It was a community decided build. The masses wanted a hodgepodge of hardware and software, and that's what they got. It's made me look at building an efficient ME rig, and really made me remember how bad group thought can be. I can't wait for the next series. This was a brilliant concept by Phil, and I hope he keeps it going.

appiah4 wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

This PC is probably the biggest waste of an Athlon 1GHz CPU ever.. 😀

Why is that?

The Kyro II alone makes it weird enough, but then we have Windows Me; it's really like something my clueless friends would probably have bought from a similarly clueless computer builder circa 2000.

Well, if you're looking for a place to only find cookiecutter builds, you've found the wrong place..

I happened to also read your thread about you loving 2k so much and you don't come across as someone who knows what he's talking about when talking about Windows OSs. You're mixing up personal favorites with facts, that doesn't work very well. Especially when stating this biggest waste of an Athlon like it's supposed to be some fact, you're talking rubbish.

Arctic wrote:

I loved my Kyro II back in the day.
What a great, efficient design!

I cannot wait to produce a video review on this card. Efficiency is the key word here and when you look at the number of transistors and memory bandwidth this card has, it's really amazing. Such a shame we didn't get to see Kyro III.

Kodai wrote:

It was a community decided build. The masses wanted a hodgepodge of hardware and software, and that's what they got. It's made me look at building an efficient ME rig, and really made me remember how bad group thought can be. I can't wait for the next series. This was a brilliant concept by Phil, and I hope he keeps it going.

I very much enjoyed it and forces me to use parts and combinations I likely wouldn't have picked, which I find very interesting and fun. And I will be doing videos over the next week or so that cover some of the other options and / or address common questions that I noticed in the comments, with surprising outcomes maybe, so stay tuned 😁

Tetrium wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

The Kyro II alone makes it weird enough, but then we have Windows Me; it's really like something my clueless friends would probably have bought from a similarly clueless computer builder circa 2000.

Well, if you're looking for a place to only find cookiecutter builds, you've found the wrong place..

I happened to also read your thread about you loving 2k so much and you don't come across as someone who knows what he's talking about when talking about Windows OSs. You're mixing up personal favorites with facts, that doesn't work very well. Especially when stating this biggest waste of an Athlon like it's supposed to be some fact, you're talking rubbish.

I just respectfully disagree that this was an effective build today or back in the day (as did many other viewers apparently). Kyro II released in what, 2001, and Athlon 1GHz was a top of the line CPU still at the time - I don't know who would pair that CPU with a crippled budget CPU; it's fun for a novel retro build but a waste of the Athlon 1GHz regardless, which Phil can probably demonstrate by running the Kyro II with a much slower CPU and show how GPU bottlenecked the system probably is. I already stopped talking about Windows Me in the other thread four days ago and as you already stated there "to each his own", so please don't make it personal I have no beef with you or anyone, nor a desire to prove any knowledge of any OS. You are free to disregard my opinion, but the remark was very uncalled for nonetheless.

Athlon 1000 and Kyro II running some games: https://youtu.be/D_CPYUvTK9g

Games featured:

Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Clive Barker's Undying
1nsane
Deus Ex
Dungeon Keeper 2
Half-Life: Uplink
Max Payne
Dark Forces II
Evolva

2:40 look at the right arm, interesting game bug or driver glitch 😀

appiah4 wrote:

2:40 look at the right arm, interesting game bug or driver glitch 😀

First time running this game for me, so maybe someone else familiar with the game knows more?

That was fun to watch, thanks Phil.

I remember playing Undying back in the day and thought it was terrifying. Now it seems almost comical. 😀

I was able to find the SD to IDE card. Bought two on ebay from China

appiah4 wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

The Kyro II alone makes it weird enough, but then we have Windows Me; it's really like something my clueless friends would probably have bought from a similarly clueless computer builder circa 2000.

Well, if you're looking for a place to only find cookiecutter builds, you've found the wrong place..

I happened to also read your thread about you loving 2k so much and you don't come across as someone who knows what he's talking about when talking about Windows OSs. You're mixing up personal favorites with facts, that doesn't work very well. Especially when stating this biggest waste of an Athlon like it's supposed to be some fact, you're talking rubbish.

I just respectfully disagree that this was an effective build today or back in the day (as did many other viewers apparently). Kyro II released in what, 2001, and Athlon 1GHz was a top of the line CPU still at the time - I don't know who would pair that CPU with a crippled budget CPU; it's fun for a novel retro build but a waste of the Athlon 1GHz regardless, which Phil can probably demonstrate by running the Kyro II with a much slower CPU and show how GPU bottlenecked the system probably is. I already stopped talking about Windows Me in the other thread four days ago and as you already stated there "to each his own", so please don't make it personal I have no beef with you or anyone, nor a desire to prove any knowledge of any OS. You are free to disregard my opinion, but the remark was very uncalled for nonetheless.

I do agree with you that the Kyro II needing a speedy CPU is kinda a waste, but to us this doesn't really matter.
People've put Voodoo 2s in Pentium 4s just so the Voodoo 2s would perform better. Yes it's weird and no it was probably not a logical thing to do back in the days.

But these days it doesn't matter. Main thing is that it works and I think Kyro is an interesting piece of hardware 😀

If the Kyro II needs a faster CPU and one would want to use that faster CPU with a graphics card that will perform better? Then go ahead and don't get a Kyro II. There's almost a fan for anything that's retro (I've actually been a fan of Geforce MX and TNT2 M64 for years now). Now the VIA C3...that CPU was burned into the ground by well..basically almost everyone. And now it's slowness is actually a benefit, along with the knowledge that it can be slowed down by software.

Tetrium wrote:

But these days it doesn't matter. Main thing is that it works and I think Kyro is an interesting piece of hardware 😀

Yes it is. There are still traces of Kyro II architecture in modern phones almost 2 decades later and they will be for years to come. I know because I worked both on Kyro HW/SW design and modern embedded GPU that use tile based rendering HW/SW design. In large overdraw frames Kyro's TBR did very well due to only rendering 1 fragment per pixel (when no transparency was present) which no GPU was doing at the time. I like to think of Kyro's architecture as smart but slow compared to the time's nVidia that was dumb but fast.

That's pretty much how it was. GeForce 2 used brute force. Huge chip, lots of transistors, fast DDR memory, massive bandwidth and throwing brute force at the problem.

Kyro II was efficient, small chip, slow SDR memory, rendered only what's actually visible. Because it worked with smaller tiles, it could use very fast on-chip memory to do stuff, rather than having to use the much slower VRAM. This all led to the Kyro II beating the GeForce 2 in quite a few games!

I will have a video comparing both of them soon 😀

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Athlon 1000 and Kyro II running some games: https://youtu.be/D_CPYUvTK9g

Switch from FRAPS to MSI Afterburner. OSD comes unconfigured, setup with settings>monitoring tab>select item from list>select show in On-Screen Display checkbox at the bottom for all that you want to display. On-Screen Display tab will show what the toggle key is.

awgamer wrote:

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Athlon 1000 and Kyro II running some games: https://youtu.be/D_CPYUvTK9g

Switch from FRAPS to MSI Afterburner. OSD comes unconfigured, setup with settings>monitoring tab>select item from list>select show in On-Screen Display checkbox at the bottom for all that you want to display. On-Screen Display tab will show what the toggle key is.

Why? Also I don't understand what you're saying.

I think I tried it once and it wouldn't install under Windows 9x.

Why because you get more than just FPS but since it's 9x I guess nevermind.

MSI Afterburner would be a great idea if you're using WinXP and upwards, it really gives you a lot of information such as CPU Usage, VRAM and RAM usage, frametimes, GPU temperature and so on.

Would be freaking great to have something like it for Win9x.

F2bnp wrote:

MSI Afterburner would be a great idea if you're using WinXP and upwards, it really gives you a lot of information such as CPU Usage, VRAM and RAM usage, frametimes, GPU temperature and so on.

Would be freaking great to have something like it for Win9x.

Yes it does, I've used it in a few Windows XP projects 😀

Ran some benchmarks to see if there is a difference between 98 SE and ME in games: https://youtu.be/DvnQBsuXrt0

Plus some Re-Volt gameplay in the background 😀

Watched it 😀

Interesting (or funny if one would prefer that 😜) to see that in the end, both OSs turn out to perform exactly the same 🤣
The quick WinME boot times are always nice though and a fun way to impress retro computing n00bs who think that

I wonder how these OSs will run when tweaked, but on hardware this 'recent' it might not matter that much.
I had a laugh when I saw the pic of the wresting arms 😁

I was hoping for a more interesting outcome, but sometimes there just isn't much to talk about 😀