Your rig looks quite similar to my very first computer ever (except I decided to get a TNT instead of V2). You can't really go wrong with teh BX 😁

And welcome into the light! I look forward to reading more about you (and your rigs 😁)

Nice retro suff 😁

Quantum fireball ... You can hardly go more kickass when naming a hard drive. I had the 1.2 gb version back then.

Thats a spicy meatball you got there.

If you could, drop ECC-Registered as data isn't mission critical and can gain some performance without it. Get a bigger monitor, my eyes would kill me on 14".

I'm more than likely out of my depth on the soundblaster but I would think that SB Pro 2.0 compatibility with games would support a larger amount of games than the SB16. Although I ordered a SB16 ISA (CT2940) for my S7 rig the other day.

Also as I'm finding it seems some games may have better support with a Voodoo 2 card over a Voodoo 3. Although I fell in love with my Voodoo 3 machine TBH.

Nice comp, sounds VERY CLOSE to my own P2 rig (which has a slightly better Voodoo3 and a slightly worse P2).

except I run Windows 🙁

jwt27 wrote:

It runs just about anything perfectly, from Crystal Caves to Carmageddon 😀

What do you guys think of it? Hot or Not? 🤣

An old rig that does what you want it to perfectly is always welcome around here.

'course once you start tinkering around and trying to build the 'perfect' retro rig, it becomes a never ending cycle 😉 ....

You can run ECC memory without it doing it's ECC thing. I don't think running ECC memory as non-ECC still is slower then non-ECC memory, correct me if I'm wrong.

sgt76 wrote:

jwt27 wrote:

It runs just about anything perfectly, from Crystal Caves to Carmageddon 😀

What do you guys think of it? Hot or Not? 🤣

An old rig that does what you want it to perfectly is always welcome around here.

'course once you start tinkering around and trying to build the 'perfect' retro rig, it becomes a never ending cycle 😉 ....

Exactly, there is no "1 rig does it all" rig. That's why I just build heaps of rigs.
If I'm having a LAN party with friends and one of my rigs refuses to run some game for whatever problem, I just say "Just grab another computer from the stack" 😜
It's faster to just try another rig then to try and fix a problem when you're trying to have fun, I do the fixing when I'm by myself, or just accept the rig has a slight limitation.

Last weekend we wanted to play "Z", but it wouldn't really run on XP (I know about the XP patch) so I'm going to build me a couple ME rigs, for LANning games like Z, Quake II, Interstate and maybe Dune 2000 and C&C 😁

Thank you all for your replies 😀

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

Thats a spicy meatball you got there. […]
Show full quote

Thats a spicy meatball you got there.

If you could, drop ECC-Registered as data isn't mission critical and can gain some performance without it. Get a bigger monitor, my eyes would kill me on 14".

I'm more than likely out of my depth on the soundblaster but I would think that SB Pro 2.0 compatibility with games would support a larger amount of games than the SB16. Although I ordered a SB16 ISA (CT2940) for my S7 rig the other day.

Also as I'm finding it seems some games may have better support with a Voodoo 2 card over a Voodoo 3. Although I fell in love with my Voodoo 3 machine TBH.

I put the ECC RAM in because those were the only two working 128MB sticks I had lying around. I also have some 256 and 512MB ram sticks which my BIOS detects as 128 and 256MB. The rest is all 64MB and 32MB junk.
Do you think the performance boost with normal RAM would be noticable?

I think the monitor is actually very good for DOS gaming. Games that would look pixelated on a 17" screen look great on this thing. The only problem it has is the brightness control, it keeps changing every few minutes.

And the SB16, you're saying that it doesn't have SBPro2 support? I always thought the SB series were pretty much backwards compatible.

I haven't had any problems with the Voodoo3 card as of yet, except with the 3Dfx versions of Blood and Shadow Warrior, they don't run at all. But I don't care about that, the Build engine was never really made for Glide anyway.
Do you know specifically which games would run better on a Voodoo2?
The card I used before this one was a Voodoo Banshee, and I can't say I notice any preformance difference between the two. I guess my CPU is the bottleneck here.

sgt76 wrote:

jwt27 wrote:

It runs just about anything perfectly, from Crystal Caves to Carmageddon 😀

What do you guys think of it? Hot or Not? 🤣

An old rig that does what you want it to perfectly is always welcome around here.

'course once you start tinkering around and trying to build the 'perfect' retro rig, it becomes a never ending cycle 😉 ....

Well, there are some exceptions ofcourse. I already know that the perfect DOS machine does not exist. My experience is that once you have one game running like it should, there's always some other game that stops working. 😒

Sorry, I mean just disable ECC from BIOS if you can.

Love gaming on my 21" CRT monitor, was playing Redneck Rampage on it @ 1024x768 last night. abit a lil slowdown so I'll probably drop it down to 800x600.

For the brightness issue. Is the brightness control a rotating knob? If so try this. Unplug the monitor power cord. rotate the knob back and forth fully for a few minutes. See if problem goes away. Sounds like the control has oxidization and needs cleaned (hence this trick). If this doesn't fix it might need to get some contact cleaner/lube on the knob.

On the SB, reading on other threads it seems like others like compatibility of SBPro over SB16. I was reading that SB16 can support SBpro digital effects only in mono. Depending on what games you play this might not mean anything.

re-reading your OP, I see there is no windows OS installed, only dos. I was meaning V2 is a bit more supported than V3 in some windows games. Although I'm thinking some games like Tomb Raider maybe better supported under V2 in dos.

Edit: On my voodoo 2 I did get Shadow Warrior and blood working with the 3dfx patch, not worth it though.

Yeah the SB16 isn't "officially" backwards compatible with the SB PRO, only original SB. I'm not sure which games are affected though. I've run heaps of games with my CT2800 and haven't run into any problems.

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

Sorry, I mean just disable ECC from BIOS if you can.

I could try that, but how much of a performance improvement do you think I can expect?

Love gaming on my 21" CRT monitor, was playing Redneck Rampage on it @ 1024x768 last night. abit a lil slowdown so I'll probably drop it down to 800x600.

For the brightness issue. Is the brightness control a rotating knob? If so try this. Unplug the monitor power cord. rotate the knob back and forth fully for a few minutes. See if problem goes away. Sounds like the control has oxidization and needs cleaned (hence this trick). If this doesn't fix it might need to get some contact cleaner/lube on the knob.

The control pot stil works smoothly like it should, so I don't think that's the problem.
When I turn it on, the screen goes from black to normal in a few seconds, then it slowly gets brighter and brighter. Then I turn the brightness down to normal and everything is fine for a few minutes. After that becomes darker again, I turn the brightness up, and after a few minutes it is too bright again. This keeps repeating for about half an hour before it finally reaches a stable level.
I was thinking it could be some bad capacitor somewhere, or the tube might be dying already. Judging from the amout of light it produces, however, I don't think that is the case.

On the SB, reading on other threads it seems like others like compatibility of SBPro over SB16. I was reading that SB16 can support SBpro digital effects only in mono. Depending on what games you play this might not mean anything.

I think most games I have support SB16 mode, but I'm not sure. I'll check that first, I couldn't possibly live without stereo. But then, 8bit at 22khz isn't exactly great either. 😐

re-reading your OP, I see there is no windows OS installed, only dos. I was meaning V2 is a bit more supported than V3 in some windows games. Although I'm thinking some games like Tomb Raider maybe better supported under V2 in dos.

Havent'had any problems running Tomb Raider yet, framerate is almost always at 30fps (and that's where the frame limiter kicks in). GTA and Carmageddon run fine as well, although Carma is a bit slow at times, but I think I can blame the CPU for that.

Edit: On my voodoo 2 I did get Shadow Warrior and blood working with the 3dfx patch, not worth it though.

Just what I expected 😎

I just discovered SpeedSys, and of course I immediately tried it out on this machine:

Also tried disabling ECC to see if it was any faster, here's the result...

Yes, very cool benchmark tool!

It just helped me realize how much my 486 build sucked 🤣

I remember reading reviews back in the day about non-ECC memory was usually 5% faster. Just googling and found a crucial memory page saying newer memory is 2% slower with ECC.

Back in the day 5% could be the difference of running CAS3 vs CAS2 speeds.

Dunno, maybe someone else can bench ECC vs. Non-ECC and see if speedsys shows improvement. I don't have any ECC memory though.

Either way, only a small improvement.

Can you adjust the multiplier on your Pentium II 350?
There are a few DOS games that prefer 200MHz or lower, with multiplier and FSB adjustments you can go there.

There should be no difference between ECC and non-ECC. The difference will be between unbuffered (usually non-ECC) and registered (usually with ECC).

gerwin wrote:

Can you adjust the multiplier on your Pentium II 350?
There are a few DOS games that prefer 200MHz or lower, with multiplier and FSB adjustments you can go there.

You mean the runtime error 200 bug? That can usually be fixed with patch programs. The multiplier on this cpu is locked so I can only adjust the FSB (from 66 to 133), so there's no way of downclocking it below 233MHz.

I think 350MHz is a good all-round speed, old games don't run too fast and newer games are not too slow. Except for Carmageddon and Magic Carpet on max settings, they do not run very smooth.

GL1zdA wrote:

There should be no difference between ECC and non-ECC. The difference will be between unbuffered (usually non-ECC) and registered (usually with ECC).

When I get my SDRAM back (a friend borrowed it) I'll benchmark it against some unbuffered RAM 😀

jwt27 wrote:

You mean the runtime error 200 bug? That can usually be fixed with patch programs. The multiplier on this cpu is locked so I can only adjust the FSB (from 66 to 133), so there's no way of downclocking it below 233MHz.

I think 350MHz is a good all-round speed, old games don't run too fast and newer games are not too slow. Except for Carmageddon and Magic Carpet on max settings, they do not run very smooth.

That runtime 200 bug yes, I was aware of the patch, but also:
- Some sierra games: have malfunctioning soundblaster detection above 200MHz.
- Dune 2: gives me no speech above 333MHz
- Star Control 1: Adlib sound malfunctions above 150MHz.
- Then some games just run too fast and can benefit from lower system speed in combination with Throttle/Moslo etc.

Still I agree, most DOS games I tested work fine at a speed like 400MHz.

It seems Carmageddon runs fine at 200MHz when using 3DFX acceleration on a voodoo 3.

gerwin wrote:

That runtime 200 bug yes, I was aware of the patch, but also: - Some sierra games: have malfunctioning soundblaster detection ab […]
Show full quote

jwt27 wrote:

You mean the runtime error 200 bug? That can usually be fixed with patch programs. The multiplier on this cpu is locked so I can only adjust the FSB (from 66 to 133), so there's no way of downclocking it below 233MHz.

I think 350MHz is a good all-round speed, old games don't run too fast and newer games are not too slow. Except for Carmageddon and Magic Carpet on max settings, they do not run very smooth.

That runtime 200 bug yes, I was aware of the patch, but also:
- Some sierra games: have malfunctioning soundblaster detection above 200MHz.
- Dune 2: gives me no speech above 333MHz
- Star Control 1: Adlib sound malfunctions above 150MHz.
- Then some games just run too fast and can benefit from lower system speed in combination with Throttle/Moslo etc.

Still I agree, most DOS games I tested work fine at a speed like 400MHz.

It seems Carmageddon runs fine at 200MHz when using 3DFX acceleration on a voodoo 3.

There are indeed a few games that won't detect a soundblaster on my system, or only sometimes, and slowdown utilities don't help. Not sure if it's a speed issue, or maybe these only work on a real SB card.

Carmageddon runs very well and is perfectly playable, yes, but setting the FSB to 133 improves FPS a lot and makes it runs much smoother. Same with Magic Carpet and Build engine games. I'm thinking of installing a P3-450 or 600 for these games but I'm afraid it will break others.

Nice system indeed. And it's nice to see a flavour of DOS playing a main role. 😁

And welcome!