VOGONS


First post, by MusicOnCD

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Hi, so I got a Celeron 400 system with a 440LX board. Recently I got a Voodoo 3 2000 AGP for waaay cheaper than Ebay prices and I'm just wondering is the Celeron 400 a major bottleneck to the V3? I could get the 533 for cheap but upgrading to a different board and a P3 isn't really an option for me currently.

Reply 1 of 13, by grjr

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Voodoo 3 won't run at its peak with a slow Celeron but if that is what you have why worry about it? Run it and enjoy it. When you feel the need for more FPS, upgrade to a faster system. First system I built for myself back in the day was similar with a Celeron 500 on 440BX Voodoo 3000 with only 64MB RAM.

Reply 2 of 13, by chinny22

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Agree with the above, you're always going to have a bottleneck somewhere.
Are the games your playing struggling on your current system? in which case upgrading the CPU may be worth it.
But if everything is working fine then no real point unless you simply want a faster CPU. and that's fine as well

Reply 3 of 13, by leileilol

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it'll be fine. The 'voodoo needs fast cpu' gatekeep is silly for those colors-limited blurry things and no forsaken bars are going to convince me otherwise. A Celeron 400's right for the period too.

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long live PCem

Reply 4 of 13, by byte_76

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It’s fine, don’t worry about it. Those specs will work well enough together.
If you really would like a little extra performance, those 400 Celeron did have a little overclocking headroom. Maybe see if you can do that on your board.
Just be sure to use a decent cooler.

Reply 5 of 13, by MusicOnCD

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chinny22 wrote on 2025-04-22, 05:50:

Are the games your playing struggling on your current system?

I ran into some driver issues so I didnt’t test it out yet.. but I mostly plan to to use it for Unreal, UT and Quake 3 (out of the more demanding games at least)

Reply 6 of 13, by Joseph_Joestar

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It's fine for pre-1999 titles, but you'll be CPU limited in some newer games.

I had a similar build several years ago, and I was getting between 35-40 FPS in Unreal Tournament and Drakan, even at 640x480.

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Core 2 Duo E8600 / Foxconn P35AX-S / X800 / Audigy2 ZS
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 980Ti / X-Fi Titanium

Reply 7 of 13, by MusicOnCD

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byte_76 wrote on 2025-04-22, 15:21:

Maybe see if you can do that on your board.
Just be sure to use a decent cooler.

Well it’s a got 66 MHz FSB so I don’t really know how would I do overclocking on such a board. I’ve seen overclocking where people just change the FSB to 100 MHz but that’s obviously not possible here.

Reply 8 of 13, by BinaryDemon

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It’s a good combo for a lot of games, but might struggle with Quake3. You probably looking at 800x600 with tweaks or dropping to 640x480 even.

Reply 9 of 13, by leileilol

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I think Q3 would perform fine, but texture quality will obviously be dinged down as there's a few 512's and Voodoo3 can only go up to 256, not to mention the lack of RGBA8 so any of those shiny textures will be extremely banded.

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long live PCem

Reply 10 of 13, by MusicOnCD

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Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-04-22, 15:39:

I had a similar build several years ago, and I was getting between 35-40 FPS in Unreal Tournament and Drakan, even at 640x480.

Not exactly ideal, but it will have to do for now. I will test it out and maybe get the 533.

Reply 11 of 13, by MusicOnCD

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leileilol wrote on 2025-04-22, 17:57:

I think Q3 would perform fine, but texture quality will obviously be dinged down as there's a few 512's and Voodoo3 can only go up to 256, not to mention the lack of RGBA8 so any of those shiny textures will be extremely banded.

Unreal is the most important to me out of those 3 games. When it comes to Q3, worse case scenario, I could put together an early 2000’s build and use that. I got some lower end AM2-era parts laying around which I know do perform pretty good with games up to like 2003-2004.

Reply 12 of 13, by H3nrik V!

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MusicOnCD wrote on 2025-04-22, 17:40:
byte_76 wrote on 2025-04-22, 15:21:

Maybe see if you can do that on your board.
Just be sure to use a decent cooler.

Well it’s a got 66 MHz FSB so I don’t really know how would I do overclocking on such a board. I’ve seen overclocking where people just change the FSB to 100 MHz but that’s obviously not possible here.

Some LX boards have 75MHz FSB (Some even 83, but that calls for issues with overclocked PCI bus and IDE controllers corrupting data and so on)

If it's dual it's kind of cool ... 😎

--- GA586DX --- P2B-DS --- BP6 ---

Please use the "quote" option if asking questions to what I write - it will really up the chances of me noticing 😀

Reply 13 of 13, by MusicOnCD

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H3nrik V! wrote on 2025-04-22, 21:39:
MusicOnCD wrote on 2025-04-22, 17:40:
byte_76 wrote on 2025-04-22, 15:21:

Maybe see if you can do that on your board.
Just be sure to use a decent cooler.

Well it’s a got 66 MHz FSB so I don’t really know how would I do overclocking on such a board. I’ve seen overclocking where people just change the FSB to 100 MHz but that’s obviously not possible here.

Some LX boards have 75MHz FSB (Some even 83, but that calls for issues with overclocked PCI bus and IDE controllers corrupting data and so on)

Well, reading the manual, I see it does actually say the first 3 DIP switches set the bus frequency. It shows switch combinations for 66, 68, 75 and 83Mhz