First post, by murrayman
AOpen 250w PSU, AOpen AX63 Pro, PIII 933 Slot 1, 256mb Toshiba PC133 SDRAM (2x128mb), Voodoo 5 5500 AGP, Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 SB0100, Western Digital WD400JB 40GB IDE HDD.
I’ve been working at various points on this computer since early 2018 after a HDD failure. You can find the bulk of details of everything that has been done up to this post HERE and HERE. I have other threads floating around for some of the below-listed issues as well.
The issues I currently have are some of the same that can be found in the first link:
- I get a very similar score on 3DMark99 MAX between a Voodoo 3 1000G 8MB and two different Voodoo 5 5500s (got the second one this week and sold the first one) despite confirming SLI is enabled and the molex connection is plugged in on the latter two, switching between AGP 1x and 2x in 3dfx Utilities, and switching between Reference 1.04 and a few different Raziel drivers. Sometimes I actually get a significantly lower score with the V5s than the V3. Other users were kind enough to provide their test scores (found in the first link) which show I should be getting a significantly higher score with a V5.
- Running 3DMark99 MAX on the V3 will crash on the 1000 pixel polygons (individual) test about 9 times out of 10, but never on either V5.
- Installing a copy of the VIA 4in1 4.25a chipset drivers (downloaded off VogonsDrivers) through Setup.exe goes from 0% to 100% instantly and without seeming to install anything, and I don’t know how to confirm if the drivers have installed.
- On all three videos cards, Descent 3 main menu’s animated background displays graphical anomalies at times and eventually crashes Main.exe after a few secs / mins (varies at random) using Glide or D3D APIs, but not OpenGL (though the menu background is not animated when using this). Using the same game discs and installation on my Compaq with an ATI Rage LT Pro does not crash in D3D (OpenGL not supported).
The issues I no longer have are the ones found in the second link:
- In early 2018, I had a 20gb WD IDE HDD installed that I had been using in the system for over a decade. It failed after moving from one house to another when I turned on the system for the first time after the move; motor didn’t fire up, and the BIOS could no longer identify the drive. After trying a number of IDE-to-SATA adapters and SATA HDDs with varying kinds of read / write and hang issues, I installed a NOS 2008 40gb WD HDD, and began having issues after installing some games where VoptXP defrag would encounter crosslinked files, allocation table problems, and unknown issues where it would defer to ScanDisk, which could not properly fix the issues. Around this time, I replaced the Creative 52x CD drive that had been in the system since new with an LG 42x DVD drive, and after multiple clean installs of Win98SE and subsequent game / software installs, both VoptXP and ScanDisk now always show good from top to bottom, including surface scan. So I haven’t had one issue with the HDD since replacing the optical drive.
There are a lot of factors at play and a number of parts that have been swapped since the start of the issues two years ago. For the full details, please see both above links. A rough list of the parts are:
- IDE cables (40 pins swapped to 80 pins on primary and secondary)
- Floppy ribbon cable
- AGP video cards
- SDRAM (from two unknown brand 512mb PC133 sticks to two Toshiba 128mb PC133 sticks)
- Removal and reinstall of SB Live! Drive front panel ribbon cable and power lead
- Optical drive
- Floppy drive
- BIOS battery
I’m looking for help with anything that anyone can address. It’s hard to see the forest for the trees now that I’ve been messing with this thing for two years after nearly two decades of problem-free use. Guess we’ve been growing old together 😜
P3B-F 1.04, PIII 1k, 512MB PC133, GF DDR 32MB + DM3DII 12MB SLI, SB0100
P3B-F 1.03, PIII 700, 384MB PC100, V5 AGP, SB0160
CP 5170, PII 350, 256MB PC100, Rage LT 2MB, ESS 1869
PB M S610, PMMX 233, 128MB EDO66, DM3D 4MB, Aztech
