Probably the MMX 166 holding you back there. I'll give it a try on an MMX 233 with V2 SLI and let you know.

Yeah, just tried it and hit a CPU bottleneck! 39FPS be it 800x600 single or SLI and even 1024x768 SLI using MiniGL 1.47. Granted I was using an older driver (V3.03.00), but I doubt it'd make much of a difference 😉.

Unfortunately, I also discovered that one of my Voodoo 2 may be dying 🙁. Entire image was magenta tinted when running at 800x600 with a single card. 😵

F2bnp wrote:

Yeah, just tried it and hit a CPU bottleneck! 39FPS be it 800x600 single or SLI and even 1024x768 SLI using MiniGL 1.47. Granted I was using an older driver (V3.03.00), but I doubt it'd make much of a difference 😉.

Unfortunately, I also discovered that one of my Voodoo 2 may be dying 🙁. Entire image was magenta tinted when running at 800x600 with a single card. 😵

I think I'm on 3.02.02 drivers and 1.47 OpenGL (might be 1.49 though, which would be stupid.. I'll check later.)

Yes, you are using the latest drivers. The Pentium MMX 166 is holding you back, if you want 60fps on Quake 2 you'll need something like Pentium 2 300 😊 .

Ill look into acquiring an mmx 233 for the time being thanks!

Should I try boosting vcore and running at 200mhz? How well do mmx chips oc? Are they multiplier locked?

Depends on the silicon lottery. I think 200 should be achievable without any voltage increase, might as well try it yourself. You might even be able to hit 233, I know that pretty much every 233 I've ever got my hands on could hit 262 effortlessly (75MHz FSB 😉 ).

F2bnp wrote:

Depends on the silicon lottery. I think 200 should be achievable without any voltage increase, might as well try it yourself. You might even be able to hit 233, I know that pretty much every 233 I've ever got my hands on could hit 262 effortlessly (75MHz FSB 😉 ).

Wouldnt 75mhz fsb mess up the pci bus? Regardless I only have PC66 sdram in the system..

It's a mild overclock. I ran a K6-2 on a TX-97 board for years at 75mhz with no ill effects.

I would think most P166-MMX's could do 200 (3x66) at stock voltage, see as they were released together.

gdjacobs wrote:

It's a mild overclock. I ran a K6-2 on a TX-97 board for years at 75mhz with no ill effects.

29x Mhz is possible and stable with a better cooler on the cpu (look for stock athlon with 80 mm fans) and plenty of air flow. I did a 8 hour stress test and it stayed stable.

appiah4 wrote:

Wouldnt 75mhz fsb mess up the pci bus? Regardless I only have PC66 sdram in the system..

You can make boot floppy with memory testing program if you want to be really certain. As long as stuff works what is not to like about faster PCI?

Putas wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

Wouldnt 75mhz fsb mess up the pci bus? Regardless I only have PC66 sdram in the system..

You can make boot floppy with memory testing program if you want to be really certain. As long as stuff works what is not to like about faster PCI?

That's what I meant, I wasn't sure things would work well on the PCI bus out of spec, i.e. the vga, 3d accelerator, sound card etc. I'd also be kind of scared of damaging these with a high FSB.. But if you're saying 'don't sweat it' why not. I'll try to see if my CPU works with a 3.0x multiplier tonight; if it doesn't, I'll try 75MHz FSB.

You can bootstrap Memtest86 straight from DOS as late as v4.2. Later versions may be possible with LOADLIN, although I haven't tried myself.
http://www.memtest.org/download/4.20/memtest86+-4.20.exe.zip

My 200MMX (an overdrive version) runs happily at 250 (83x3), but not 300.

Apparently I was using MiniGL 1.49, which I think is optimized for PII clas CPUs, I'll check again with 1.47 tonight - not sure if it will make a difference, but still.. I'll also try overclocking the CPU via multiplier first, FSB second.

F2bnp wrote:

Yeah, just tried it and hit a CPU bottleneck! 39FPS be it 800x600 single or SLI and even 1024x768 SLI using MiniGL 1.47. Granted I was using an older driver (V3.03.00), but I doubt it'd make much of a difference 😉.

Unfortunately, I also discovered that one of my Voodoo 2 may be dying 🙁. Entire image was magenta tinted when running at 800x600 with a single card. 😵

That's an issue with the SLI cable I think.

MrEWhite wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

Yeah, just tried it and hit a CPU bottleneck! 39FPS be it 800x600 single or SLI and even 1024x768 SLI using MiniGL 1.47. Granted I was using an older driver (V3.03.00), but I doubt it'd make much of a difference 😉.

Unfortunately, I also discovered that one of my Voodoo 2 may be dying 🙁. Entire image was magenta tinted when running at 800x600 with a single card. 😵

That's an issue with the SLI cable I think.

Sorry for going offtopic, but can you elaborate on that? How can it be an SLI cable if I'm using a single card to render?

F2bnp wrote:

MrEWhite wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

Yeah, just tried it and hit a CPU bottleneck! 39FPS be it 800x600 single or SLI and even 1024x768 SLI using MiniGL 1.47. Granted I was using an older driver (V3.03.00), but I doubt it'd make much of a difference 😉.

Unfortunately, I also discovered that one of my Voodoo 2 may be dying 🙁. Entire image was magenta tinted when running at 800x600 with a single card. 😵

That's an issue with the SLI cable I think.

Sorry for going offtopic, but can you elaborate on that? How can it be an SLI cable if I'm using a single card to render?

Unplug the SLI cable and it should work correctly on 1. But it's either an issue with the cable or the connector.

Just wanted to report that I've managed to overclock with the x3.0 multiplier to 200MHz and that improved my Q2 demo1 timedemo from 29.9 fps to 34.0 fps, so that's a 13% FPS improvement for a 20% CPU speed bump, rather impressive. Not sure if I should push my luck and try 233MHz.. I'm using a StarTech aftermarket Socket 7 cooler, so it's fairly cool..

EDIT: Went ahead and tried the x3.5 multiplier for 233MHz and it seems rock solid. Q2 demo1 improved further to 36.4 fps (diminishing returns obviously, but still 7% improvement for a 16% CPU speed bump isn't bad). At least now I'm satisfied with my Voodoo 2 system performance enough that I don't really think I need a second Slot 1 system. 😀

Also, I guess I have a very lucky MMX 166 CPU binning? Time to try 75MHz FSB for 262 MHz perhaps? Would that be too unsafe?