Take a look at Phil’s 4-in-1 page:

https://www.philscomputerlab.com/4-in-1-retro-gaming-pc.html

Zeerex wrote on 2024-04-12, 01:12:

Take a look at Phil’s 4-in-1 page:

https://www.philscomputerlab.com/4-in-1-retro-gaming-pc.html

Will do. Thank you!

Also talking about 4-in-1, if you ever use Windows 9x on it don't forget to install the vIA 4-in-1 driver as the very first driver you install. These VIA SS7 boards have all sorts of potential and fun issues with AGP support, usually blocking it to AGP 1x in the BIOS (this has multiple names) fixes most of them. With a Voodoo 3 you probably have more luck, they were amongst the most compatible cards.

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2024-04-12, 05:19:

Also talking about 4-in-1, if you ever use Windows 9x on it don't forget to install the vIA 4-in-1 driver as the very first driver you install. These VIA SS7 boards have all sorts of potential and fun issues with AGP support, usually blocking it to AGP 1x in the BIOS (this has multiple names) fixes most of them. With a Voodoo 3 you probably have more luck, they were amongst the most compatible cards.

Thanks for the tip!

Via 4.05B is good AGP driver for MVP3 usually and Rage128/Rage128Pro does not support Win 3.1, latest ATi card for Win 3.1 is Rage XL (Rage Pro) cards. I would use Geforce2 MX400, almost best performance card for AMD K6-2 and Win9x if you use older Nvidia drivers, like 7.76. With Rage128 you get 8 bit palleted textures support and good DVD playback and no table fog, Geforce2 has both, but no DVD playback acceleration. I usually like to go with AMD/ATI builds, but Geforce 2/3 64MB beats ATI Rage128 @ DX7 and OpenGL easly + no table fog for ATi Win9x setups. Voodoo3 is good choice, but it has 16 bit only, ATI Rage128 likes 32bit. Also i like Tnt2 with very old drivers @ K6-2 machines and Tnt2 has some Win3.1 support. Sometimes after ATi vga driver install i have to install Via agp driver again to get better (normal) performance back. If you go with ATi card, then do not use DX8 drivers, DX6 or some DX7 drivers are faster for AMD K6-2 old cpu.

Use Memory interleave enabler for VIA chipsets and "PCI Latency" patch for VIA chipsets
https://www.georgebreese.com/net/software/

Here are some Win 3.1 drivers:
http://www.win31.de/edrivers.htm

marxveix wrote on 2024-04-12, 17:43:

Via 4.05B is good AGP driver for MVP3 usually and Rage128/Rage128Pro does not support Win 3.1, latest ATi card for Win 3.1 is Ra […]
Show full quote

Via 4.05B is good AGP driver for MVP3 usually and Rage128/Rage128Pro does not support Win 3.1, latest ATi card for Win 3.1 is Rage XL (Rage Pro) cards. I would use Geforce2 MX400, almost best performance card for AMD K6-2 and Win9x if you use older Nvidia drivers, like 7.76. With Rage128 you get 8 bit palleted textures support and good DVD playback and no table fog, Geforce2 has both, but no DVD playback acceleration. I usually like to go with AMD/ATI builds, but Geforce 2/3 64MB beats ATI Rage128 @ DX7 and OpenGL easly + no table fog for ATi Win9x setups. Voodoo3 is good choice, but it has 16 bit only, ATI Rage128 likes 32bit. Also i like Tnt2 with very old drivers @ K6-2 machines and Tnt2 has some Win3.1 support. Sometimes after ATi vga driver install i have to install Via agp driver again to get better (normal) performance back. If you go with ATi card, then do not use DX8 drivers, DX6 or some DX7 drivers are faster for AMD K6-2 old cpu.

Use Memory interleave enabler for VIA chipsets and "PCI Latency" patch for VIA chipsets
https://www.georgebreese.com/net/software/

Here are some Win 3.1 drivers:
http://www.win31.de/edrivers.htm

Thank you for the info!

I am reading that for slowing down a SS7 w/ an AMD CPU, I want a K6-2+ or a K6-III+. Am I screwed with a regular K6-2?

This comes from the fact that the "+" chips are actually mobile chips and have features to control frequency via software. For the regular chips I you can still manually lower their speed via the jumpers and disable their cache in the bIOS to make everything slow, but it's not dynamic as far as I know.

marxveix wrote on 2024-04-12, 17:43:

Voodoo3 is good choice, but it has 16 bit only

Voodoo 4 4500 (Voodoo 5 is overkill for this build), the best 3dfx option for a SS7 build. 32-bit colour in 3D, texture compression, 32MB memory and support for 2048x2048 textures. NFS Porsche for example looks better with more detailes textures on a 3dfx VSA-100 based card than on the Voodoo3 Avenger, also in Glide Mode, or Quake 3, which supports 512x512 texture resolution. Voodoo 3 supports only max. 256x256 texture resolution, so the 16MB on-Boad (not the Velocity 100 with castrated 8MB) memory is more than enough for this tiny resolution size.

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2024-04-12, 05:19:

Also talking about 4-in-1, if you ever use Windows 9x on it don't forget to install the vIA 4-in-1 driver as the very first driver you install. These VIA SS7 boards have all sorts of potential and fun issues with AGP support, usually blocking it to AGP 1x in the BIOS (this has multiple names) fixes most of them. With a Voodoo 3 you probably have more luck, they were amongst the most compatible cards.

This was always the catch back in the day. Consider the situation if your system isn't stable and a new 4-1 driver shows up. In my case, I tried upgrading the 4-1 driver, I tried uninstalling all the drivers and reinstalling all the drivers, and then I tried reinstalling the operating system. Turns out the actual answer for my SS7 MVP3 system back in the day was to wait for the 4-1 driver that came out the following year and swap the video card for the Voodoo 3. At least today you don't get stuck in the painful cycle of waiting for a working driver to come out =)

I do remember that switching to a Voodoo 3 card from a TNT2 card made things more stable, probably because of the simpler AGP implementation.

Does anyone have experience trying cards that arrived after 2000 in an MVP3 board? Geforce 2 MX 440 ? Radeon 9000? Radeon 9700 Pro ? Were they better or worse?

douglar wrote on 2024-04-15, 13:21:

This was always the catch back in the day. Consider the situation if your system isn't stable and a new 4-1 driver shows up. […]
Show full quote

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2024-04-12, 05:19:

Also talking about 4-in-1, if you ever use Windows 9x on it don't forget to install the vIA 4-in-1 driver as the very first driver you install. These VIA SS7 boards have all sorts of potential and fun issues with AGP support, usually blocking it to AGP 1x in the BIOS (this has multiple names) fixes most of them. With a Voodoo 3 you probably have more luck, they were amongst the most compatible cards.

This was always the catch back in the day. Consider the situation if your system isn't stable and a new 4-1 driver shows up. In my case, I tried upgrading the 4-1 driver, I tried uninstalling all the drivers and reinstalling all the drivers, and then I tried reinstalling the operating system. Turns out the actual answer for my SS7 MVP3 system back in the day was to wait for the 4-1 driver that came out the following year and swap the video card for the Voodoo 3. At least today you don't get stuck in the painful cycle of waiting for a working driver to come out =)

I do remember that switching to a Voodoo 3 card from a TNT2 card made things more stable, probably because of the simpler AGP implementation.

Does anyone have experience trying cards that arrived after 2000 in an MVP3 board? Geforce 2 MX 440 ? Radeon 9000? Radeon 9700 Pro ? Were they better or worse?

I was running a Radeon 9250 for a very long time on my Aladdin V system, very stable and no bugs I could find. The only catch is to not go further than the Catalyst 5.5 (or 5.6, don't remember exactly) because then they start to require SSE support and things start to crash randomly. But other than that, a Radeon 9250 is about as feature-rich as you can hope on a SS7 system. I also had luck with GeForce FX 5700LE cards but again lots of trial and error with drivers...in the end the ATI card was way less painful and stable...which is a surprise considering what we lived trough with ATI driver releases back then. But as you just said, we now have/know the luxury to have stable drivers.

It's quite funny to think that low-end cards available for close to nothing from one generation can be a "high-end" card for an older system.

The Voodoo 4-5 are way too expensive, it may be a good technical option but not a practical one. I finally went with a Voodoo 3 2000 I got from a friend and it's "enough" for this machine. If I need more performance, I just start up the Athlon.

Note: I'm on Windows 2000.

I bought a modded K6-2+ CPU which makes into a K6-III+ which can run up to 633MHz (depending on the mobo,) so hopefully it works with this mobo and is stable. I will go with the Voodoo3 option for Windows 3.x driver support via Velocity driver, at least for now. I may just leave Windows 3.11 for the Pentium 166 MMX or rebuild my 486 as I did score a beige mid-tower very reminiscent of the one I had when I built my very first PC. However, I am trying to reduce the number of retro systems currently in use due to space and a lack of a KVM (at the moment.) If I do that, then switching graphics cards won't be as much of an issue since it will be a DOS/Windows 98SE system.

The seller of the CPU sells these all of the time and I believe has 100% feedback rating. He de-lids the CPU and mods the cache and reseals with epoxy and then stress tests each CPU. Being a K6+, I can dynamically slow it down. I should be good to go barring any mobo/CPU stability issues. I should have gotten a public-VOGONS opinion on SS7 chipset, but I didn't want to snooze n' lose on the K6-2 PC since the price was great for a full system including a 32gb CF card, another Creative optical drive, a Vibra16 card (which will be a spare card,) a NIC and the GeForce card. SS7 boards with USB, PS2, AGP, and three ISA slots seem to be uncommon and expensive.

EDIT: Despite being overkill, I could migrate my Voodoo5 from my P3 700 since it is somewhat overkill for that system as well, and try the patched SVGA driver for Windows 3.x, which would get me full screen anti-aliasing, 32-bit color, and all of that. I have just under a week to think about it before everything arrives. I'm not sure how much a performance difference there is between a P3 700 and a K6-III+ at 633 Mhz (if I can get it to run that fast.) When I had my original Gateway P3 450 back in the day, it had a Voodoo3 card in it, and I used it until a retired the system when I built my second PC I ever built.