There's quite a few issues here.

- No, the K6-2 400 is not as fast as a Pentium II 300. It's probably closer to a PII 233. Here's a K6-2 450 being somewhat faster than a PII 233. That being said,

- The SiS 530 chipset is not exactly among the fastest. The IGP eats into the already constrained memory bandwidth of the CPU. Are you sure the IGP is completely disabled?

- Radeon 7000 is a decent card, it should a bit faster than a Voodoo 3 which is certainly period accurate, however it's a much newer card and its drivers have much greater overhead so expect to see lower performance than if you were using something like a Voodoo 3. That being said,

- The 2006 driver release you have chosen for your video card is a very bad choice. Try something from when the card first came out, 2001-2002. This is crucial, I bet this will lift performance significantly. You're not going to run anything newer anyway and you are making sure that the drivers were prioritizing this particular GPU and not just relegating it to legacy support. That way you get much less CPU overhead too!

- Sound Blaster Live! is a fine little card, but 3D audio acceleration is CPU intensive, which is something you shouldn't be bargaining for with the K6-2. Make sure it is not doing any fancy DirectSound3D acceleration and such (and certainly not EAX!) otherwise performance will suffer greatly. Just as a reminder, much much faster CPUs such as PIII 733 or 1GHz generally see a performance hit of ~20% when using 3D Sound Acceleration AFAIR.

- Can't comment on Commanche or F-22, but NFS III and Outcast are both quite demanding games and Outcast especially eats CPUs for breakfast! Outcast came out when Pentium III 550 and Athlon 600 were the fastest CPUs and they both struggled to maintain 30 FPS at 512x384 (the highest supported resolution in the original release) with all the bells and whistles on! NFS III is similarly CPU demanding, don't expect 60FPS on anything lower than say a Pentium II 400 and above.

- Don't trust your memories. Those games ran... okay on your PII 300 probably. Do not expect 60+ FPS on period correct hardware from the era. Times were different, our sensitivity to FPS and frametimes was a lot lower than it is today. That being said,

- If you are running the original installation on this HP Pavilion, it might be borked in some ways and you may be getting lower performance that way. The fact that the USB drivers did not work for you lead me to believe that you are either running Windows 98 vanilla or have maybe used some unofficial Service Pack for Win98SE. Does any of these ring true?

Garrett W wrote on 2023-09-26, 18:45:

There's quite a few issues here. […]
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There's quite a few issues here.

- No, the K6-2 400 is not as fast as a Pentium II 300. It's probably closer to a PII 233. Here's a K6-2 450 being somewhat faster than a PII 233. That being said,

- The SiS 530 chipset is not exactly among the fastest. The IGP eats into the already constrained memory bandwidth of the CPU. Are you sure the IGP is completely disabled?

- Radeon 7000 is a decent card, it should a bit faster than a Voodoo 3 which is certainly period accurate, however it's a much newer card and its drivers have much greater overhead so expect to see lower performance than if you were using something like a Voodoo 3. That being said,

- The 2006 driver release you have chosen for your video card is a very bad choice. Try something from when the card first came out, 2001-2002. This is crucial, I bet this will lift performance significantly. You're not going to run anything newer anyway and you are making sure that the drivers were prioritizing this particular GPU and not just relegating it to legacy support. That way you get much less CPU overhead too!

- Sound Blaster Live! is a fine little card, but 3D audio acceleration is CPU intensive, which is something you shouldn't be bargaining for with the K6-2. Make sure it is not doing any fancy DirectSound3D acceleration and such (and certainly not EAX!) otherwise performance will suffer greatly. Just as a reminder, much much faster CPUs such as PIII 733 or 1GHz generally see a performance hit of ~20% when using 3D Sound Acceleration AFAIR.

- Can't comment on Commanche or F-22, but NFS III and Outcast are both quite demanding games and Outcast especially eats CPUs for breakfast! Outcast came out when Pentium III 550 and Athlon 600 were the fastest CPUs and they both struggled to maintain 30 FPS at 512x384 (the highest supported resolution in the original release) with all the bells and whistles on! NFS III is similarly CPU demanding, don't expect 60FPS on anything lower than say a Pentium II 400 and above.

- Don't trust your memories. Those games ran... okay on your PII 300 probably. Do not expect 60+ FPS on period correct hardware from the era. Times were different, our sensitivity to FPS and frametimes was a lot lower than it is today. That being said,

- If you are running the original installation on this HP Pavilion, it might be borked in some ways and you may be getting lower performance that way. The fact that the USB drivers did not work for you lead me to believe that you are either running Windows 98 vanilla or have maybe used some unofficial Service Pack for Win98SE. Does any of these ring true?

I read the mobo manual and I moved the IGP and the graphic IRQ jumpers to the off position. Windows isn't detecting the IGP either.

For Windows 98, I found a copy of Windows 98 SE inside some VM software about 14 years ago. It's an OEM disk. Yesterday I tried a "full retail" version of SE (the one where it needs a floppy or DOS in order to install since it's not bootable) and the USB driver still didn't work. I'll have to keep digging into that.

Using the VOGONS 4.3 Catalyst driver, I noticed games were running a tad smoother. Device manager shows this driver was from 2004 so I'm going to see if I can dig up something even earlier.

Certainly a lot to work with so appreciate it!

It's always a better idea to do a fresh install of Win98SE. Here's what I usually do:

- Boot from CD and reach DOS prompt
- Copy Win98 to C:\
- Run the setup file and complete installation from within the HDD. (this not only is faster, but makes sure that Win98 will always look for system files within that folder instead of nagging you for the CD!)
- Copy nusb36e.exe (or nusb33e.exe if you've had issues with that one) to a floppy disc or burn it on a CD.
- Install it on the retro PC.
- Insert my USB stick of choice and voila!

Keep in mind, you need a clean, English copy of Win98SE in order for nUSB to install correctly.
That being said, this is very slow. In recent years, I've found the best way to move files quickly and effortlessly is through networking and FTP. Just install network cards on my retro systems and set them up with Norton Commander and connect to my home FTP server.
This is undoubtedly faster but adding a network card to your system may prove a bit of a headache, not to mention not everyone has the space or infrastructure to support this.

As far as other Win98SE updates and drivers go, I tend to use the Unofficial Service Pack 2.1a, this one only really has updates from Microsoft as well as the Win2000/ME theme which I quite like and some performance tweaks. Some people here say there is absolutely no need for any of this and maybe they're right, but this has worked for me for about 15 years now.
I then install:

- Chipset drivers

- GPU drivers (2004 is still too new IMO, I'd try these, they are from mid to late 2001)

- DirectX 7.0a (newer version of DirectX are known to cause issues, random crashes and what not. You should not be attempting to run anything that really needs DX8 anyway on your K6-2, that being said the drivers may require newer DX versions in which case you will have to comply)

- Soundcard drivers ( there's WDM drivers and VXD drivers, WDM are newer, but VXD are more performant. You should almost always go with VXD for Win9x. Definitely install VXD drivers for your SB Live!)

- Check your HDD and Optical Drive under Device Manager and make sure that DMA is enabled for both of them.

- Lastly, I like to install Cacheman, this is a utility that tweaks Win9x's virtual memory and other settings for optimal RAM usage. It's pretty neat, but definitely not essential with 128MB RAM.

That is all, I hope I'm not forgetting something. Remember, do not despair if you get frustrated, leave the system for a few days or a week and come back and try again. Ask around here for more, there's a treasure trove of knowledge in VOGONS.
And as always, lower your expectations. K6-2 400 is slow : - P.
You can run 3DMark 2000 to compare with people with K6-2 systems and Radeon or other cards and see where you land.