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Any good reason to hang on to this Red Fox AGP-ALI board?

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First post, by Jorpho

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I quite desperately want to pare down some of my surplus equipment. Sitting before me is a Red Fox AGP-ALI Super Socket 7 motherboard, currently loaded with a K6-2/500 and 64 MB of RAM. I think my original fascination with it when I picked it up was that I could toss in an ancient Pentium to slow it down. It also has three ISA slots, which I guess is nice?

The reason I don't think I need it anymore is that I also have an ASUS P3BF with a P3-450 and 512 MB of RAM, which is presumably much faster than the K6-2 and can be slowed down quite nicely by disabling the onboard cache, right? It only has one ISA slot, but I can't imagine why I would need more than one.

So, is there any good reason to hold on to this AGP-ALI? (There are a couple on eBay right now with starting prices of $190, which sure would be mighty nice, but I don't think I could feasibly get that much.)

Reply 1 of 2, by d1stortion

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Disabling L1+L2 cache will lead to sub-386 performance on a ~1GHz P3 (there are threads on here where this was tested iirc), so the usefulness of that depends a lot on what you want to play.

The oldest game I've tried with such a configuration was Wolf3d and that was a pain, but for even older games it might be ok. It's certainly not as flexible as a SS7 machine, but fortunately a lot of later DOS games are fine with P2s/P3s or even benefit from them in high resolutions. There are exceptions where it won't hurt to have such a machine if you're in lack of a real 486 though.

Reply 2 of 2, by nforce4max

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Disable the L1 but leave the L2 enabled and you will get 486 level performance. With both disabled you will get 386 (slow 386) performance but it homing in on a particular level can take some practice.

On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.

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