I have a few questions regarding getting a Socket Super 7 board:

1. What advantages does a Socket Super 7 have over Slot 1 or Socket 370?
2. If I were to get a Super 7 board, are there any boards or chipsets you would recommend? I'd prefer an ATX board with ISA slots for the AWE64 Gold, I kind of want to avoid AT boards. I remember my old computer, Project Sonic 2.0, had a VIA MVP4 Chipset, and the USB was pretty wonky with 98SE. 98 First Edition worked fine though.
3. Would it be better to can the Pentium 166 MMX and drop in a K6-III+?

SS7 boards have motherboard cache and takes CPUs that are (compared to PII and PIII) quite fast with cache disabled.

This means that you can perfectly emulate a 386DX and 486DX/DX2 on SS7 machines 😀

On a PII or PIII you can only get a 286 - 386SX equivalent with cache disabled.

For DOS games it doesn't really matter if the chipset is VIA or ALI. I used both with zero issues. There are also a few boards with SIS and Intel chipsets.

The choice of CPU determines what slowed down machine you can hit. The Pentium and AMDs are on the slow side with caches disabled. The MMX and Cyrix are the fastest.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

SS7 boards have motherboard cache and takes CPUs that are (compared to PII and PIII) quite fast with cache disabled. […]
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SS7 boards have motherboard cache and takes CPUs that are (compared to PII and PIII) quite fast with cache disabled.

This means that you can perfectly emulate a 386DX and 486DX/DX2 on SS7 machines 😀

On a PII or PIII you can only get a 286 - 386SX equivalent with cache disabled.

For DOS games it doesn't really matter if the chipset is VIA or ALI. I used both with zero issues. There are also a few boards with SIS and Intel chipsets.

The choice of CPU determines what slowed down machine you can hit. The Pentium and AMDs are on the slow side with caches disabled. The MMX and Cyrix are the fastest.

And another nice thing is that an FPU was still considered optional during the 486 era so the weaker FPU performance of SS7 CPU's doesn't even enter into the picture when playing games from that period because an FPU was largely unnecessary.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

The choice of CPU determines what slowed down machine you can hit. The Pentium and AMDs are on the slow side with caches disabled. The MMX and Cyrix are the fastest.

Now the difference between Pentium and MMX I find interesting. The MMX instructions won't make a difference here, neither the enlarged cache. The only other difference I can think of is that Intel included the branch prediction unit from the PPro into the MMX. I don't know if this would make a big difference at the same clock speed, but maybe this is even more important with disabled cache.

The performance differences with disabled cache are quite important. Looking at the numbers it's easy to go "oh well they are all very low", but in percentage the difference is huge.

On my current DFI motherboard with 16MB EDO RAM a K6-III+ with caches disabled gets a 3dbench score of around 8. The MMX 11 or 12. That's almost 50% faster!

I found on that system that the K6 is simply too slow. Things are even more interesting with L1 off, but motherboard cache on. The MMX is the fastest by a long shot. With 100 MHz FSB pulling off a convincing DX2-50 performance.

Not to be overlooked, the Cyrix. Without caches an absolute speed monster just like the MMX.

So from my (plentyful) testing on various motherboards I would rank them in terms of "cacheless speed": AMD, Pentium, Cyrix and Pentium MMX.

I must also stress that my other motherboards are faster than the DFI and that SDRAM is faster than EDO. So it all depends on your system and one should definitely try out a few CPUs, benchmark them and choose a CPU that suits your scenario.

Well, I just dropped in SLI'ed Voodoo 2s (Diamond Monster 3D 2) that I bought from Fleabay and so far it works great, with 3DMark2000 and a few games. I have yet to test DOS support yet.

Dopefish is just about complete

If Socket 7 is the go, which mobo and CPU combo would be best? Is it also possible to get one with 2 ISA slots? I wouldn't mind whacking in a GUS ACE in there as well

CARDS I HAVE SO FAR

Intel 10/100 Network Card
S3 ViRGE 4MB
2x Voodoo 2 cards
AWE 64 Gold with SIMMCon Expansion Adapter

IMO it doesn't really matter much which board.

The CPU you want to use determines the board. Not all board take the K6-III+.

Even the latest boards have at least 2 ISA slot, some have 3.