I'm having some concerns on my recent refurbish job i would like to bring up with the forum, to seek some pointers. I rebuilt and refurbished to mint condition, like new, an IBM Aptiva machine sporting a PII 400 Slot-1 and 256Mb of RAM (likely upgraded by a previous owner). My idea was to use some spare parts and make it more 98/99-era gaming friendly, with as much compatibility as possible. This is a bit beyond my usual era for refurbs but why not, right? I choose to keep the Aureal Vortex audio card, which seems to work fine and choose to also keep the "IBM no name" motherboard and beforementioned PII. But i ripped out the Matrox it shipped with and installed a Creative TNT2 Ultra and for Glide stuff also added a Creative 3D Blaster 2 Voodoo2-board. After the usual bathing and cleaning, along with caps check, i put it together and set up Win98SE and installed all the drivers. Hooked it to a Dell Trinitron CRT and went to installing some games to test it out.

Now to the issue. I am not happy with performance... I tried Unreal, Sin, Quake 2 and Mechwarrior 3 as reference titles. Both in OpenGL-mode and in Glide-mode where supported, and even in the D3D6-mode for MW3 there are some significant stuttering and frame rate is quite poor.

For instance, MW3 on the TNT2 in DX6 sports 31 fps at best, with dips to 21fps at times and some VERY annoying stutter when panning around. Quake 2 on Glide OGL manages 17-36 fps on the Voodoo2 with stuttering all over the place... Sin has drops as low as 14 fps on both TNT2 and V2 using OpenGL drivers (RIVA or V2 OGL driver). When testing in Unreal, using Glide it does some 30-ish fps which is nice, but drops suddenly to 12-16fps and becomes a slide show. Stuttering and frame drops remain when switching to TNT2 in Unreal, but top fps is higher.

I feel that this is a bit underwhelming for this system, and i've built V2 systems in the past that ran much smoother. Especially in the 1997-1999 range of titles i've been testing here.

On to stuff i've tested so far:

Switch pass-trough cable
Run only TNT2, disable V2
Switch monitor
Switch CPU to another spare

When refurbing the PSU was measured and showed no issues, likewise tith the slots which where measured when powered on, no issues.
Drivers are installed and dxdiag sows no issues. 3dfx test suite runs fine.

Any thoughts and/or suggestions? Am i exaggerating this and the stuttering is supposed to be there, and i just forgot about it because it's been a while since i worked on a 1998-era machine? Or am i right in thinking this is not as intended, and that something is up? If so, suggestions as to what's going on?