Dochartaigh wrote on 2020-01-12, 02:46:
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I'm on week 6 (and ongoing still) of getting some Kramer broadcast equipment to me from Germany...so I would hate to see how long it would take for budget shipping from those other countries. It's simply a matter of time and hassle. I know I've gotten stuff from even China and Japan in a week or two...but when the price difference was only $20 or abouts, I'm fine with paying a little more to get it next week guaranteed.
Yes, that's a valid point - although the big issue is the intercontinental shipping, particularly to or from the US. Whether it comes fro, DE or RU or UA would make very little difference indeed.
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I'm glad I didn't splurge on the ti4800 then! If I'm to believe the manual (which I might not since it says it has integrated audio and it seems to not have), it only has a 200w power supply. I just wasted a half hour trying to find the power consumption of the different GeForce 4 series cards and completely failed (closest was a spec page which said "its power draw is not exactly known" 🤣 - does say suggested a 350w so I would probably get 400 or 450w to be safe).
What are symptoms of not having enough power? Will it simply not boot? If it's going to do something like take a performance hit in-game because of not enough power I'm not going to notice something like that since I've never used one before...
Symptoms of insufficient power supply will be unstable voltages, which in the short term lead to instability, particularly under heavy load and/or when the system get physically warm. In the long term it increases the risk of catastrophic failure of the power supply and possibly multiple connected components in the system. If your power supply blows, it tends to take the motherboard with it. Worst-case it knocks out pretty much everything in the system.
Can you recommend any exact ATX power supplies? All the ones I just looked up seem to have newer style connectors - I don't see any of the funky ones I remember from things like 3.5" hard drives (molex was all there of course). I can re-wire if I can find the pinout (this page seems to be the bible about upgrading Dell Dimensions, but unfortunately the link to the pinout is a dead link anymore - I'll look some more).
There are as many opinions on power supplies as on sound cards 😉
Robert Hancock addresses most of the relevant points: don't trust the maximum power rating alone; Dell uses very good power supplies, but if you have a combination of 'heavy' components you need more; the big draw of a P3 (or Athlon) system is on the 5V, not the 12V line etc.
Basically there are two main schools of thought:
1) ATX 2.x PSUs (such as all mainstream supplies today) emphasize the 12V line used for newer CPUs and GPUs at the expense of the 5V line needed by older systems. As such they will be inefficient when load is drawn mainly from 5V. You would need a much heavier PSU and it still wouldn't outperform a period-correct ATX 1.x PSU. So go for a good period-correct PSU for best match.
2) Overall PSU efficiency has increased to the point that that will compensate the disadvantages of unbalanced draw from 5V on a 12V-heavy PSU. Older PSUs were not only less efficient overall, but after a few decades they are wearing out and more prone to catastrophic failure. So go for a reliable new PSU and choose it based on its 5V power rating.
Personally I tend towards #1, particularly as the reliability bit works both ways - after 20 years it's pretty clear which PSUs were duds and which aren't. The biggest risk of failure comes from capacitors and you can get a good idea of their health just by looking at them. I like Fortron Source Power PSUs best. They were commonly used by Acer and AOpen. I have a pile of turn-of-the-millennium examples rated at 350W and capable of delivering huge power on the 5V line (over 30A). If you can find one of those, you're good. Enlight was another good brand. Antec was rated highly, but became notorious for capacitor failure.
If you can't find a good old PSU (or tend towards school #2), go for a good new one. Check independent reviews by people who actually take the things apart and investigate at component level. I haven't built a new system for a few years, so am not up to speed on exactly which models to look for right now. Bear in mind that the vast majority of brands just relabel PSUs made by a very limited number of factories, so the difference between brands can be smaller than the difference between individual PSUs supplied by that brand, as they can be sourced from totally different production facilities! Don't assume that because one eg. Corsair (a brand without own production facilities) PSU is good, another will also be. Treat each device on its own merits.
As for the pinout: https://pinouts.ru/Power/dell_atxpower_pinout.shtml
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This rings a bell of something my buddy said: this exact Dell can ONLY take a Coppermine, stock, right? And I think he choose the 1ghz because the fastest coppermine was 1.1ghz and it was super pricy and rare. Does that sound right? So the 1ghz I already ordered is the fastest normal one I can use? I'm not going to buy one of those expensive powerleaps or any advanced mods or anything.
The fastest 100MHz FSB Coppermine is the 1.1GHz (there was briefly a 1.13GHz Coppermine with 133MHz FSB, but it was notoriously unstable and withdrawn). As your motherboard can't run faster than 100MHz, it's as high as you can theoretically go. The difference between 1GHz and 1.1GHz is minimal, as with a high multiplier, your bus speed becomes more and more of a bottleneck. If that tiny difference is significant. you should probably be looking for a faster platform anyway.
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The 2GB SD drive already has Win98se on it, and it's already installed. I'm honestly ashamed I don't even know what kind of hard drives these have (it is "ATA EIDE"?). I think they're before IDE which I have a bunch of these 250gb IDE drives I use for OG Xbox and PS2 builds... But I was kinda thinking of leaving the OS on the tiny SD card, then worse case plug in the HDD from my other P3 to use as game storage. I'm OK if the SD card dies in a year or whatever (I know SSD isn't good to run without the software which maintains the drives health, right?).
IDE is a standard dating back to 1986, so this computer is most definitely not older than IDE 😉
The motherboard is a Dell-modified Intel SE440BX (modification is mainly the ATX pinout), which has the i440BX chipset. That chipset supports IDE modes up to UDMA-2, also known as ATA-33. That describes the interface between drive and system, which can deliver max 33MB/s. It does not tell you anything about what size drives are supported or how fast the drives themselves are.
On the first count, the motherboard BIOS is the limiting factor. Robert Hancock's info shows its age here as it incorrectly says 'no limit', when there is definitely a 137GB-limit to the 28-bit addressing used. You can't address drives over 137GB natively with that motherboard, so those 250GB drives won't work without some trouble.
Regarding performance, people tend to obsess over max bus speed (the 33MB/s vs other speeds/standards), but for general desktop/gaming use, latencies are generally much more important. Rotating hard drive latency is inversely proportional to spin rate, so a 15k rpm SCSI drive will have lower latencies than a 7200rpm high-end IDE drive and both will completely trounce a 3200rpm Quantum Bigfoot. But the massive difference is between HDDs (with latencies measured in ms) and SSDs (with latencies measured in ns). Bottom line: an SSD bottlenecked at 33MB/s by a simple ATA/SATA adapter will feel far, far, far faster than an U320 SCSI drive spinning at 15k rpm, despite the latter being able to communicate at almost ten times the speed!
On my other P3 I'm honestly perfectly fine with the optical HDD's performance. Win98se literally boots up in less than 30 seconds if my memory serves. Actually seems zippy. Still think I should go the PCI SATA card adapter route (which if so I would have to research how that works).
PCI SATA is one route, the other is direct PATA-SATA adapters. The latter are much easier, but limit max throughput to your motherboard's interfaces and are affected by BIOS size limits. PCI adapters cost more, slow down boot, but can offer (far) higher throughput and are limited only by their own BIOS, not the motherboard BIOS.
The latter is probably the most relevant factor. I use PCI on my old BX system that doesn't like >8.4GB HDDs, but PATA-SATA adapter on my Tualatin system with SiS635T chipset. Note that that system support ATA-100, so the performance hit by using the adapter is far less relevant.
I don't think I'll be running a HDD which is ONLY DOS, so I don't have to worry about FAT16, right? My other p3 I simply booted from the Win98 disc and formatted it through the install setup whichever way is the default (FAT32?). I can then (I think, it's been a while) hit F8 and it'll boot into DOS if a game won't run from within Windows proper (or quit Windows into DOS? maybe).
If you're booting into real DOS, you need to partition the drive in a way DOS will understand it. And for late, very demanding DOS games, you really want to boot into native DOS, as every byte of conventional memory matters.
It's entirely possible to do that on the same HDD as the Windows install, but that involves compromises and complexity. It's much easier to let BIOS determine which to boot and to give each OS its own native device.
The ad said it has a Turtle Beach but didn't list the model. Since the Audigy2 is already on it's way, and wasn't super pricy, I'll stick with that for Windows (plus I was reading about them - they just seem cool with reference grade audio and all that!).
Why not run both? The Montego2 gives you A3D, the Audigy2 EAX. Generally EAX is considered superior, but it really depends on the game (and some only support A3D for positional audio). Only reason not to would be shortage of PCI slots, but with 4 or 5 to play with, you have more than enough options. NIC, Voodoo2 and 2x sound would easily fit.
BUT, it sounds like since you think this doesn't actually have an audio header (which TBH I would have NO clue where to even look for that to tell 🤣),
It's the part of the back panel you stick 3.5mm jacks into for speakers or headphones. No place to plug in your speakers is generally a good giveaway that there's no built-in sound 😉
we're back to needing an ISA card. I re-read the first couple posts where people mentioned good ones, and yup, still confused. I read some pages and seems like the Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold is highly recommended, but super pricy still. I found a non-gold (kinda random so have no clue if this is good), but how does this one look?
Once again, this is a matter of personal preference. I for one consider most Creative cards to be buggy and overrated.
The AWE64 Gold has two unique selling points, but three major drawbacks too:
+ Best (analog) SNR on an ISA sound card, combined with those nice big IEC jacks (instead of crappy 3.5mm)
+ All audio output can be digitally routed over SPDIF. Sounds simple, but is very rare. No other Sound Blaster allows it. Usually you can't get FM synth stuff over SPDIF.
- Not a real OPL3 but Creative's CQM FM Synth (old DOS music can sound 'off')
- Stuttering on high sampling rate MIDI (MPU-401) music
- to get the most out of native AWE, you need a RAM upgrade, but it is rare and painfully expensive; SIMM adapters exist but are far from cheap too.
If you want to go down the AWE route, don't care about digital audio out (SPDIF) and aren't obsessed with SNR, a CT3670 SB32 would be a better choice, as it's basically an AWE64 without onboard RAM (and those fancy gold IEC connectors and the digital routing), but with two bog-standard 30p SIMM connectors onboard. Add 2x 16MB 30p SIMMs and you're good to go with full RAM, probably for less than the price of a basic AWE64 Gold.
However as I already pointed out, for older DOS stuff this is less than ideal. You mentioned Eye of the Beholder. That's a classic with a classic AdLib soundtrack. Exactly the sort of thing that would sound 'off' on late Sound Blasters like the AWE64. For that sort of stuff you really want a Yamaha OPL3 synth (or 1:1 clone). This sort of target is why I recommended an Aztech 2316-based card, as it has real OPL3 and full SBPro2 compatibiliy, and bug-free MIDI. Your ESS ES1868 is better than the AWE64 for really old stuff, but its ESFM also isn't exactly the same as OPL3. It does however have the full SBPro2 compatibility and bug-free MIDI.
kolderman wrote on 2020-01-12, 08:37:
Yes it can be overwhelming. Probably why I have 4 different builds that have ISA slots, so I have places to try out my 100+ ISA sound cards I have hoarded over the years.
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And yes the ZS is probably the best Win98 sounds card. The reason people recommended so many kinds of soundcards is because there are retro-gamers...and there are retro-gamophiles. The former just like to play games. The latter, like myself, like to be able to switch between 9 different midi devices just to see which ones sounds best for a given game, or even level. Or refuse to use non-genuine OPL cards. Or go to great lengths to get pure SPDIF in dos games. If you are the former, life is a lot cheaper and simpler.
+1, no, +999 😜
I have a Pentium build with 5 ISA slots (finding a board with that many is a challenge in itself), I regularly struggle to get 5 ISA sound cards working in the same system. Never managed more than 4 though...
Please don't dive straight down this rabbit hole, enjoy just using a functional system first 😉