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M3D (PCX2) Build Advice.

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First post, by Rhuwyn

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Interested in building a system around an M3D 3D card. I am curious about what everyone's experience has been around. What 2d cards go well with it as well as any info anyone has around CPU scaling. How fast of a CPU would this card benefit from being paired with, and how fast is too fast.

Any Thoughts?

Reply 1 of 21, by gdjacobs

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I run mine on a KT133 board with an Athlon T-Bird 1200 with a Radeon 8500 LE card. It runs Mech2 like a beast.

CPU too fast? No such thing, buddy!

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Reply 2 of 21, by Rhuwyn

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gdjacobs wrote:

I run mine on a KT133 board with an Athlon T-Bird 1200 with a Radeon 8500 LE card. It runs Mech2 like a beast.

CPU too fast? No such thing, buddy!

Mech2 is the biggest reason why I bought the card. I had one a long time ago paired with a P2 233 and I think it was very underrated.

Reply 3 of 21, by gdjacobs

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The build for PowerSGL is the best accelerated version, bar none.

Do you have a Win98 machine which could be upgraded?

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Reply 4 of 21, by mwdmeyer

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Very interested in this thread, I also recently purchased an M3D for Mech 2 but haven't had a chance to use it yet! These cards are pretty hard to find in Australia now.

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Reply 5 of 21, by Rhuwyn

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gdjacobs wrote:

The build for PowerSGL is the best accelerated version, bar none.

Do you have a Win98 machine which could be upgraded?

I've got lots of hardware. Just want to understand what has worked well (or not so well) for other people so that I can make a decision on where to start.

Reply 6 of 21, by Putas

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Rhuwyn wrote:

What 2d cards go well with it as well as any info anyone has around CPU scaling. How fast of a CPU would this card benefit from being paired with, and how fast is too fast.

Any Thoughts?

Go through PowerVR fun thread.

I did test K7 scaling (with various PCI speeds) for PCX1 - even slowest ones are more than enough. PCX2 should be more of the same.
Video cards from their era are as good as modern ones and actually more likely to work correctly with it, but performance in particular games can be hit and miss.
PCX1.jpg

Reply 7 of 21, by gdjacobs

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Plainly GPU limited in all these cases. Any compatibility issues to relate?

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Reply 9 of 21, by Rhuwyn

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Another thought, I bought two M3ds in one auction. The seller implied he had both of them installed in his system at once. does anyone know if there is any benefit to that?

Reply 10 of 21, by gdjacobs

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There is not.

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Reply 11 of 21, by Rhuwyn

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So anyone have any thoughts on what is the slowest CPU that will bottleneck this video card. Just curious.

Reply 12 of 21, by gdjacobs

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Depends on the title. For Mech2, I suspect a PMMX 233 will run fine.

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Reply 13 of 21, by Tommaso72

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I have mine with a Cyrix 166mx and it works well with Mech 2 but it is obviously not working to it's fullest. I think a P3 - 500 is where it really shines and will work to it's fullest, but that is just my opinion. It really is underrated though.

Tommaso

Reply 14 of 21, by gdjacobs

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Yeah, for Win98, I don't see any reason to not pour on as much performance as you can.

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Reply 15 of 21, by Rhuwyn

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I've got a K6-III+ machine which I am running a Voodoo3 and Voodoo1 in currently. Think a m3D would play nice with both these cards?

Reply 16 of 21, by mwdmeyer

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Scali wrote:
mwdmeyer wrote:

These cards are pretty hard to find in Australia now.

Just the M3D? Or also the Apocalypse 3D variations?

Pretty much any PCX card is very hard to find these days in Australia. Not sure they were super popular here. Glad to have one though.

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Reply 17 of 21, by gdjacobs

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Rhuwyn wrote:

I've got a K6-III+ machine which I am running a Voodoo3 and Voodoo1 in currently. Think a m3D would play nice with both these cards?

Worth trying. Q: Why the Voodoo 1?

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Reply 18 of 21, by leileilol

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I've only had bad experience with Nvidia cards mixed with the PCX2. Nvidia drivers have aggressive Direct3D HALs.

A PCX2 should be fine with thw two different Voodoos.

I use mine with a 2003ish Pentium 4 system and i feel it's much faster there than the period motherboards it's made for. One of the main bottlenecks of the PCX2 is the bus transfer speed. You also need to enable the 24-bit output mode just for more speed (there's a registry key for this)

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 19 of 21, by Rhuwyn

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gdjacobs wrote:
Rhuwyn wrote:

I've got a K6-III+ machine which I am running a Voodoo3 and Voodoo1 in currently. Think a m3D would play nice with both these cards?

Worth trying. Q: Why the Voodoo 1?

So I figure anything that a Voodoo2 would run a Voodoo3 would run better, with the exception of really old games which probably only work with Voodoo1 anyway. Happy to take any advice if you have any.