First post, by Standard Def Steve
Another week, another PC thread. 😀
I built this machine around a year ago to replace an Athlon XP 2000+ system based on a crappy (and now dead) ECS board. At first I thought it would be a slight downgrade in CPU performance, but a PIII-S on a hopped up FSB actually outperforms an Athlon XP 2000+ that's stuck with PC133!
I had a lot of fun building and tweaking this machine and learned quite a bit in the process. I guess the biggest surprise was how much the VIA chipset didn't suck! Besides showing you guys a bunch of photos, I'll also post some video playback results. Yes, software-decoded 720p H.264 is possible on a fast P3.
First, the specs:
-Pentium III-S 1400 @ 1600MHz (152MHz FSB). Had to push the voltage up to 1.5v to achieve complete stability.
EDIT: I now run the CPU at 1585MHz (151MHz FSB) because the L1 cache actually runs faster at this speed. More details (and Cachechk benchmarks) can be found on page 2.
-Asus TUV4x motherboard, based on the VIA Apollo Pro 133T (aka 694X) chipset. This board proved to be a better overclocker than my i815-based Gigabyte board, which seemed to hit a wall at 148MHz FSB. Performance was also a tad ahead of the i815 based board. With the AGP bus set to run at 2x, it's completely stable, too.
-1.5GB of no-name eBay PC133, running at 151MHz/CL2.
-ATI-built Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB video card
-Sound Blaster X-Fi ExtremeMusic. This card eliminated the random pops I was getting with Live! and Audigy 2 cards. It also (somehow) managed to improve overall system performance.
-D-link GigE network card
-Western Digital 250GB/8MB cache PATA-100 HDD
-LG 20x DVD-RW
-Zalman 400w PSU
Software used:
-Windows XP Professional SP3 with all updates installed.
-Catalyst 7.3 video driver. This seems to be the best driver to use with a Radeon 9500-9800 video card. It's almost as fast as the older 4.x and 5.x drivers in DX7/8, slightly faster in DX9, and supports pixel shader 2.0 based WMV-HD acceleration. YouTube's Flash based player also enables hardware video rendering when used with this driver. Catalyst 6.x, 8.x and 9.x drivers are slower, and Cat 10.2 causes D3D games to crash to the desktop.
-Opera 12.12 browser with the latest version of Flash
-DirectShow video tests:
PowerDVD XP was used for for DVD-Video and WMV-HD playback. Windows Media Player 11 and CoreAVC 1.8.5 was used for MPEG4-AVC playback.
Photos:
Here it is sitting next to the Dell E771 test monitor. I normally use a 1440x900 LCD with this machine. The "bubble tubes" on each side of the case are supposed to light up, but I left them unplugged.
A look inside:
Radeon 9800 Pro in all its fiery red glory:
An old PowerLeap HSF cools the processor. I'm not actually using the adapter because the TUV4X directly supports Tualatin CPUs.
D-Link gigabit ethernet card and a very dusty Sound Blaster X-Fi:
Port cluster
3DMark01:
3DMark2000. Check out that CPU score!
Video playback results on next post....