First post, by SuperHanSolo
Hi Guys
First thing I really love reading about your retro builds on this forum.
Anyway Ive built myself a retro PC, I spent many years collecting new old stock and buying good condition old parts and i used the best parts i could from what i could find.
My system specs are:
AMD K6-2 500 @ 550Mhz 2.4V
Mitac 5114VU motherboard with the VIA MV4P chipset
2x128MB PC100 (1X Kingston, 1X Generic)
Creative Nvidia Geforce 2MX 32MB PCI
1x Western Digital 10GB IDE HDD
1x Western Digital 8GB IDE HDD
Hewlett Packard CD Writer Plus 8100
Sony 3.5" Floppy Drive
Chenbro Gaming Bomb Case (I plan to paint it Playstation 1 grey)
Hunt Key CP350 ATX PSU
I built it to run games and benchmarks from the late 90s to early 2000s, and i installed Windows 98SE on it so i could also have DOS mode. It ran very well on XP but the OS wasnt ideal for older games.
It has an issue that i havent been able to solve, at times when under heavy load (particularly 3DMark 2000 Demo) it suddenly slows down and i get static and blips from the audio. Its always at the same point in 3Dmark 2000 that it happens (the indoor pool scene). It seems like a PCI bus traffic issue and ive tried different BIOS settings, chipset drivers and video/audio drivers with little success. The biggest improvement came from enabling PCI Delay transaction in the BIOS. I know VIA were notorious for PCI issues so thats what i think is the problem. Moving the GFX card to different slots had no effect.
It seems to play games fine, and strangely enough 3Dmark2001 doesnt seem to suffer as badly as 2000.
I was planning to buy a K6-III 450 and more RAM but i dont want to unless i can figure out whats going wrong here since if it really is a PCI bus issue, i might have to buy a new board with AGP.
Im thinking of adding a discrete sound board (sound blaster) to see if it helps, but i know the Sound Blaster Live! was known to make PCI bus traffic worse.
Anybody willing to comment or help 😀
Win 98 Retro PC: AMD K6-2+ @ 550mhz, Mitac 5114VU motherboard, 256MB RAM, Radeon 7000 PCI 64MB DDR
Win 95 Retro PC: Intel Pentium 233mmx, Elpina M571 motherboard, 32MB EDO RAM, Voodoo 3 2000 16MB PCI
Main PC: AMD Ryzen 7700x, 32GB DDR5-6000, Geforce 3080