First the good news, it boots up! The BIOS read: 1B GHz! SCSI all working however 1 drive must have a broken motor because the tray wouldn't open...it was removed.

The bad, I bought some CL2 RAM but it wouldn't boot at 133MHz, even though it's rated 133MHz...funny the original RAM is rated CL3/133MHz & boots fine at CL2/133MHz!

Also the Geforce2 Pro is a no-go, wouldn't boot at all until I updated the firmware, then won't boot with the increased AGP speed...

I'm crazy, it was recently my b-day & I got some money so I bought a FX5950 Ultra for $60, top of the line, 🤣 I'll tell you if the FX5950 Ultra doesn't boot with AGP@89MHz you guys won't be hearing from me again!

Oh, I could boot with a Nvidia Vanta (cheap TNT card) & POST beeps a video error with the GF2@89MHz so it's def. the card.

Also decided not to go for SLI, there must be an engineering bug because the Voodoo2 dual card SLI configuration doesn't have any performance benefit at all!

Doubt the legacy games that the Voodoo will be used for will even support 1024x768 😜

Would be interesting to do the benchmarks with a 1GHz+ CPU to see if it has any effect...but as it stands I can't see any really benefit.

Your not in windows 2K or XP when you try those voodoo's out are you? I never got SLI working in there either. 98 on the other hand was flawless.

prophase_j wrote:

Your not in windows 2K or XP when you try those voodoo's out are you? I never got SLI working in there either. 98 on the other hand was flawless.

They are tests I found online, one is using a Mac machine, other I'm confident is Windows 98 PC, two very different systems, two very similar results. I will be using Windows 98 First Edition with all the updates, S.E. is heavier with no add features I will be using.

Could be many reasons why SLI, um, doesn't work?, maybe the OS(s) at the time didn't handle SLI well, more likely the games weren't designed for multi GPU processing maybe even the drivers or the CPU was the limiting factor.

What I can say is that although a lot of people talkin' bout how Voodoo2 SLI was sooo fast & how it could compete with the next generation V3 I have yet to see any proof that SLI had any performance benefit over 1 card.

I've seen the same thing with my Win98SE gaming machine. I have a 300 mhz MMX PII with two 12 mb Voodoo 2 PCI cards in SLI and get nothing extra. I've used them with both a 8 mb Matrox G200 and a 16 mb Diamond Stealth III (AGP cards). I even loaded the the newest driver from the 3dfx forums. I was told the MOBO probably couldn't work with SLI.

If you can run glide games in higher resolutions than 800x600 on your V2 SLI setup, it works alright. There are no faster frame rates to be gained, the point of the second V2 only was to increase the resolution.

There has to be a speed boost... The greyscale chart above looks suspiciously like it's running up against vsync frame rate issues. The 75 fps looks a lot like 75Hz. The ~38 fps results could be 1/2 Vsync due to double buffering.

On computers from the SLI era, you would probably be CPU-limited with V2 SLI. That would make it seem like there was no speed benefit. A G3 isn't exactly fast, nor is a Pentium II. Put something like a 1 GHz P3 together and things will be different.

Prophase_j has a fast system (relative to the GPU's) & an SLI setup 😀

A Quake test using Single/SLI would be interesting & put the debate to end..

Quake is for sissys. I play Unreal 😀 But yes, there is absolutely a difference. Using my copy of Unreal gold I get about 100fps average at 800x600, after disabling SLI I only get 55fps. I ran it with native 3Dfx support and the FastVoodoo 4.6 driver. I used the option to disable the SLI from the control panel.

EDIT: I also used 3Dmark99 to test the DirectX side of things, single card got 3231 and SLI got 5767.

Oh, just realized my last post was poorly phrased. I just wanted to say that SLI doesn't increase the frame rate on slow CPU's like a PII-300.

I agree that SLI yields higher frame rates, but only on fast machines.
The same goes for Voodoo5. With a 300 MHz CPU, enabling the second VSA100 core doesn't help much for the frame rate. At 1 GHz, there is a big difference.

COOL 😎

Do you notice much tearing?

5u3 wrote:

Oh, just realized my last post was poorly phrased. I just wanted to say that SLI doesn't increase the frame rate on slow CPU's like a PII-300.

I agree that SLI yields higher frame rates, but only on fast machines.
The same goes for Voodoo5. With a 300 MHz CPU, enabling the second VSA100 core doesn't help much for the frame rate. At 1 GHz, there is a big difference.

I know that a 300 mhz PII is slow. But the Voodoo 2 came out a year before the first PIII's. So they were designed with slower PII's in mind.

Got the FX5950, damn Canadian shipping to Australia is fasssttt, don't know why USA is so much slower...anyway I didn't connect the box to a monitor, didn't have time but POST beeps normally, so, haha, I guess I will be finishing this project 😁

I would have to say that the only really noticeable as far as visual artifacts comes from the gamma correction being cranked. I"m using a really crappy Sony Monitor and it all comes through really dark. Other than that I'll see de-interlacing if I really try, but over all I would have to say my V2 performance is top notch.

olemogamer wrote:

5u3 wrote:

Oh, just realized my last post was poorly phrased. I just wanted to say that SLI doesn't increase the frame rate on slow CPU's like a PII-300.

I agree that SLI yields higher frame rates, but only on fast machines.
The same goes for Voodoo5. With a 300 MHz CPU, enabling the second VSA100 core doesn't help much for the frame rate. At 1 GHz, there is a big difference.

I know that a 300 mhz PII is slow. But the Voodoo 2 came out a year before the first PIII's. So they were designed with slower PII's in mind.

Yes but the Voodoo2 was a high end part & dual V2's could be compared to dual CPU's, 2xPII might be able to keep up with it.

But nothing says that the CPU won't act as a bottleneck in a system even if it is the fastest available at the time.

olemogamer, why don't you try your V2's with a faster CPU?

The dual processor won't make any difference at all. Very few games at that point even supported it and Windows 98 is a uniprocessor operating system. I can only think of two games from that era that would have a benefit, that being Falcon 4.0 and Quake 3. I personally haven't had my Voodoos working (haven't tied much either) in SLI in XP, and only the NT based operating systems will see the second processor. Granted you would see a benefit when you're multitasking, but ultimately the single threaded game is facing the same bottleneck. I would even argue in some cases it may be worse, seeing as how the Pentium based boards share the FSB with themselves.

prophase_j wrote:

The dual processor won't make any difference at all. Very few games at that point even supported it and Windows 98 is a uniprocessor operating system.

It was just a comparison, we talked about the usefulness of dual CPU's earlier in the thread 😁

Yes it's getting long...but I think there has been very useful information pulled so far.

I should have Windows 98 First installed by today.

I remember my friend in Argentina who had a computer shop & always had high end, stable hardware running on his computer; SOYO motherboard, PIII CPU, TNT2 graphics, I'll never forget him clean formatting his computer, installing Windows 98, his drivers & after he restarted Boom! BSOD haha

MartinC wrote:

Yes but the Voodoo2 was a high end part & dual V2's could be compared to dual CPU's, 2xPII might be able to keep up with it. […]
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olemogamer wrote:

5u3 wrote:

Oh, just realized my last post was poorly phrased. I just wanted to say that SLI doesn't increase the frame rate on slow CPU's like a PII-300.

I agree that SLI yields higher frame rates, but only on fast machines.
The same goes for Voodoo5. With a 300 MHz CPU, enabling the second VSA100 core doesn't help much for the frame rate. At 1 GHz, there is a big difference.

I know that a 300 mhz PII is slow. But the Voodoo 2 came out a year before the first PIII's. So they were designed with slower PII's in mind.

Yes but the Voodoo2 was a high end part & dual V2's could be compared to dual CPU's, 2xPII might be able to keep up with it.

But nothing says that the CPU won't act as a bottleneck in a system even if it is the fastest available at the time.

olemogamer, why don't you try your V2's with a faster CPU?

I currently don't have anything else to put them in. My next level up PC is a 3 ghz hyperthreaded P4 with a HD3850 in it. And then there's my gaming rig! 😀
I have been looking for a PIII with Windows 98SE. But so many people have mucked them up by putting XP on them and I just don't have the time to set those up for Windows 98. And quite frankly, I don't have many games that need glide. I found that most "glide" games run really well in the DX 7 - 9 cards I own.

Most Glide games work with DGVoodoo or Zeckensack's wrapper too. The DOSBOX with Glide support will run a few DOS glide games too, with dgvoodoo as the wrapper working in concert with it.

Kkk, booted up:

Does anyone know how to install Windows 98 on a SCSI HDD drive? I don't see a chance to load SCSI drivers when booting the Windows 98 setup CD 😜