Hi everyone. Today is my day off from work. What shall I do today? I’ll go outside and fly my remote control plane.

This is what outside looks like

My remote control plane

*6 to 8 minutes of battery life later*
Ok now what?
Go home and benchmark some crap of course!

I watched Nostalgia Nerd's video on Cyrix so I thought I’d throw together my stored VIA C3 “Samuel” build. I’m currently daily using a late DOS / early Windows PC and I have a feeling these PC’s will give comparable performance even the PCs are different in many ways. It is very much an apples vs oranges comparison given the range of kit in them!

I thought I’d come up with at least some theme or excuse for this comparison so it’s "Passive Cooling where it probably really should kinda be active”

Apples:

VIA C3 800MHz – “large” passive heatsink repalcing tiny hfs
256Mb 100MHz SDR RAM (3t)
PCI Voodoo 3 2000 16MB
SB Live SB0100
CF Card for OS

3DMark 99: 1329 GPU / 4136 CPU
3DMark 2000: 819
Quake 3: 19.5
Quake 1: 22fps
N4S High Stakes: Glide ~15fps;
PC Player (Phil’s Benches): 9.4fps
Chris’ Bench (Phil’s Benches): 19.3fps
Driver (San Fran) 15 Dx6 (25 ish in Glide)

This is much slower than I thought it would be. I even put a fan back on the bigger heatsink to see if it was down-multiplying or anything, but nope, same crap performance. I tried NFS HS in Software Mode to see if something wasn’t right with Voodoo drivers. Nope, 10 fps or so it felt, completely unplayable.

Ah well, it only has 300, older, MHz to beat, right?

Oranges:

Pentium 3 300Mhz (4.5 x 66 instead of x 100); no fan
256Mb 100MHz SDR RAM
AGP TNT2 16Mb
ISA SB AWE 32 Value (CT3910 I think)
IDE HDD

3DMark 99: 2,875 GPU and 4609 CPU
3DMark 2000: 1641
Quake 3: 30.9
Quake 1: 29.5
N4S High Stakes DX: 25; software felt the same.
PC Player (Phil’s Benches): 22.4
Chris’ Bench (Phile’s Benches): 41.2
Driver: 45 FPS

Oh dear VIA.

Bonus Sound Comparison

Next I compared some DOS mode audio between the two for some reason. Here are some Soundblaster Live DOS samples (they should stream in your browser from my dropbox):

Soundblaster Live SB0100:

The happiest OPL song I know (from frickin’ Monopoly). Works well.

Duke Nukem 3D in “Soundblaster” mode. Works terribly.

Duke Nukem 3D General Midi mode. Works Well which I guess is the point.

Descent OPL3. Works Terribly.

Descent OPL2. Works Bad but not too bad.

Descent Gernal Midi. Works well.

CT3910 AWE 32 Value-thingy:

Monopoly continues to sound great. Can you tell the difference between SBL emulation and the real Yamaha chip in my CT3910?

Duke 3D in "Soundblaster" mode. Sounds great, albeit quietly.

Duke 3D in "AWE32" mode as my card can't do GM as it is. Sounds like month old trash

Descent OPL2. Sounds Great

Descent OPL3. Sounds Great.

Descent AWE32. Sounds fantastic.

So what have I learnt? Not a great deal I didn't already know - My Via C3 is pants. Both the soundcards sound great in some situations, pants in others. Short battery life is pants but lets you benchmark things.