Issues with memory speeds on Gigabyte K8NF-9

Posted on 2023-05-30, 00:53

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by athlon_p0wer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I will soon be upgrading the Athlon 64 3400+ Venice in this build to an Athlon 64 3500+ Venice to use all the available bandwidth in my motherboard (800MHz HT vs 1000MHz HT). In order to do that though, I need to make sure my RAM is at the correct speeds as well. I have 2GB total of Super Talent …

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2 New Machines, 3 Refreshes

Posted on 2023-05-23, 09:38

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by athlon_p0wer

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

I recently scored a TON of hardware from Facebook Marketplace, with 7 different computers (1 Dell Dimension 3000, the rest were system builder PCs). 6 Of these system builder cases were from 2000-2004, and all of those are beige. All had motherboards, not all had RAM or hard drives, but most did, …

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Re: First Ever "Magic Smoke" Experience

Posted on 2022-12-31, 19:50

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by athlon_p0wer

in Milliways

in Milliways

Why would they put all those fan headers in there if the controller couldn't handle it? I've had other 440BX boards with three fan headers and ran all three (CPU, intake, exhaust) at the same time and never had any issues, so it must be something specific to that board, maybe the fan controller just …

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Re: First Ever "Magic Smoke" Experience

Posted on 2022-12-30, 22:47

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by athlon_p0wer

in Milliways

in Milliways

I've had a PSU die on me while I was playing Garry's Mod on my main rig back in 2015. It stunk of ozone badly, but never smoked and also never damaged any components. Can't remember the brand, some cheap thing that came out of my mom's old gaming PC she bought from a local computer store. Of course …

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Re: First Ever "Magic Smoke" Experience

Posted on 2022-12-29, 03:06

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by athlon_p0wer

in Milliways

in Milliways

Thank you mkarcher, I'll see if I can get a multimeter and test that out. Best case scenario is that the riser card is fine, and I can use it to put a sound card back in the machine (likely another Vibra 16s). I've never tried soldering before, so I'm not sure that I could replace the cap on the …

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First Ever "Magic Smoke" Experience

Posted on 2022-12-28, 01:37

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by athlon_p0wer

in Milliways

in Milliways

I've been tinkering around with old computers for years now, and I've never had a computer component smoke on me. It startled me quite a bit, and I unplugged the thing as fast as I could but the damage was already done. The sound card started quietly crackling and shot out a fair bit of black smoke, …

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Issues using external PCI soundcards

Posted on 2022-09-23, 02:25

by

by athlon_p0wer

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I've been trying to upgrade my Gateway Essential 500c to play late 90s games smoothly, and so far I have worked out most of the issues in the system. It seems now that it doesn't like to use external PCI sound cards, as during driver installation, under both Windows 98 SE and Windows XP SP2, the …

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Re: Strange Quake Performance Issues

Posted on 2022-09-13, 17:41

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by athlon_p0wer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Here, your Quake is running under software rendering or hardware accelerated 3d ? It's odd because even in software rendering, your 9250 PCI graphics card should be more than enough to have good results. I'm running Quake under software rendering in DOS at the moment, though I'll be running it …

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Re: Strange Quake Performance Issues

Posted on 2022-09-13, 08:35

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by athlon_p0wer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I think its a integrated videocard with shared memory specific. Try to maximize RAM speed or add i810 videoram cache module/chip if its possible. I would try but I honestly have no soldering skills, let alone soldering something that small. As far as RAM goes, I have all the latency options …

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Re: Strange Quake Performance Issues

Posted on 2022-09-13, 08:16

by

by athlon_p0wer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've just ran all of Sisoft Sandra's benchmarks, as well as 3DMark 99, and the CPU performs exactly as it should in both cases. Maybe this isn't computer specific, but rather Quake specific?

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Re: Strange Quake Performance Issues

Posted on 2022-09-13, 06:36

by

by athlon_p0wer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I tried fastvid and am now seeing 29FPS, which seems to be closer to that of a Pentium II 300, so major progress has been made, I am very thankful for the help. I feel like this is closer to what I should be seeing on the Celeron. [EDIT] Just reinstalled the Pentium III, and it runs at 42FPS with …

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Re: Strange Quake Performance Issues

Posted on 2022-09-13, 05:07

by

by athlon_p0wer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

MTRRLFBE was able to initialize when I used the parameters "VGA," and "WC," but it had no impact on performance, still at exactly 14 FPS.

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Re: Strange Quake Performance Issues

Posted on 2022-09-13, 04:34

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by athlon_p0wer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

DosFreak wrote on 2022-09-13, 01:04: If you want something newer you can try MTRRLFBE as well http://rayer.g6.cz/programm/programe.htm Thank you. I'll try this and see if maybe it just has something to do with that.

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Re: Strange Quake Performance Issues

Posted on 2022-09-13, 00:52

by

by athlon_p0wer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

seems normal, you can speed it up with fastvid https://www.philscomputerlab.com/dos-graphics-boost.html According to these benchmarks, a Pentium 200 gets around 16FPS with the same settings, I'm getting 14 with a Celeron 500, maybe he has fastvid running but I didn't see that anywhere on there. …

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Strange Quake Performance Issues

Posted on 2022-09-13, 00:32

by

by athlon_p0wer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I am attempting to rework and upgrade an old Gateway Essential 500 PC into a Windows 98/DOS gaming machine, and have bought a Pentium III 1000 for it, as an upgrade from the Celeron 500 it came with. Right now, the biggest issue I've ran into is that while running some preliminary tests, which …

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Re: Question on PC133 RAM Speeds

Posted on 2022-08-26, 04:17

by

by athlon_p0wer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You might want to check if the 810e integrated video is still enabled and stealing memory bandwidth. Most boards will let you toggle between PCI and onboard in the BIOS. However, some ultra cheap 810 boards keep the integrated video running even when there's a PCI video card installed, with no way …

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Re: Question on PC133 RAM Speeds

Posted on 2022-08-26, 02:20

by

by athlon_p0wer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I wouldn't read to much into Memtest's "benchmark". I find that it can vary quite a lot even between runs. Granted it can give some indication if you have bad timings. Thank you, I had tried to lower all the available timings to 2 (you can if you jumper the BIOS into the configuration mode) but …

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Question on PC133 RAM Speeds

Posted on 2022-08-26, 01:14

by

by athlon_p0wer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I recently got a Gateway Essential 500c from a family member, and I've been trying to upgrade it to play Windows 98 games and potentially some slightly newer games. I'm running memtest86 to make sure the RAM is okay, and I noticed that the RAM speed is only 235MB/s, which, if I'm remembering …

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Re: Questions on startup menu for Windows 95

Posted on 2022-03-14, 22:19

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by athlon_p0wer

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I managed to get it working, I'm not sure what I did differently but it's going smoothly now. I think I can sum this up to user error on my part. Thank you for the help!

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Re: Questions on startup menu for Windows 95

Posted on 2022-03-12, 21:09

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by athlon_p0wer

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I think the first step would be to post your autoexec.bat, config.sys and msdos.sys. Usually setting bootGUI=0 in msdos.sys will be enough to preventing win95 to load automatically. My guesses for it not working for you would be: 1-Did you remove the read-only attribute on msdos.sys before changing …

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