nice machine!!! smells NOS 🤣

Nice socket 3 box.

Have you tried any other 3d games with it?

keropi wrote:

nice machine!!! smells NOS 🤣

yeah...it's too white and shiney 😉

I have played Need for Speed II in 3dfx mode and it plays pretty good, as well as GTA 1 in 3dfx mode. I plan on trying Hexen II next to see how it does. When I have some time I plan on running some Quake benchmarks and posting them up as I'm sure everyone is curious. As mentioned above, I'm thinking about putting a PCI Voodoo 3 in the system so I can free up a PCI slot for an add-on PCI IDE card. The SIS disk controller is terrible, and the only time the PC really becomes slow is when trying to move large files around due to the lack of DMA mode and probably bus-mastering as well. Access to a USB flash drive is far faster and seemingly less CPU intensive then accessing the hard drives. I'm wondering what PCI IDE cards out there will work with PCI 2.0 compliant slots though?

I've run a Promise Ultra66 and SATA150TX2 in a 486. I had a SATA drive in a 486 heh. 😀

But you never can be sure what will work in 486 PCI slots because of how bad the chipsets usually were. Hell, even Intel's PCI chipsets for Socket 7 were picky.

Nice work with the ties! Both nice clean machines.
Case has a nice face but I hate how the front case fan mounts, had one like that before.

That is one wicked hot rod of a 486. I mean, your surfing the net, and listening to music? Nice. I'd play old school mechwarrior on it all day long 😀

I think I would go with SCSI over PCI IDE, as that's about the only thing left if you really want to pimp it out. PCI SATA might be good if you can get it working, but I think SCSI will give you better compatibility and performance. Unless you want to have a large disk, bigger than 74 gigs or so, in which case price will likely be the deciding factor as big SCSI drives can get VERY expensive.

What OS are you running, Win98?

I'm running a very stripped down version of Win98SE, using the program called '98lite'. I'm actually even using the Win95 file explorer too, as the program allows you to get away from the more resource hungry Win98 explorer. This program is cool, as it allows you to strip away alot of the extra stuff that isn't needed, yet allows enough functionality that you can still get modern software running such as the Opera browser. See here: http://www.litepc.com/98lite.html

I never got Opera to run well on my 486. The best browser I could use? Seamonkey. Fastest? OffByOne. Both in Win98SE and Win2000.
Even worse is trying to find a Java Runtime that'll work well (yes, for those kind of sites). For 98SE I stuck to the msjava vm, since that appears to be much faster than Sun's.

I know a Voodoo2 will work on a PCI 486 motherboard, and some games from the early-to-mid '98 era run quite well. Particularily, Battlezone. Since you have the ludicrous amounts of ram RAM, you can get Unreal going without much swapping going on.

I'm speaking from experience of a AMD 5x86, though. That floating point juice in that penty there will help Unreal obviously.

There's no way Unreal 1 would run playably on a 486. Quake 1 is just playable on a 486DX4-120 (although with software rendering).

I did once install Linux on a 486DX4-120 and ran 2 instances of Quake 1 and networked them together, but it wasn't really playable.

I tried Unreal on my Pentium 200 when the Voodoo2's released in 98'. Pretty much unplayable to me until I dropped a second one in (borrowed 😒). I wasn't ready to play Unreal until I paired the Voodoo2 with a Celeron 300A@450.

No way would I attempt to play Unreal on a 486 unless of course, that's all I would ever have.

I first played it on my PII-450 (450MHz Pentium II) with an nVidia TNT1 16MB AGP and it had problems because the Direct3D renderer in Unreal 1 was pretty rough at the time. Eventually they smoothed things out and it ran quite well.

Dude... MP3 files, while surfing on the latest Opera?
Not even my 2.4 GHZ Celeron with 1.5 gigs of RAM
can't do those two without major problems, and
I use Norton 2009 daily to scan for viruses...
Your pretty lucky man, great job on building that
machine, and you say you can surf the web without problems? That is a very decent setup you have there,
by the way, I didn't know a 486 could do all that...

NICE! music and web with 83mhz is cool.

cdoublejj wrote:

NICE! music and web with 83mhz is cool.

Save energy!

Yeah I dunno, a couple of years ago my mobo bit the dust and I was left with running my retro win98 rig, but upgraded it temporarily to use as my main rig till I built a new system. The upgrades included at celeron @800mhz, 256mb ram, geforce 5200 128mb. The net SEEMED SO SLOW compared to my dead dual core that I was about to pull my hair out waiting for my new equipment to arrive.

I can browse the web on my Pentium 200, which isn't bad mind you cause I'm just playing, But it would be a pain in the arse if I was trying to get some work done. 😵

hhm internet seems alright on my 98 machine, 1 ghz 256mb gfx card and 512 ram.

Mike, you need to get rid of Norton 2009, that is probably most of your problem! That 2.4 celly with that much much RAM should surf great, it seems like the newer versions of Norton act much like a virus infection themselves! Switch to ESET NOD32 or Microsoft Security Essentials!

Yeah, the 486 surprises me with what it can do, although you do have to a little patient with it 🤣 . I have removed the voodoo card and switched to a Diamond Stealth 3D with the S3 Virge chipset and 4MB of memory. It seems to be more compatible and better performing in DOS then the Cirrus Logic card, and quite frankly the system just doesn't have enough power to really use the voodoo outside of a few early games like Quake. I have also replaced the AWE64 with an original Sound Blaster 16 that isn't even PNP capable, MIDI is much better now!!!!!!!!

My next step is to experiment again with my combo PCI SATA / USB 2.0 card to see if I can get a small SATA drive running on the system and see if I can get DMA support. Not sure if it will work though!

386DX40 wrote:

I have also replaced the AWE64 with an original Sound Blaster 16 that isn't even PNP capable, MIDI is much better now!!!!!!!!

Is that possible? Do i need to swap my 64 out for a 16? I'm gonna have to do some sound tests.