds PC XT/AT machines make. The Deskpro sounds like a computer with two 95mm fans. The Athlon sounds compete with the speakers, I have to turn them up so I can hear my games. When I say "jet engine", I mean it. I don't think it's as loud as FX5800 though - a friend had it back in the day and I didn't want to be in the same room as it. Then he got one of those Arctic "silencer" kits and the noise was improved a lot.

So something strange happened half an hour ago that might be of interest to other people.

I replaced the GeForce4 MX440 with an FX 5500. It went well. Then the machine wouldn't post. Long-short-short (GPU error) beep, then two low tones, the second lower than the first.

Put the GeForce4 back in. Still the same problem.

Put a PCI S3 Virge/DX instead to check if the AGP was the problem. Nope, it wasn't, and the problem persisted.

At this point I was dreading I had killed the motherboard. So I reset the BIOS, twice. It posted.

I had made two mistakes. One was misunderstanding what "AGP aperture" is and setting it to the 256Mb of the FX 550. It created a memory conflict with the BIOS, I have no idea why.

The second was the Ali M5273 USB 2.0 Card I had added to the system. I don't know what happened but the card made the motherboard and he CPU to PCI bridge have a hardware conflict and malfunction. Maybe the VIA chipset doesn't like this particular card, or maybe it has an issue. Need to check further, but I think I remember Phil having issues with Via chipsets and PCI USB 2.0 cards, or maybe it was someone else.

Removing the PCI USB 2.0 card and resetting the AGP aperture to its default 64Mb solved all the problems, and the system is once again operational.

And no, I don't think I had too many devices using hardware resources because I've disabled everything I'm not using, including the onboard networking and dial-up devices that would operate the ACR card if I had one, as well as the COM and LPT ports and the onboard MIDI/Joystick port. The system was fine with them enabled, I just wanted to make it a bit faster.

So I'd advice to be careful about PCI USB cards on VIA chipsets.

A few notes.

First, the performance. It has worked admirably with almost any game I've thrown at it - AvP 2, Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Deus Ex, Diablo 1&2, Fallout 1&2, GTA2, Half Life, Icewind Dale 1&2, Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver to Defiance, The Thing, Unreal Gold, Unreal Tournament, UT2003, VTM: Redemption, Warcraft III. Only Morrowind gave it trouble - it's a bit choppy, and I think it's a CPU bottleneck because changing the resolution does not affect the experience - 640x480 is about the same as 1024x768. So maybe upgrading to Athlon XP 3300+ would be a good idea. I thought Morrowind ran even on PIII 500MHz, and I remember playing it more or less fine on a P4 1800MHz and GeForce 2 MX200. Will have to investigate further. All other games are running quite well at 800x600.

Second, no matter how much cleaning and oiling you put into an old fan, it will still sound like the choirs of hell. Still, I replacedothe PSU and system fans with modern Noctua NF-A8s. At some point I just put my finger on the CPU fan and stopped it. And I was able to hear the rest of the components - the HDD, the CD-ROM, the floppy drive. So the CPU fan has to go, that's for sure. And I wish I found a way to control the fan speeds.

Fans of that era are very noisy. I have Thermaltake Volcano 11 CU which has very noisy ball bearings. I doubt modern silent fans can provide the same airflow. Noise is a major downside of Socket A builds. Quiet fans are available for Socket 754 but these tend to have problems with AGP in Windows 98. If you want a quiet rig, forget about high frequency Athlon XP. They tend to have very high TDP above 2 Ghz. From TDP perspective, Athlon XP 1700+ Thoroughbred with 50W TDP is a very good choice. These can overclock up to 2300-2400Mhz if needed. Bartons start at 68W TDP.

A KT333-400 board would be slightly better but it isn't strictly necessary for Windows 98. It would only matter for Windows XP.

My PIII 900E has just 23W TDP. It has a modern Noctua fan and is very quiet. I don't want anything faster as it would be noisier.

AlexZ wrote on 2023-11-19, 21:46:

Fans of that era are very noisy. I have Thermaltake Volcano 11 CU which has very noisy ball bearings. I doubt modern silent fans can provide the same airflow. Noise is a major downside of Socket A builds. Quiet fans are available for Socket 754 but these tend to have problems with AGP in Windows 98. If you want a quiet rig, forget about high frequency Athlon XP. They tend to have very high TDP above 2 Ghz. From TDP perspective, Athlon XP 1700+ Thoroughbred with 50W TDP is a very good choice. These can overclock up to 2300-2400Mhz if needed. Bartons start at 68W TDP.

A KT333-400 board would be slightly better but it isn't strictly necessary for Windows 98. It would only matter for Windows XP.

My PIII 900E has just 23W TDP. It has a modern Noctua fan and is very quiet. I don't want anything faster as it would be noisier.

I've seen Tualatin builds that are whisper-silent. A 1.4GHz P3 has half the TDP of my Athlon and performs better. The Athlon has the same TDP as my P4 1.8GHz Willamette, but I remember it performing better and being more stable, and not making so much noise.

As for airflow, I could live with less, the CPU barely gets to 55C.

songoffall wrote on 2023-11-20, 05:09:

AlexZ wrote on 2023-11-19, 21:46:

Fans of that era are very noisy. I have Thermaltake Volcano 11 CU which has very noisy ball bearings. I doubt modern silent fans can provide the same airflow. Noise is a major downside of Socket A builds. Quiet fans are available for Socket 754 but these tend to have problems with AGP in Windows 98. If you want a quiet rig, forget about high frequency Athlon XP. They tend to have very high TDP above 2 Ghz. From TDP perspective, Athlon XP 1700+ Thoroughbred with 50W TDP is a very good choice. These can overclock up to 2300-2400Mhz if needed. Bartons start at 68W TDP.

A KT333-400 board would be slightly better but it isn't strictly necessary for Windows 98. It would only matter for Windows XP.

My PIII 900E has just 23W TDP. It has a modern Noctua fan and is very quiet. I don't want anything faster as it would be noisier.

I've seen Tualatin builds that are whisper-silent. A 1.4GHz P3 has half the TDP of my Athlon and performs better. The Athlon has the same TDP as my P4 1.8GHz Willamette, but I remember it performing better and being more stable, and not making so much noise.

As for airflow, I could live with less, the CPU barely gets to 55C.

I incidentally built another early socket A machine based on a 1400 TB, Abit KG7 RAID (AMD 760) and Radeon 8500. I have Nexus sA cooler with 80mm original fan and I don’t find it loud, although I can of course hear the system when it is running. I also have one 80mm case fan and Radeon cooler is also clearly audible even after little bit lubrication. Back in the day I had Thermaltake Dragon Orb 3 with 7000rpm fan until I swapped to water cooling for the rest of my time withsocket A. That thing was loud!

About performance, Tualatin and Thunderbird should perform quite equally at least with DDR boards. However, socket A performance improved a lot in couple of years with the introduction of better chipsets and higher clocking processors. For example, KT266a realesed in autumn 2001 is significantly faster compared to AMD760 chipset and later chipsets were generally more mature and offered also higher FSBs and memory speeds.

Progress was fast between 2001-2003, which could be considered as the hey day of socket A and top end Athlon’s could give top Intel offerings a run for the money. From price/performance perspective there is no contest. My two systems are a good example of the remarkable improvement. This TB Win98 system is pretty much the top end socket A you could buy in autumn of 2001 and my other system with Barton 2500+@3200+, Epox 8rga+ nForce2, DDR400 and FX5900XT is close to top end for spring-summer 2003 and latter system scores over double the points in 3DMark2001. This isn’t of course apples to apples comparison because of different GPU, but just shows how much things in general progressed during those days. This evolution of socket A also makes it very fun platform to play around, overclock and test different motherboard/CPU combos.

All in all, AMD K7 CPU is the fifth in my ”greatest x86 CPUs of all time” list. It truly was a wonderful thing back in the day and it was the first AMD offering which didn’t compete mainly as a lower tier budget alternative with Intel or was a straight up clone like their earlier 286-486 CPUs

songoffall wrote on 2023-11-20, 05:09:

[...]

I've seen Tualatin builds that are whisper-silent. A 1.4GHz P3 has half the TDP of my Athlon and performs better. The Athlon has the same TDP as my P4 1.8GHz Willamette, but I remember it performing better and being more stable, and not making so much noise.

As for airflow, I could live with less, the CPU barely gets to 55C.

It's perfectly possible to get an Athlon quiet; even in the day CPU coolers with 80mm (cheap Coolermaster and Titans were ubiquitous but feared for being top heavy and having a nasty tendency to crush cores if installed inexpertly) or 120mm (Scythe!) fans were available. The default was 'jet engine', but you didn't have to stick to default. Same with cases: default was totally uninsulated steel or - worse - fashionable rattling aluminium, but there were quieter options, if only some old heavy 1990s 'built like a tank' steel case. You still wouldn't get things as quiet as with a modern build with Fractal Design case and massive phase-change hsf, but it definitely doesn't need to be as bad as you describe here to be period-correct. And certainly, P4s were no quieter than Athlons, if your P4 1.8 had same TDP and was quieter, it means you had a better heastink+fan and doesn't reflect on the CPU itself.

dionb wrote on 2023-11-20, 08:48:

And certainly, P4s were no quieter than Athlons, if your P4 1.8 had same TDP and was quieter, it means you had a better heastink+fan and doesn't reflect on the CPU itself.

I understand it, TDP shows how much heat the CPU dissipates. I think my P4 lived with the stock Intel cooler. It sure wasn't silent, but it wasn't roaring either. If anything, I'm blaming Thermaltake and the age of the fan. The heatsink itself is solid - copper core, nice fins. The 60mm fan running at ~6000rpm is a bit too much, I think. It's not just the usual fan rumbling you might get with a noisy fan - it's mostly the air, and when the PC is off you can hear the fan wind down, exactly like a jet engine.