VOGONS


First post, by appiah4

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What video cards do you prefer for (Super) Socket 7 systems? I guess we can break that down into early Socket 7 Pentiums focused on DOS, Socket 7 late Pentium/MMX systems for Win9x and Super Socket 7 systems with (flaky) AGP support.

Most early Socket 7 builds I see are going with S3 cards for compatibility reasons, but my experiences with Trio64V+ and onwards including Virge cards has been terrible with very washed out colors. I'm currently considering replacing a Trio64 in my P133 with an ARK1000PV (out of curiosity, but I can't really find a terrible lot on this card) or just moving my Mystique 220 from the K6-2 system to this. There also seem to be decent Cirrus Logic PCI alternatives here, and I guess things like the Voodoo Rush and early Matrox cards could also be used here, but they are mostly absent from builds. Does anyone favor these cards?

I'm especially curious if any of you pair newer hardware with these systems for . I have a K6-2 system that's running on a Mystique 220 + Voodoo 2 SLI setup currently but I want to free one of my Voodoo 2s to add GLIDE capability to as many PCs as I can; to that end I was considering dropping in a Matrox G450 PCI into this system and pairing that with a single Voodoo 2. Do you do things like this with newer hardware, maybe a GF2 MX PCI, or a Radeon 7000/9250 PCI? How well do they scale with Socket 7 CPUs? Or do you stick to more contemporary hardware like Voodoo 2/3, TNT 1/2?

I have absolutely no experience with Super Socker 7 boards, and apparently most of these boards have poor AGP support. What are good AGP cards to go with these, or is it better to just stick with PCI here? What is your goto card for Super Socket 7?

Reply 1 of 13, by weldum

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Phil's computer lab made a very good video about this, can't put the link now.
I would say:
Early socket 7: something very compatible, i would choose a trident 9680 with 2mb, because it has very good performance and it tops out any processor up the p133, i will pair it with a voodoo 1 4 or 6mb.
Late socket 7: taking the pentium mmx 233, i will say a voodoo 2, or something similar, like a TNT or a Savage4, because it'll be a good pair.
Super socket 7: using a k6-2 450 at least, the best will be the voodoo 3 3000, it has the best compatibility and quality, all the others have some drawback, if you want 32bit rendering, you can use a voodoo 4 4500 but it doesn't have better performance.

DT: R7-5800X3D/R5-3600/R3-1200/P-G5400/FX-6100/i3-3225/P-8400/D-900/K6-2_550
LT: C-N2840/A64-TK57/N2600/N455/N270/C-ULV353/PM-1.7/P4-2.6/P133
TC: Esther-1000/Esther-400/Vortex86-366
Others: Drean C64c/Czerweny Spectrum 48k/Talent MSX DPC200/M512K/MP475

Reply 2 of 13, by squiggly

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Some matrox 4mb -> voodoo1 4mb. Also used a riva 128zx. Both AGP.

Reply 3 of 13, by The Serpent Rider

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Early socket 7: something very compatible, i would choose a trident 9680 with 2mb

No reason to choose any Trident card over S3/late Cirrus Logic cards. 9680 is a horrible performer.

Last edited by The Serpent Rider on 2018-04-25, 07:40. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 4 of 13, by weldum

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Well i will choose that because im familiar with that

DT: R7-5800X3D/R5-3600/R3-1200/P-G5400/FX-6100/i3-3225/P-8400/D-900/K6-2_550
LT: C-N2840/A64-TK57/N2600/N455/N270/C-ULV353/PM-1.7/P4-2.6/P133
TC: Esther-1000/Esther-400/Vortex86-366
Others: Drean C64c/Czerweny Spectrum 48k/Talent MSX DPC200/M512K/MP475

Reply 5 of 13, by vvbee

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The original matrox millennium in my s7. Does well. Doesn't do 3d generally speaking but that's what the cpu is for.

Reply 7 of 13, by tayyare

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I only have one active socket 7 rig and it's an MMX 233, which is my main MS-DOS machine but can also boot Windows 98. Before having a chance to grab a Voodoo 3 PCI, my choice was any of the Matrox PCI cards that I have on hand (Millenium, Millenium II and Mystique) plus a Voodoo 2 (I never had any Voodoo 1, which probably would be a better fit). As an alternative, I have all kinds of S3 cards but I never considered using them; they are sooo uninteresting 🤣

Now having a PCI Voodoo3, I just use it and completely happy with it. Please note that I'm not into DOS games released before 1992-93, (oldest in this system is X-Wing for example) and have nothng to do with side scrollers and other arcade/action type games which are the most whiny about compatibility.

GA-6VTXE PIII 1.4+512MB
Geforce4 Ti 4200 64MB
Diamond Monster 3D 12MB SLI
SB AWE64 PNP+32MB
120GB IDE Samsung/80GB IDE Seagate/146GB SCSI Compaq/73GB SCSI IBM
Adaptec AHA29160
3com 3C905B-TX
Gotek+CF Reader
MSDOS 6.22+Win 3.11/95 OSR2.1/98SE/ME/2000

Reply 8 of 13, by Tiido

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I have Mach64 or Rage3D cards in my socket7 machines. I also have one S3 Trio and one Cirrus Logic card but they're both worse performers than the ATI cards and video quality is also worse on them. I would like to experiment with other things but PCI cards don't seem to come by in trash very often and when they do it is another Mach64 or S3 Trio 🤣.

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 9 of 13, by jheronimus

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- Matrox Millenium or Tseng ET6000 with Voodoo 1 for Socket 7. I have a Slot 1 with V5, so I don't need too much performance on S7, just compatibility. The choice of 2D card basically boils down to the fact that I like to make my systems more interesting and avoid S3 for that reason;
- AGP Voodoo 3 for SS7 — basically perfect. You don't need 32 bit colour on that system anyways. I've never actually used anything else on SS7, but I hear it's also preferable because SS7 has a somewhat flawed implementation of AGP, and V3 doesn't have issues with it because it doesn't really use all AGP features (unlike, say Riva TNT2 or GeForces);
- PCI Voodoo 3 for Socket 8 — same, but for systems without AGP.

MR BIOS catalog
Unicore catalog

Reply 11 of 13, by tpowell.ca

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Went with a GeForce3 Ti 200 due to its performance in Direct3D, DVI outputs and it's passive cooling (100% silent).
That with a Voodoo 4MB for compatibility.

This on a SS7 w/ AMD K6-III+

  • Merlin: MS-4144, AMD5x86-160 32MB, 16GB CF, ZIP100, Orpheus, GUS, S3 VirgeGX 2MB
    Tesla: GA-6BXC, VIA C3 Ezra-T, 256MB, 120GB SATA, YMF744, GUSpnp, Quadro2
    Newton: K6XV3+/66, AMD K6-III+500, 256MB, 32GB SSD, AWE32, Voodoo3

Reply 12 of 13, by meljor

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It's in my sig. Love these combo's, they work well.

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 13 of 13, by shamino

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I have a Tyan S1590 (MVP3 chipset) with K6-3+. When I get in the mood, I use it for benchmarking various things. It's a very slow project, but at some point I hope to make some comparisons against some other builds (which haven't been built yet).

I haven't tried the Voodoo3 3500 yet. I'm sure it's a good match, but if I build a system for Glide, I think I'm going to be more concerned about maxing the potential of the card rather than maxing the potential of the CPU, so I'll probably prefer the Voodoo3 in a Pentium 3 machine.

I tried the Matrox G400 and it was pretty fast. As I recall it was close to the performance of a Geforce2 MX in some stuff, but I don't have my spreadsheet in front of me. I don't have a G400 Max - I probably should have looked for one of those instead of buying a plain G400.

Most of my testing has been with a Geforce2 MX (AGP). I haven't had any problems with it, but I'm used to this setup, having used such a card on this same motherboard back in the day. I went through some pain back then, but I know how to make it work now.
Performance with different nVidia drivers is erratic on my super 7 machine. One driver will be fast, the next will be mysteriously slow in some games but fast in one of them, the next few drivers will be more consistently fast again, and even later ones will be so slow they seem broken. Testing different drivers is a major time sink, unfortunately.

My motherboard has 2 significant faults IMO. One is it's lack of an AGP1X/2X toggle in the BIOS. I force AGP 1X when installing the VIA AGP driver, but I'd be a lot happier if I could control that in the BIOS. AGP 2X on the MVP3 is broken, and it serves no purpose anyway. Back when I used to try using it, the performance difference was so tiny as to be completely meaningless. This chipset should stay in AGP 1X only.
My other complaint with the Tyan S1590 is that if you want to use the AGP slot then you have to install it in an AT case. If you put the board in an ATX case, the AGP slot is inaccessible. They put one too many PCI/ISA slots underneath it.

I expect to try a Geforce2 Ultra and maybe a Geforce3 in the future, just for the heck of it. Those cards' power consumption scares me a bit, but I think it will be okay as long as I use an ATX PSU and not an AT (my revision of the Tyan S1590 will utilize the +3.3V rail from an ATX PSU, it's wired in parallel with the output of the onboard linear regulator).
The appeal those cards might have on a super-7 is that some versions of them have DVI output, and they can still use fairly old drivers.