K6-2/400 is also bottlenecking that Voodoo 3 quite a bit, by the way.

I wouldn't say so. It could be a period machine, 3dfx machines weren't exactly aiming for the stars in 1999. There shouldn't be any obligation for anyone to be pressured to giving a Voodoo more CPU to "honor their glory" or some shit. It's not a Geforce2.

Oh ffs

Just a ramble: I re-organized some of my storage shelves to fit a couple extra machines I'm not using. Lately I've been thinking I should sell off all my pre-Pentium gear, once the pandemic dies down and people are comfortable meeting in person again. DOSBox & PCem adequately emulate anything 486 or below (DOSBox for running the software, PCem for emulating the hardware), and for me all the interesting stuff that's not well emulated - proprietary video APIs, sound cards with onboard synths, A3D/EAX - is for Socket 7 or later. I guess I could keep ONE nice late PCI 486 and a couple swappable CPUs for it, but I have no real need to have a locker full of difficult-to-maintain beige towers when anything I might run on them would do better on my 233MMX.

Not to mention it's so much easier to keep a Socket 7 or Slot 1 machine going in 2020 - they're more robust, spare parts are orders of magnitude more common, and there are far less BS incompatibilities or limitations that need to be worked around.

Anyone else in this boat? I guess this is exactly the same thought process we all went through in, like, 1996, but the difference now is I know exactly what from the early era I still want to have a way to run in the forseeable future.

I am in the same boat but I opted to keep a 386SX and a 486 VLB instead. I maintain a Socket 7 as my main these days..

I have 2 - XT's, 2-486's, 2 Pentiums, two P4's as complete machines plus a few newer (i5, i7) completes. Lots of boards, vid cards, etc but they do not take up the space of finished bunch of "beige towers" as you said. Yes I am in that boat ! with a handful of cases in the shed that will probably never get used in the near future have thought about getting rid of a bunch of them...

I've been trying to condense the stuff that's "redundant" (systems with very similar specs, for example) down to free up much needed space. It's hard though because a lot of these are perfectly fine machines and thus not deserving of being recycled yet selling them or even giving them away can be tough.

Today fixed a EFA P5V580AT rev A motherboard with an intermittent floppy drive issue, was cold solder joints on a couple of the floppy connector pins. Need to create a jumper doc and include pictures (for upload to our library) as jumpers are laid out different then the rev C at Stasons. Also added 1Mb to a Cirrus Logic based VLB card (FIC EUN542VT 5428 based), has soldered and sockets, added 8 x 44256-70's (per screen print on the board) to bring it to 2Mb. Still have to test it thoroughly but works ok so far.

Fujoshi-hime wrote on 2020-03-28, 22:52:

After, oh, I dunno, 23 years of writing on recordable discs for Windows OS's with a sharpie, I decided to level up my game today […]
Show full quote

After, oh, I dunno, 23 years of writing on recordable discs for Windows OS's with a sharpie, I decided to level up my game today after realizing that a stack of DVDRs I had were inkjet printable.

Very nice!
What printer is that?

assasincz wrote on 2020-04-19, 20:41:

I picked up a package with Voodoo 3 2000 today; tested it, attached a 40mm fan to the heatsink and installed it in my K6-2/400 setup. At first glance it performs almost the same as with Voodoo 2. Just the image looks cleaner and sharper. A bit of a disappointment really, but now the V2 can go back to my Pentium build.

I then did some final cable management in my ongoing 286 build. I just need some beige 5.25" bay covers for the case (came with none) and I am done....for now....

As you have active cooling why not take it up to 3000/3500 speeds?

Yesterday I achieved a new personal best of "cannot be arsed" and ended up throwing my go to retro PC bits into my modern case, with modern power supply and using my modern monitor, which means I needed a DVI graphics card.

Annoyingly the AWE32 isn't being detected in any of the ISA slots. I've not changed any settings on either the board / bios or the jumpers on the card 🙁

We are still struggling to complete version 1.0 of ReDos, beyond which we update our FastShell

https://www.orbitalcrew.com/PROJECTS/redos.php
https://www.orbitalcrew.com/ARTNEWS/testboot_redos.php
https://www.orbitalcrew.com/ARTNEWS/fastshell.php

appiah4 wrote on 2020-04-19, 21:18:

K6-2/400 is also bottlenecking that Voodoo 3 quite a bit, by the way.

Exactly. Anything below a P3 1 GHz will make the V3 (and V2 SLI) starve, and that's why you don't see any difference. It can only go as fast as it gets geometry data from the CPU and the K6-2/400 simply can't provide these fast enough to push the card to its limit.

derSammler wrote on 2020-04-20, 11:29:

appiah4 wrote on 2020-04-19, 21:18:

K6-2/400 is also bottlenecking that Voodoo 3 quite a bit, by the way.

Exactly. Anything below a P3 1 GHz will make the V3 (and V2 SLI) starve, and that's why you don't see any difference. It can only go as fast as it gets geometry data from the CPU and the K6-2/400 simply can't provide these fast enough to push the card to its limit.

That seems a bit high? I was running my V2 SLI on a Celeron 300A @ 504 and there was a definite gain from single to dual card.

Oj0 wrote on 2020-04-20, 12:26:

That seems a bit high? I was running my V2 SLI on a Celeron 300A @ 504 and there was a definite gain from single to dual card.

At 800x600 it would run virtually at the same speed.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-04-20, 12:51:

Oj0 wrote on 2020-04-20, 12:26:

That seems a bit high? I was running my V2 SLI on a Celeron 300A @ 504 and there was a definite gain from single to dual card.

At 800x600 it would run virtually at the same speed.

I only ran 800x600 or sometimes even 640x480. At the time I was actually using them they were connected to a 15" CRT which looked quite garbage at 1024x768.

We're going back a long, long time, so I can't give you exact numbers, but I remember there was definitely a performance difference.

Oj0 wrote on 2020-04-20, 12:26:

That seems a bit high? I was running my V2 SLI on a Celeron 300A @ 504 and there was a definite gain from single to dual card.

I wasn't saying that you need 1 GHz for a single Voodoo2. But if you look here:

https://www.voodooalert.de/board/forum/index. … sli-benchmarks/

A K6-2 500@500 does not gain anything from SLI (and he only has a 400 MHz one), apart from getting 1024x768 as a selectable resolution with z-buffering. Unreal Tournament even shows a slight decrease in performance with SLI, probably because the CPU has a hard time getting the additional work done needed to feed two V2 cards at once. There's just not enough horse power there.

in phil's benchmark run you can see performance gains with SLI over a single voodoo2 and the CPU scaling up to 1000Mhz... but gains in games fps are very minimal at 1024x768 with anything above 500Mhz

https://www.philscomputerlab.com/voodoo-2-and … ng-project.html

imi wrote on 2020-04-20, 13:45:

in phil's benchmark run you can see performance gains with SLI over a single voodoo2 and the CPU scaling up to 1000Mhz... but gains in games fps are very minimal at 1024x768 with anything above 500Mhz

https://www.philscomputerlab.com/voodoo-2-and … ng-project.html

Deschutes 400 and above show larger gains - I forgot just how slow the K6 was in comparison.

I would imagine that the 104 MHz core speed advantage, 12 MHz bus speed advantage, and cache running at twice the speed (although only half as much) would mean the differences I saw were even larger.

From that document it seems that at 800x600 a Pentium II 400 is about as fast a CPU as you need, and in SLI there's little point in anything over 1GHz. Large differences in SLI are definitely there at lower speeds though.

it's pretty much just showing the obvious... that at higher resolutions, in the case of Voodoo 2 SLI 1024x768, you are GPU limited beyond a certain point and gains are minimal, but at lower resolutions it scales very well up to 1000Mhz.

but yeah a K6-2 400 is going to be limiting to a Voodoo 3 in any case.