VOGONS


Reply 20 of 30, by Deksor

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Octek mvp3-at but identical to dfi P5BV3+ rev c. The bios is already on the web.

Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative

Reply 22 of 30, by assasincz

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Hi guys,

I really appreciate the discussion that went on, I feel like this could be leading somewhere,
Anyways,
The mainboard bears a desgination REV:B3 right next to the CMOS battery
On startup the BIOS version that is reported is v4.51PG, and when in BIOS, it says 2A5LED4C (see pictures)

Anyways, I tried downclocking FSB all the way down to 66Mhz and run the CPU at 6x66=400MHz.
I also conntected the PSU to the ATX connector, rather than through ATX-to-AT adaptor.
I finally installed Windows 2000 and tried that with TNT2 Pro

Still the same, it does not work beyond 16-color retard mode (640x480 and 800x600),

I would appreciate if you could steer me to how to flash the BIOS in this board, is there a way to do it without the programmer?

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Reply 23 of 30, by assasincz

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Hi guys,

So after a few days of struggling, I have update worth sharing.
So primary improvement was brought by switching the option "assing IRQ for VGA" from "disable" to "enable" (default and failsafe option was "disable" for some reason).
After that, the system started kind of working, but random freezes and restarts stills occured. It turned out that apparently the SD card I was using was faulty in some way. After switching to new one and fresh install of Win98 (non-SE), I got it working nicely. Installing all the drivers for all the various graphics card I wanted to test worked just fine, no longer "retard 16-color mode only". I benchmarked the cards with 3DMark99 and Unreal Time demo to find the best fit, and during that, I found that the system still occasionally crashed when the FSB was set to higher than 66MHz. So in the end, 66x6MHz for the CPU clock it is. Installing AGP drivers wierdly did reduce the performance somewhat.

What seemed surprising to me is that even though I expected the CPU to bottleneck the system, the but resulting scaling was kind of strange,

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I am going to add to the mix a TNT2 M64 AGP card, and hopefully Rage 128 Pro to see where they fall

Reply 24 of 30, by the3dfxdude

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You ask how we survived the year 2000. Honestly by that point, if you bought a system to play games then, you were buying Athlon or P3. Socket 7 was around but it was the very low end and was at the point of being phased out. I had bought my K6-3 a year earlier, and I think I ran a voodoo 2 on it. Some people I knew had banshee in AGP form, which was a cheaper solution then too. In '99 some people had voodoo 3 or TNT2 if they had money to spend. Like I said, by 2000, we were starting to look past socket 7.

I looked at the pictures of the board you linked to, and the AGP slot looks like 3.3V. So that means AGP 2X max. And with the socket 7 technology probably early AGP anyway. The cards you have been trying are 4X or even 8X, and a 1-4 years newer than your socket 7 class system. While there was backwards compatibility to 2X, it was very spotty in those days, and might not be very good with your socket 7. Generally speaking, when I built a system at the time, I would have looked over the bus specs, and pick cards that matched it. I would have been pretty nervous to spend money on an expensive AGP 4X card and not have it work in socket 7 at the time.

Reply 25 of 30, by Deksor

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It's here : http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/k6plus.htm

Originally it was a Octek motherboard, but it's identical to the DFI P5BV3+

Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative

Reply 27 of 30, by assasincz

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Well I eventually slammed a Voodoo2 from my 200MMX into this build as it perform the best. Going from 10FPS Direct3D (TNT2 Pro) to 26FPS Glide in Unreal Time Demo convinced me...

Thank you all for all your insight....

Reply 28 of 30, by assasincz

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.....and today I paired the V2 with AGP ATi Rage 128 Pro 32MB, because I wanted a fairly capable OpenGL and Direct3D card in it. My choice was determined by the fact that it has a very low profil passive cooler and can nestle right against the V2 in the first PCI slot without much heat generation. Due to collision with the CPU cooper I could only put the V2 in one slot only, the first right next to the AGP.

I also have a SB Like 5.1 digital SB0220 and a USB 2.0 card inside

I think I am done with the build,

Reply 30 of 30, by assasincz

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Deksor wrote on 2020-03-29, 19:56:

Great news ! Have fun with your K6 😁

Oh I will!

I picked up Kingpin: Life of Crime where I left off on 200MMX, and resumed gamplay on this setup, runs considerably better,

Sin will be next,