If your able to I'd recommend installing them both in a dual boot setup and then use each one and see which one you like better.

xp is fine.

(insert "most programs from this time period don't support smp" comment here)

Though two pentium 3's will be of more benefit than one when you allocate the cpu's to do multiple tasks so it should work out fine. get ready for purists lectures though.

I have a real soft spot for Windows 2000. I strongly believe it is the best operating system (or least shite) that Microsoft has ever made. It's massive set of modern, but simple to use features, rock solid stability, and proven UI make it something I wish I used more option.

If you do go with 2000, you do give up some things in the modern day. Steam might be one, but I haven't checked recently. You also give up support for some earlier Windows 9x games that weren't written so well. NTVDM is also so laughably bad that it caused an entire forum to spring up around getting older games to work on it. (I wonder which one that is... hint hint)

Either way, if I could, I would use Windows 2000 today. It's truly a wonder to behold, and I wish we had stuff like that today. XP might be the more reasonable option, but it could also end up being the slower option. XP had a decent amount of extra overhead compared to the relatively simple Windows 2000, so that might be something to consider, even on a dual CPU 1ghz system.

Windows XP is more suited for dual 1ghz Coppermine. I would use Windows 2000 on something like Pentium Pro or dual Celeron Mendocino boards to save recources.

Win XP of course... And why the hell GEforce 6800 ?!?!? Instead you can put Radeon 9800XT or GEforce FX5950 Ultra, the FX will be more suited for the V2 SLI......

What are the rest of the system parts, like what mobo, what PSU, case cooling... Better go for dual Tualatin build is better...

Windows 2000 was a great OS back in the day and could run much more comfortably on lower spec hardware, than the more bloated XP.

However, the spec you intend to use is more than adequate for XP and using 2000 would be hobbling yourself for no good reason, as XP has the wider software support.

chrismeyer6 wrote:

If your able to I'd recommend installing them both in a dual boot setup and then use each one and see which one you like better.

I'd go with this too.

They both run NTFS so copying files between systems is quite simple. Also NTFS system volumes can be extended using diskpart on a WinPE boot disk. So you can always delete the volume you don't want, and extend the one you want to keep.

Dual PIII's and 2K/XP are cool, just don't set any unrealistic expectations. 3dfx cards make sense in an NT build?

firage wrote:

Dual PIII's and 2K/XP are cool, just don't set any unrealistic expectations. 3dfx cards make sense in an NT build?

They can be used for Glide.

Regarding OS choice, depending on your motherboard you may or may not have ACPI support with Windows XP. If that's a big deal to you, you might want to install Windows 2000. If its of no consequence to you, XP will run great on dual 1 GHz CuMines, even SP3.

slivercr wrote:

firage wrote:

3dfx cards make sense in an NT build?

They can be used for Glide.

Yeah, very cool. I'm always curious about which games people like to target with V2's on 2K and XP.

firage wrote:

Yeah, very cool. I'm always curious about which games people like to target with V2's on 2K and XP.

I didn't mean my answer to be condescending or anything.
I was just wondering why wouldn't V2s make sense in an NT build? A lot of games that work on 98 will work fine on 2k (maybe with a bit of tweaking needed), chances are what you want to play will work fine. Choosing NT over 9x is mostly a byproduct of the dual-processors, I think.

As for games, to me NfS2SE and NfS3, both of which both work fine on 2k (though NfS2 required some "massaging"), justify having V2 SLI. I also play Diablo2 with Glide, as well as ePSXe with a Glide plug-in.

Yeah. If using 2k or Xp why not just pull the v2's and use a glide wrapper so your not resolution or effects limited by the actual hardware.

rick6 wrote:

WinXP seems more tempting to me because i'm way more familiar with it than with Windows2000.
Although i've always heard wonders from Windows2000 and i'm not sure if i should give it a try...

Windows 2000 was not that far from XP. It's missing some features (system restore, firewall, activation...) and eye candy (Luna themes, ClearType) but overall it's closer to XP than to anything else.

I remember that back in the day my colleague had 2K on his PC, used mostly for gaming.

Back at you guys, sorry for only awnsering now. I went with XP.

The motherboard i'm using is a Gigabyte GA-6VXDC7 that i recently recapped with nichicon caps around the power supply area. But this board has been giving some grief mostly because of it's chipset, a VIA Apollo Pro VT82C686 and it's issues\limitations. Firstly the AGP always sets itself to 2X despite being at 4X in the bios. After a quick googlesearch this seems to be a rather well known problem with these chipsets. Also the max ram i can use is 1.5GB, not 2GB.

This would be all fine with me, but now my biggest problem is with the voodoo 2 cards on this board. Unreal or UT for example only run for 4 or 5 seconds before freezing.

Some games like Midtown Madness or a benchmark like 3D Mark won't even recognize the Voodoo2 as it being in the system at all. Also i get this crazy thing on the 3Dfx System info:

The drivers i'm using are the ones at http://www.3dfxzone.it/dir/3dfx/voodoo2/drivers/windowsxp/ which never failed me before...

I'm a bit lost at the moment.

rick6 wrote:

Back at you guys, sorry for only awnsering now. I went with XP. […]
Show full quote

Back at you guys, sorry for only awnsering now. I went with XP.

The motherboard i'm using is a Gigabyte GA-6VXDC7 that i recently recapped with nichicon caps around the power supply area. But this board has been giving some grief mostly because of it's chipset, a VIA Apollo Pro VT82C686 and it's issues\limitations. Firstly the AGP always sets itself to 2X despite being at 4X in the bios. After a quick googlesearch this seems to be a rather well known problem with these chipsets. Also the max ram i can use is 1.5GB, not 2GB.

This would be all fine with me, but now my biggest problem is with the voodoo 2 cards on this board. Unreal or UT for example only run for 4 or 5 seconds before freezing.

Some games like Midtown Madness or a benchmark like 3D Mark won't even recognize the Voodoo2 as it being in the system at all. Also i get this crazy thing on the 3Dfx System info:

bug1.JPG

The drivers i'm using are the ones at http://www.3dfxzone.it/dir/3dfx/voodoo2/drivers/windowsxp/ which never failed me before...

I'm a bit lost at the moment.

The garbled menu text is probably related to one of the files that the 3dfx drivers try to install. I vaguely remember there being one of those "your existing file is newer than the one being copied, which do you want to keep?" dialog boxes when installing Voodoo 2 drivers in Windows 98SE, and when I chose to keep my existing one it led to that exact problem with the 3dfx info screen. I can't remember the name of the file though. Just taking a quick glance through some Voodoo 2 driver files (for 9x) I have on my system, riched20.dll rings a bell. It seems to be something related to rendering text in certain applications.

As for the crashing, the first step would be to remove a card and test it. If it still crashes, swap cards. If it still crashes, then its less likely to be a bad card (unless they are both bad in the same exact way). It is most likely a driver issue of some kind though. I've never run a 3dfx card under XP personally.

I've tried three Voodoo 2 cards now, all with the same weird symptom. They work fine on other systems.

I'ce ran voodoo2 video cards before under windows xp with no problems, so i'm not sure if this is another motherboard chipset issue or not...
For testing purposes i'm running a Voodoo 3 AGP now on this system and it's running fine.

What gives? :\

rick6 wrote:

I've tried three Voodoo 2 cards now, all with the same weird symptom. They work fine on other systems. […]
Show full quote

I've tried three Voodoo 2 cards now, all with the same weird symptom. They work fine on other systems.

I'ce ran voodoo2 video cards before under windows xp with no problems, so i'm not sure if this is another motherboard chipset issue or not...
For testing purposes i'm running a Voodoo 3 AGP now on this system and it's running fine.

What gives? :\

Forgive me if this has been stated elsewhere, but was it a fresh installation of Windows XP when you installed the Voodoo 2 drivers? 3dfx cards can be very picky about old Glide or 3dfx related .dll files left over from other devices or driver versions.

Also, check for resource conflicts in the device manager and it might not hurt to reset your BIOS configuration to defaults just in case there are any wonky PCI related settings causing problems.

Almost forgot... what service pack of XP and what version of DirectX is installed?

Hi. Yes, it's a fresh installation and it was the first time i was installing 3Dfx hardware. As for the weird System info it seems to be unrelated as it is mentioned in the readme file that it can happen...
Device manager looks ok, no conflits at all and i already did reset my BIOS, i even tried messing around a bit with IRQ in the bios.
As for the OS it's Windows XP Service Pack2 with DirectX 9.0C.

I'm seeing a lot of hatred towards VIA chipsets on my google searches and it's odd problems with latencies, AGP speeds and weird hardware incompatibilities. Thank goodness that the Geforce 6800 is more than enough to run every game from 1998 to 2003\2004 even with the dual pentium 3 handicap.
My goal was to maximize this dual Pentium 3 computer, and by adding this Geforce 6800 and 1.5Gb of ram i think i did it. Oh, and i'm using a SSD for the operative system. The computer as it is, is pretty snappy.

I think i got it!

Removing the network adatper solved the voodoo 2 crashing in glide games. Beats me why that was the culprit as it's a pretty regular network card. It's a D-link DFE-530-TX. I guess i need to find a replacement for it as i can't live without access to my NAS for all my stuff.