idspispopd, I get your point, it's great to have several vintage 3D modes to play with. However, Trio3D just does not work with S3D. I wish it did. As I said, the last card to work with S3D was Virge GX/2 and in most games it delivered around 30 fps. Not much for an ultimate S3D videocard... Some games became playable only with GX/2, some were never smooth enough.

jwt27, never seen a real V3 in my entire life. Wish me luck finding a suitable one 😁

The only games that is worth playing in S3D mode is Destruction Derby and Havoc (see youtube links), both which looks better than the software counterparts and run in decent framerate. All others have better accelerated versions on other cards or are better played in software mode.

Full S3D list here.

I literally just threw out a 300PL desktop just like this. It was the last of many that I owned. I still have one 300PL tower left.

The special form factor for the AGP card is called NLX. It was supposed to be for small-ish form factor PC's, but was also used in towers like the 300PL tower. The two fastest NLX cards made were the Elsa Erazor X (Geforce256) and the Elsa Gloria II (Quadro). There's a pretty wide variety of cards that were made to this specification, and many standard AGP cards could be used as long as you swapped the standard mounting bracket for an NLX bracket.

misterjones, thank you for your information! Throwing out such a good PC is kind of a cruel measure. If I were you, I would have donated it to some local guy with similar interests.

By the way, what country are you from?

RacoonRider wrote:

misterjones, thank you for your information! Throwing out such a good PC is kind of a cruel measure. If I were you, I would have donated it to some local guy with similar interests.

By the way, what country are you from?

USA.

I would have, but it had issues. I got beep codes from it one day complaining about the power supply. I swapped the PSU out with a known working spare I had and it didn't resolve the problem. I reseated everything, swapped out RAM and the processor and still couldn't get it to work.

misterjones, thou art frogiven 😁

If you're not afraid of butchering a video card, those machines can accept a wide variety of AGP cards.

Edit to add: My one that I got rid of a few years ago had a P3-850, 512MB RAM, TNT2-M64 video card.

Was bought as a P2-350, 128MB RAM and onboard video.

Chewhacca wrote:

If you're not afraid of butchering a video card, those machines can accept a wide variety of AGP cards.

Edit to add: My one that I got rid of a few years ago had a P3-850, 512MB RAM, TNT2-M64 video card.

Was bought as a P2-350, 128MB RAM and onboard video.

no, they can't.

Some older AGP cards are designed for both standard brackets and NLX brackets.

on the lower end of the bracket on this card is a small square that can be snapped off (permanantly). If you take that off, remove the standard mounting bracket, and replace it with an NLX bracket, you can use it in any PC that has an NLX slot for AGP cards.

Ditch the bracket and grind the corner off a standard ATX card. (If you don't mind ghetto PC mods.)

misterjones wrote:

on the lower end of the bracket on this card is a small square that can be snapped off (permanantly). If you take that off, remove the standard mounting bracket, and replace it with an NLX bracket, you can use it in any PC that has an NLX slot for AGP cards.

That's exactly what I've done here. My Viper V770 was most similar to this one. Got a bracket from NLX Ati card.

That way nothing gets damaged and even the old bracket can be attached back. Those D-SUB screws are all you need to hold it in position.

For the record, I got this baby a few days ago

I'm most happy! It's a little hard to control the ship at Descent III at first, but I'm getting used to it. Any tips?

RacoonRider wrote:

That's exactly what I've done here. My Viper V770 was most similar to this one. Got a bracket from NLX Ati card. http://home.da […]
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misterjones wrote:

on the lower end of the bracket on this card is a small square that can be snapped off (permanantly). If you take that off, remove the standard mounting bracket, and replace it with an NLX bracket, you can use it in any PC that has an NLX slot for AGP cards.

That's exactly what I've done here. My Viper V770 was most similar to this one. Got a bracket from NLX Ati card.

That way nothing gets damaged and even the old bracket can be attached back. Those D-SUB screws are all you need to hold it in position.

For the record, I got this baby a few days ago

I'm most happy! It's a little hard to control the ship at Descent III at first, but I'm getting used to it. Any tips?

yeah, they're designed with the knock-off specifically for NLX compatibility. In other cases (like my ATI Rage Pro Turbo), the knock-off isn't there, and the lower part of the standard bracket has an arm that screws on the card.

Over past weeks it's been -30...-40C outside, which resulted in quite an overload in central heating systems. As the temperature went back to -20C, it became hotter in our flat. That was when I realized my Voodoos were not propperly cooled.

There's just not enough cooling options in this desktop case. It has a front FAN which draws air to passive-cooled CPU and that's all. The Diamond Viper V770 handles heat better than the Voodoos, the thing never hanged. However, when I run something on Voodoo 2 SLI, the system freezes after 20-30 minutes of intensive load. It can run Quake 2 for hours, but is capable of handling Descent for not much longer than 20 minutes.

The curious thing is, whenever it hangs, different Voodoo 2 cards show different frames (I see an interlaced picture), which means that they do not freeze simultaneously.

Possible measures as I see them:
A. Install chipset heatsinks on all 3dfx chips OR buy 2 large heatsinks from radio shop.
B. Downclock Voodoo 2, which I would rather not do.
C. Mount 2 50x50 or 40x40 FANs on the edges of the cards.
D. Sacrifice Aureal Vortex 2 and XR385 and make more space between Voodoos.
E. Connect system fan directly to PSU for constant RPM
F. Install 2 50x50 FANs under floppy drive bezel to draw more air into the case.
G. Make a wind tunnel to draw air from floppy drive bezel directly to Voodoos.
H. Cut a hole in the back for an exhaust FAN, which I would rather not do.

Any suggestions? I think I'll go with A and E and see how it goes...

If you had an open slot, it would make such a difference to install a basic slot exhaust fan...

It's been a while since I updated the thread. Well, thanks to luckybob, I discovered such thing as slot exhaust fan 😀 No, seriously, I never knew they existed.

I tested Crystal 4236 in Descent 3, Dethkarz and Turok 2. As long as volume is not set high in Windows and "Crystal 3D" is off, the sound is pretty good. I need nothing more.

So I went on and removed Aureal Vortex to make space for two slot exhaust fans:

In order to make better use of the hole where floppy drive should have been, I mounted a low-profile FAN I had lying around. With extra rubber padding. To my surprise, it turned out to be very quiet.

The PCI card fixing mechanism turned out to be no good for fans, so I replaced it with spare ATX chassis:

This is what I had as a result:

The issue I had before stopped at the cost of some extra noise and no A3D. I have only 2.0 speakers, so the second thing does not bother me much.

Considering XR385, I switched to software S-XG70, which proved to sound just as good. I was unable to spot any actual difference in FFVII, perhaps with a slower CPU it gives a performance hit, but PII-450 is way over FFVII system requirments.

Love the look of this system. It's so clean looking inside! Great job.

maybe you can use only 1 fan and put the sound card back in maybe?

cobracon wrote:

Love the look of this system. It's so clean looking inside! Great job.

Thank you!

luckybob wrote:

maybe you can use only 1 fan and put the sound card back in maybe?

This way the whole construction seems more or less balanced convection-wise. Actually, I could remove one fan. There's no use overclocking Voodoo 2 on PII-450 as far as I know, so this much cooling would be overkill... Perhaps I should switch the upper fan for the Vortex and make the lower V2 Master card.

I'd actually be curious if opening the front end up some more (knock out some of the metal to let more air come through; might do this for the CPU intake too - it should make things run quieter as well (less turbulence = less noise)) if you couldn't ditch the blowers entirely, and replace the open slots with vented I/O shields to let heat/air escape from the back (that's drawn through with the front intake).

I do think it looks cool with the blowers though, with the black shrouds and all. Reminds me of some of the later 3DLabs cards with their huge airflow shrouds.

Sourced 4x256MB PC-133 double-sided modules for $3 each. Great RAM for such a price! Took them all thinking that I might do a Tualatin build one day. Until then, three of them found a place in the 300PL. Now it has 768MB RAM and can take no more 😁 Not that it would make much use, feels the same as with 256MB.

An update on the topic: got new heatsinks for V2s