VOGONS


Super Socket 7/Voodoo 3 machine

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First post, by jheronimus

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Hi, all

Finally got everything I needed for a SS7 build! Namely:

An AMD K6-3+ 400 ATZ

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I got this from eBay and really excited about this CPU. Not only is it interesting because I can mess around with 386 speeds on it, but it actually should be roughly in the ballpark of PII@233 that was my main gaming machine back in my childhood.

I thought about overclocking it to 550MHz or so, but AFAIK that would make setmul less effective or even unusable. Anyways, there's not a lot of benefit in such speed bump for me — it probably still wouldn't be able to run Deus Ex or Black & White properly — both games are really P3 territory.

A Lucky Star 5MVP3 rev 4.0 motherboard

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Probably, the most common SS7 motherboard in Russia. Lucky Star is a brand that was often used by a really popular OEM vendor called Formoza and some of these boards are even reported to be assembled in Moscow. I have probably seven of their boards, mostly 430VX and 430TX. I actually even have two of these 5MVP3's 😀.

The issue with this one is that it has a non-standard PS/2 pinout. Schematics exist to make a proper header, but for me it was easier to either get another board or a board with the proper header. Which I ended up getting.

Rev 4.0 is supposed to be really stable (as opposed to less common rev 2.0), but it definitely gave me some issues. ACPI is enabled by default in BIOS, which causes Windows to freeze at boot. Took me three days to figure that out 😀

PowerColor EvilKing 3 Pro — a Voodoo 3 3000 — AGP 2x, 16MB

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Never had the chance to use this card extensively, so I'm really curious. I was lucky that this card barely has any 3DFX or Voodoo logos, which is why I was able to get it for ridiculous 100 RUB (1,75USD).

Actually, I have a lot of other GPUs for this system:

- NVIDIA TNT2@16MB;
- ATI Rage Pro@16MB;
- ATI Rage 128 Pro@16MB — the card one of the 5MVP3 boards came with;
- 3DFX Voodoo Banshee;
- 2x 3DFX Voodoo 2 — though I don't have an SLI cable yet.

I NVIDIA would give me 32bit color, but I had a Vanta on my Pentium machine back then, so I really wanted to try Voodoo for mid to late Win9x gaming.

SoundBlaster 16 CT2230

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This is the best SoundBlaster that I have. True OPL3, doesn't have hanging note bugs in Doom-based games and has really clean output. I'm pairing it with a DreamBlaster X2.

Otherwise the specs are:

- 2x128MB SDRAM@133. I know I can use up to 384MB, but I don't have three sticks of PC-133 memory, and this board doesn't allow me to mix it with PC-100 (unlike an Asus 440BX board that I have). Anyways, even 256MB is probably an overkill for this system.
- 80GB HDD
- 3COM 3C905 NIC
- Asus CRW-3212A 40x CD-RW

Here's a quick photo of the finished build:

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I really like this case: it has a proper three digit MHz indicator (but no turbo button) and a nice sliding door that covers the CD and floppy drives and actually provides some pretty good sound isolation that really helps with a 40x CD drive. Also, this is a case from another Formoza rig. My childhood P2 machine had the same case — only in ATX.

At this point I've only finished the actual build and OS installation. I need to connect this machine to my network — either by moving it to another room or by getting a really long Ethernet cable 😀 After that I'll be able to mess around with software for AMD K6, benchmarks and games.

Last edited by jheronimus on 2017-05-17, 08:54. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 2 of 28, by jheronimus

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Installed reference drivers for V3, enabled AGP 2x in BIOS.

Couldn't decide on a DirectX version, but PC Mark 2002 requires 8.1, so that's what I picked.

Here are some quick results:

3DMark 99: 2421 3DMarks/5607 CPU 3DMarks
PCMark is on its way — the benchmark hang at first attempt.

The 3DMark result is actually 15% lower than in feipoa's test — 5607 vs 6479. Could it be because his FIC PA-2013 has 2MB cache and mine has only 512KB?

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Reply 3 of 28, by chinny22

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Nice looking system, really wish I had a digit MHz indicator, only got 1 system less then 100Mhz, and Hi / Lo that most people set 2 digit displays just doesn't do it for me.
Overall nice honest system, nothing too fancy but everything is good, even the Voodoo as you said isn't showing itself off

Reply 4 of 28, by jesolo

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You can easily make an SLI cable out of a standard 34 pin floppy drive cable. You just have to twist the inner part of the one end of the cable and fasten it again.
Have a guide somewhere. Will look it up and post it here.

Reply 5 of 28, by jheronimus

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jesolo wrote:

You can easily make an SLI cable out of a standard 34 pin floppy drive cable. You just have to twist the inner part of the one end of the cable and fasten it again.
Have a guide somewhere. Will look it up and post it here.

I've actually tried that. Don't know what I did wrong, but I couldn't deal with the clamps — they always broke or didn't hold. Screwed maybe 3 or 4 FDD sleeves that way.

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Reply 6 of 28, by jheronimus

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Another quick observation: I've never been able to get more than 500KB/s in FTP transfers on a Pentium/Pentium MMX machine. The AMD K6 gives me about 3500-4000KB/s, on par with my Pentium Pro machine. It's Total Commander vs my home FTP server running vsftpd under Ubuntu in both cases.

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Reply 8 of 28, by jheronimus

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gdjacobs wrote:

Which NIC?

I only use the 3COM's 3C905 PCI family in my builds. Not remember the exact make in this one, but it's probably 3C905CX-TX-M.

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Reply 9 of 28, by dr.zeissler

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the 3com-nic's always produce a error in the connection to the nas if a lot of small files were copied.
it can only be fixed with a reboot, otherwise I cannot get connected back to the nas.

this issue is reproducable an all win9x machines I have, so there must be a driver issue I alway run in.

Therefore I only use intel-network cards. I never encounter such a problem with them.

Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines

Reply 10 of 28, by dr.zeissler

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I normally use 15" LCD/TFT Smsung/Nec/Eizo, but I have recently bought a 15" CRT Sony Trinitron. Fist I was impressed, but after a short wile,
the colors and the contrast on the LCD was better...don't know why, but I think about, selling the CRT.

Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines

Reply 11 of 28, by jheronimus

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dr.zeissler wrote:

the 3com-nic's always produce a error in the connection to the nas if a lot of small files were copied.
it can only be fixed with a reboot, otherwise I cannot get connected back to the nas.

I feel like this is an issue with your NAS. Of course, I don't know how many files are we talking here, but I've never had a problem like that under Win9x.

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Reply 13 of 28, by jheronimus

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So far I've been really enjoying late 90s games, not DOS stuff. Unreal Gold, Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed (my favourite in the series), Half-Life all run beautifully. Deus Ex stutters every time I enter a new room at max settings@800x600, though.

What does bother me, however, is the quality of sound output — feels like I need to get myself an MX300, reroute it into SB16 and use it for all non-MIDI games.

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Reply 14 of 28, by kanecvr

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jheronimus wrote:

I thought about overclocking it to 550MHz or so, but AFAIK that would make setmul less effective or even unusable. Anyways, there's not a lot of benefit in such speed bump for me — it probably still wouldn't be able to run Deus Ex or Black & White properly — both games are really P3 territory.

Black and White requires a fast socket A or 478 machine to be enjoyed properly. It will run on a ~900 mhz PIII, but it will be hard to enjoy since the game is quite CPU intensive. Deus EX runs fine on a fast PIII - 1000MHz coppermine should do.

I remember I played black and white on a Athlon XP 1700+ with a Radeon 7500 back in the day and it was pretty laggy regardless of resolution or detail level, especially in cinematics and when zooming out.

There's actually quite a bit of games from that timeframe that requite much stronger machines then what's listed on the box as minimum or recommended specs - here's a few:

Homeworld (1999)
- minimum requirements - 200MHz pentium - recommended 350 MHz Pentium II. Well, it runs like crap on any pentium II. It gets really bad when you have more then 15 units on screen fighting and flying around. I completed the game back in the day on my K6-II @ 400MHz and from mission 5 onwards it was a slideshow (but I still loved it).
- I personally recommend at least a fast socket 370 Pentium III machine - 800MHz+, preferably 1400MHz tualatin or a socket A computer - a 1200MHz Athlon will do fine. For 1600x1200 you will want a fast socket A machine (barton core) or a fast P4 (at least 2600MHz) and a Geforce 4 Titanium or FX5700.

Dungeon Keeper II (1999)
- the quoted minimum requirements are laughable. 90MHz Pentium? Yeah, right! Recommended 233Mhz pentium? Nope. The game lags heavily on a 1400MHz tualatin if you have lots of rooms and creatures, regardless of how fast your video card is. This is caused by the limitation of the slot 1 / socket 370 CPU to AGP bus - it's unable to feed the video card data fast enough. Back in the day I completed the game on the same 400MHz K6-2 / 192MB of ram / Voodoo 2 SLi and I remember "My pet dungeons" running very poorly. The game will run fine on said pentium III - even a 900MHz machine will do for campaign missions if you stick to 16 bit colours and 1024x768
- if you want to play the game in it's full glory, you'll want a socket 754/939/LGA 775 machine with a fast(ish) older video card like the Radeon 9700/9800 or FX 5900 series. Don't go newer then a gefroce 6 series or radeon x800 series or you will get a black screen on launch. A 3200+ / FX 5900XT / win98se will run the game flawlessly @ 1600x1200 / 32bit color with no slowdowns regardless of how many creatures you have on screen or how big the rooms are. There is a side-effect tough. Torch animations will run really fast on newer machines.

Reply 15 of 28, by jheronimus

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kanecvr wrote:

Black and White requires a fast socket A or 478 machine to be enjoyed properly. It will run on a ~900 mhz PIII, but it will be hard to enjoy since the game is quite CPU intensive. Deus EX runs fine on a fast PIII - 1000MHz coppermine should do.

I remember I played black and white on a Athlon XP 1700+ with a Radeon 7500 back in the day and it was pretty laggy regardless of resolution or detail level, especially in cinematics and when zooming out.

Haha. I actually played it on a Pentium II@233 when it came out. For some reason, my Vanta wouldn't produce textures on most models (except for the temple and Creatures). For example, all the villagers were simply black. The rocks were rainbowish, and so on. I was 11, so I didn't know a lot about dealing with settings and graphics drivers. Regardless, I played a ton of Black & White on this machine.

kanecvr wrote:

There's actually quite a bit of games from that timeframe that requite much stronger machines then what's listed on the box as minimum or recommended specs - here's a few:

Bummer about DK2. Still, I keep telling myself that I don't really need a high-end Win98 rig.

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Reply 17 of 28, by jheronimus

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AzzKickr wrote:

Awesome system !

Thanks! Looks like crappy sound in Win9x games can be partially attributed to the fact that I plugged the speakers into SB16's amplified output instead of a lineout. Still, I got a cheap MX300 because I always wanted an excuse to try that card 😀 Sound quality is awesome, and A3D in Half-Life is noticeable even without headphones. I'm curious to try the wavetable.

I'm wondering if 256MB RAM is entirely cacheable. My system only has 512KB L2 cache and according to Anandtech I can only cache 128MB. However, according to this thread it doesn't apply to CPUs with on-die cache such as K6-2+ and 3+. What is the easiest way to check it? I'm still concerned about my low benchmarks — if only a bit 😀

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Reply 18 of 28, by meljor

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jheronimus wrote:
AzzKickr wrote:

Awesome system !

Thanks! Looks like crappy sound in Win9x games can be partially attributed to the fact that I plugged the speakers into SB16's amplified output instead of a lineout. Still, I got a cheap MX300 because I always wanted an excuse to try that card 😀 Sound quality is awesome, and A3D in Half-Life is noticeable even without headphones. I'm curious to try the wavetable.

I'm wondering if 256MB RAM is entirely cacheable. My system only has 512KB L2 cache and according to Anandtech I can only cache 128MB. However, according to this thread it doesn't apply to CPUs with on-die cache such as K6-2+ and 3+. What is the easiest way to check it? I'm still concerned about my low benchmarks — if only a bit 😀

The performance hit for going over the 128mb is around 5% or so and really not a problem when using a cpu with it's own L2 like your k6-3+.

But i run mine with 128mb and never really encountered something that needed more. Usually when a game does need more ram it will also need a faster system like p3 or higher.

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

Reply 19 of 28, by Skalabala

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Some mother boards take less of a hit when going outside cache area.
One thing people miss is that you can tweak the system better when inside cache area.
If you do not loose performance then it means you are doing something wrong when going outside cache area.

For you machine its completely pointless to run 256mb ram. And as far as I know you can only cache 64mb ram on VIA with 512kb

To be honest I think my K6 is the only one that could benefit from 256mb in GTA3.