VOGONS


Baby K6-III+ Rebuild

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First post, by blank001

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Hi,

I just rebuilt my K6-III rig and this time I took pictures. This is essentially a motherboard and case swap from my previous rig (ATX, ms5169). I wanted to rebuild for the compact form factor and superior super socket 7 motherboard that is the P5A.

The specs are
AMD K6-III+ 450apz
Asus P5A-B rev 1.04
128Mb Micron CL2
AWE 64 Gold, Simmcon 32mb
ELSA Gladiac Geforce 2 Ultra 64mb
2x STB Blackmagic 12mb
Netgear FA310
ATX Form Card
WD 250Gb SATA w adapter
Aopen 924E
Powerman SPI-230G
AT Case (anyone know the brand?)

One stick of CL2
18373271614_23fa6fa65b.jpg

PCI NIC, nothing special, but I like the color
18808136920_ed521b72f7.jpg

The ELSA Gladiac, a $500 card in its time, missing one ram heatsink. Will be replaced by ti4400 soon.
18808174198_c675a4dc09.jpg

Two mexican Voodoo 2 12Mb cards
18808172868_6287f68a4d.jpg

The AWE 64 Gold with 32Mb simmcon expansion
18969601936_83d86b94d9.jpg

The ATX form card, for usb and ps2 mousing
18998869541_3e8f7f40ba.jpg

Asus P5A-B mounted
18995837615_69eb2977bf.jpg

Loaded the 450apz into its socket
18995840535_ed509af8a4.jpg

Cards, ram and CPU loaded!
18809631579_40faceeaf1.jpg

Plugged in the rest of the cables
18995841195_f5c9792473.jpg

And done! (except SLI cable which I added after the photo)
18969638316_4312b10ed1.jpg

I'm pretty happy with it. I'll post some benches soon. Do tell if you have comments or suggestions for the setup.

Last edited by blank001 on 2015-06-21, 02:35. Edited 1 time in total.

_: K6-III+ 450apz@550, P5A-B, 128Mb CL2, Voodoo 5500 AGP, MX300, AWE64 Gold 32mb, SC-55v2.0
_: Pentium III 1400 S, TUSL2-C, 512Mb CL2, Voodoo 5500 AGP, MX300

Reply 1 of 27, by Skyscraper

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Its a very nice system!

See if you can get the CPU to run at 550+ MHz otherwise the Voodoo II SLI will be more bottlenecked than necessary.

New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.

Reply 2 of 27, by petro89

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Nice job! I am a little jealous .

Good choice of parts, nice case, and nice clean build overall!

What are you going to run on it?

*Ryzen 9 3900xt, 5700xt, Win10
*Ryzen 7 2700x, Gtx1080, Win10
*FX 9590, Vega64, Win10
*Phenom IIx6 1100T, R9 380, Win7
*QX9770, r9 270x, Win7
*FX60, hd5850, Win7
*XP2400+, ti4600, Win2k
*PPro 200 1mb, banshee, w98
*AMD 5x86, CL , DOS

Reply 3 of 27, by kin

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Nice one! The K6-III was my next step up after a 486. Many fond memories of it.
It was also my first custom PC I bought with the money I earned in my teenage years
at the computerstore where I was an employee selling them 🤣. 😎

Reply 4 of 27, by F2bnp

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I have a very similar PC with a P5A-B and K6-III+ 400@550MHz and a Voodoo3. I've been thinking about replacing the Voodoo3 with Voodoo2 SLI + some other card, probably an GeForce2 MX 200 that I have laying around.

Thanks for the photos, you've done some great cable management!

Reply 5 of 27, by PhilsComputerLab

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Very nice build. Good job!

YouTube, Facebook, Website

Reply 6 of 27, by blank001

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Thanks for the support Vogons!

I've been doing a little benchmarking in 98SE to see what is the best card (that I have) to go along with the V2 SLI. I'm using det 45.23 drivers for all benches.

The 64Mb MX
18839088538_66f4e1e9a8.jpg

A visiontek ti4400, ramsinks are my addition
18839088958_ed5a611278.jpg

Looks strange to have such a large AGP card in there.
19021242732_bcbb5ffc5f.jpg

The MX at 450Mhz
18404067294_3edfcfe1f6.jpg

The MX at 550Mhz
18840415289_958306d414.jpg

The gf2 ultra at 550Mhz
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The ti4400 at 550Mhz
19021099312_58f40d0cf4.jpg

sandra 99 cpu
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memory
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and hdd (WD2500KS with adapter)
19000382326_04b1850723_c.jpg

I think in conclusion it's hard to justify using a card better than the MX in this system. The MX produces low heat and power (fanless) and at least in the case of 3dmark99 performs like all the others. The P5A did a better job of overclocking than the ms5169 in the sense that the chip could do 550 in both cases, but the ms5169 required 2.1v whereas the P5A seems happy with 2v (actually 1.9-2.0V according to the bios). In general I agree that overclocking old hardware is not a good idea, but I think when the overclocking doesn't come with a voltage penalty it's basically OK.

_: K6-III+ 450apz@550, P5A-B, 128Mb CL2, Voodoo 5500 AGP, MX300, AWE64 Gold 32mb, SC-55v2.0
_: Pentium III 1400 S, TUSL2-C, 512Mb CL2, Voodoo 5500 AGP, MX300

Reply 7 of 27, by matte20

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Cool build . My main pc for a long time was a home build from various used parts . It had an asus p5a-b with an amd k6-2 350mhz 128mb ram an ati 128 pro ,sound blaster and windows 2000 .It handled over clocking well and endued a lot of tinkering . I used it until i was given a dell dimension 8100 from some one who bought a new pc every couple years .

Reply 8 of 27, by blank001

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The versatility is just astounding. It's so cool to play some wing commander, then xcom ufo then quake3 back to back on the same machine.

_: K6-III+ 450apz@550, P5A-B, 128Mb CL2, Voodoo 5500 AGP, MX300, AWE64 Gold 32mb, SC-55v2.0
_: Pentium III 1400 S, TUSL2-C, 512Mb CL2, Voodoo 5500 AGP, MX300

Reply 9 of 27, by Bullmecha

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I am looking to test out my Asus P55T2P4 with a K6-2+, just haven't got the CPU yet. If you want a nice read the link below will take you there.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/oldie-tuning,216.html

Nice system build also =)

Just a guy with a bad tinkering habit.
i5 6600k Main Rig
too many to list old school rigs

Reply 10 of 27, by Mamba

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Nice set up,
I am doing the same thing but with something else in mind.
Could you post some 3Dmark2001 @550Mhz with the GF2Ultra and the Ti4400?
I'm quite curious.

Also, you can confirm that 45.23 are better than 44.03 with Ti cards?

Reply 11 of 27, by bjt

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Nice, I am a big fan of these machines. I run a GF2 MX 440 in mine now.

Reply 12 of 27, by blank001

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I rebuilt the K6-III+ again. This time I was fortunate enough to have acquired a second Voodoo 5500. So I have now joined the rather small club of people (actually I might be the only one) with K6-III+ / AT / Voodoo 5500. The network card was also upgraded to the classic 3c905 and I dropped my second MX300 in along side the AWE64 Gold now that I freed up two PCI slots by dropping the V^2 SLI.

The neat thing about a V5500 with a K6-III+ is you can run 4X AA and not even notice a performance hit (because the system is bottlenecked to begin with).

Last, I had to change the bracket (with a voodoo 3500 one from a broken card) on the V5500 as it was originally one of the taller ones that didn't fit (i.e. there would be a small gap if you tried to screw the bracket in place).

19964952098_fb46dab4ae_c.jpg

TODO: maybe a voodoo 1 for that final PCI slot? I could also put something like a GUS in the second ISA and move the PCI cards up one. That would be nice.

_: K6-III+ 450apz@550, P5A-B, 128Mb CL2, Voodoo 5500 AGP, MX300, AWE64 Gold 32mb, SC-55v2.0
_: Pentium III 1400 S, TUSL2-C, 512Mb CL2, Voodoo 5500 AGP, MX300

Reply 13 of 27, by NJRoadfan

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Ugh, those Pacific Micro cases with the sharp edges. I have scars from those things!

Where did you find that ATX form factor card? Asus didn't include it with the P5A-B new, which was annoying if you wanted USB. Meanwhile the cheaper PC Chips M590 SS7 board came with the breakout.

Reply 14 of 27, by blank001

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It was an arm and a leg on ebay...!

Ah thank you for identifying the case. I actually didn't know who made it. I find it's of acceptable quality though. Nothing razer sharp.

_: K6-III+ 450apz@550, P5A-B, 128Mb CL2, Voodoo 5500 AGP, MX300, AWE64 Gold 32mb, SC-55v2.0
_: Pentium III 1400 S, TUSL2-C, 512Mb CL2, Voodoo 5500 AGP, MX300

Reply 15 of 27, by NJRoadfan

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I don't know if that was the actual manufacturer of that case. The computer store I worked at used to buy them for machine builds in 1998-99 from a company called "Pacific Micro". For all I know, it could have been a distributor. They came in unbranded brown boxes.

Reply 16 of 27, by joacim

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That's a nice system. Always liked the way Baby AT systems looked.

Nobody believes me when I tell then that I've cut my hands on old computer cases and parts. Got wounded many times by trying to pull out stuck molex and ide connectors. When they finally came loose, my hand would hit the nearest sharp edge. I guess people are just too used to rounded edges and easy to remove sata connectors these days. 😀

Reply 17 of 27, by blank001

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I had stitches in maybe 2006 for building someone a computer with an ultra cheap case. I think I was removing those metal 5.25" covers in order to put a drive in. You like rotate them until they snap off. Anyway way too much force that time and it wasn't pretty. So I do know bad cases. This one from what I can tell is nothing like that.

_: K6-III+ 450apz@550, P5A-B, 128Mb CL2, Voodoo 5500 AGP, MX300, AWE64 Gold 32mb, SC-55v2.0
_: Pentium III 1400 S, TUSL2-C, 512Mb CL2, Voodoo 5500 AGP, MX300

Reply 18 of 27, by Iris030380

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I have the same problem with my K6-III+ system. Even at full bore 550Mhz, the FPU capability seems to throttle any cards I throw in there. Even at OC speed the VooDoo 2 SLI was performing at only around 50% of what I know the cards are capable of. Quake 1 timedemo (1.08) at the start map posted around 32fps, which is really bad for a 550Mhz CPU even on a SS7 platform. I hit around 23.5fps with a Pentium 200 non MMX in there, for comparison. I'm sure a Pentium II 450Mhz would be well over 60fps. On the other hand, K6-III's are cool as shit. I took out one of the V2's and added a radeon 9200se (I think) as the 2D card because of the clean 2D display it gives in Windows and DOS.

Screamer 2 and Carmageddon Splat Pack (3Dfx versions) run in full awesome mode though. And WinQuake (despite the odd slowdown in bigger maps + firefights) has the feel that only a true retro build can give. DosBox be damned! When it comes to The Dismal Oubliette on Nightmare, I want it pure.

I5-2500K @ 4.0Ghz + R9 290 + 8GB DDR3 1333 :: I3-540 @ 4.2 GHZ + 6870 4GB DDR3 2000 :: E6300 @ 2.7 GHZ + 1950XTX 2GB DDR2 800 :: A64 3700 + 1950PRO AGP 2GB DDR400 :: K63+ @ 550MHZ + V2 SLI 256 PC133:: P200 + MYSTIQUE / 3Dfx 128 PC66

Reply 19 of 27, by meljor

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Yes, that's a bit of a problem with the k6-2 and k6-3. They do score perfectly fine in 3dmark99 and very high in cpu due to 3dnow! and 3d scores come pretty close to p2-450. p3-450 has sse and scores a bit better in 3dmark99.

But in actual games it is all over the place, and p2-450 is much faster. a 600mhz k6-3+ has a very hard time even beating a p2-350 in games.

But i agree, the k6 platform has something true retro about it and it is one of my absolute favorites.

asus tx97-e, 233mmx, voodoo1, s3 virge ,sb16
asus p5a, k6-3+ @ 550mhz, voodoo2 12mb sli, gf2 gts, awe32
asus p3b-f, p3-700, voodoo3 3500TV agp, awe64
asus tusl2-c, p3-S 1,4ghz, voodoo5 5500, live!
asus a7n8x DL, barton cpu, 6800ultra, Voodoo3 pci, audigy1