Err... Why not Asus TUSL2?

Gamecollector wrote:

Err... Why not Asus TUSL2?

Because the plan was to use a board with Intel 440BX chipset.
I tested the CUSL2 just to see how it compared and liked it.

Also an Asus CUSL2 costs ~1 Euro while a TUSL2 often costs 30 - 50 Euro.

I dont think the TUSL2 does anything better than a CUSL2 other than accepting unmodded FC-PGA2 CPUs?

Nice built! That machine would tear through many games. 1600 x 1200 gaming for sure 😀

Are there any specific games you want to run on this?

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Nice built! That machine would tear through many games. 1600 x 1200 gaming for sure 😀

Are there any specific games you want to run on this?

Everything that uses DX7 and DX8 from the period 1999 - 2002 and OpenGL games from the same period.
No DX9 games though. I do not have a good experience from running Direct X 9 in Windows 9X.

I am hacking away in Diablo 2 at the moment and yes I know it runs perfectly well in Windows 7 as well 😁

I really like the Pentium 3 S, I got mine (modified) from this guy in S.Korea who was selling mountains of them for 20 dollars a pop. I had to replace the generic Dell BIOS with an Intel one, but it was worth the trouble. Mine also has 512MB of ram and an SBLive inside. No agp though...agp probably really makes it shine.

zstandig wrote:

I really like the Pentium 3 S, I got mine (modified) from this guy in S.Korea who was selling mountains of them for 20 dollars a pop. I had to replace the generic Dell BIOS with an Intel one, but it was worth the trouble. Mine also has 512MB of ram and an SBLive inside. No agp though...agp probably really makes it shine.

I got my CPUs from the Korean guy as well.

The AGP video performance is great.
Here are a couple of pics I posted in my tinkering thread.

Very nice setup. I get similar 3DMark scores on my Tualatin/9800 Pro/VIA 694x machine.
3DMark2000: 11185
3DMark2001: 11544

What's your 3DMark2000 CPU score? I get 735 at 1585MHz.

Skyscraper wrote:

Because the plan was to use a board with Intel 440BX chipset.
...
I dont think the TUSL2 does anything better than a CUSL2 other than accepting unmodded FC-PGA2 CPUs?

CUSL2 isn't BX. It's 815. Yes, I think that is the main difference between the CUSL and the TUSL (I believe the TUSL used a later stepping of the 815 chipset with official support for Tualatin).

Very nice build 😁

The case isn't well ventilated though (At least I don't see any case fans), but the AOpen PSU should take care of that but try to keep this in mind if you for whatever reason decide to change the PSU.
Some of the AOpen PSU's have a knob for turning the fan speed up and down, but you seem to have a PSU without such a knob.

Nicely done!

Nice build, unlike most I don't like Enlight cases but not bad. That 5900 is a beast for a system like this.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Very nice setup. I get similar 3DMark scores on my Tualatin/9800 Pro/VIA 694x machine. 3DMark2000: 11185 3DMark2001: 11544 […]
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Very nice setup. I get similar 3DMark scores on my Tualatin/9800 Pro/VIA 694x machine.
3DMark2000: 11185
3DMark2001: 11544

What's your 3DMark2000 CPU score? I get 735 at 1585MHz.

I got 772 CPU score @ 1607 mhz

Are you running Windows 98 or Windows XP ?

mockingbird wrote:

CUSL2 isn't BX. It's 815. Yes, I think that is the main difference between the CUSL and the TUSL (I believe the TUSL used a later stepping of the 815 chipset with official support for Tualatin).

I know CUSL2 dosnt use BX but as I wrote in the first post the plan when I started out testing parts for this build was to use i440BX.
I tested the i815 board just for comparison but ended up preferring it.
FSB up to 166 MHz with the memory running 1:1 on the i815 board without having to worry about insane AGP-bus overclocking made the choice an easy one.

I have my AOPEN AX6BC i440BX on the test bench at the moment.
Max stable 3D gaming FSB is 124 to 143 MHz depending on the AGP Video Card but with a PCI video card the board is running fine at its maximum FSB of 153 MHz.
I do not like to be limited when it comes to video cards just to be able to run the CPU at stock speed.
The BX chipset has a little bit faster memory speed clock for clock than i815 though.

Tetrium wrote:

Very nice build :D […]
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Very nice build 😁

The case isn't well ventilated though (At least I don't see any case fans), but the AOpen PSU should take care of that but try to keep this in mind if you for whatever reason decide to change the PSU.
Some of the AOpen PSU's have a knob for turning the fan speed up and down, but you seem to have a PSU without such a knob.

Nicely done!

There is a case fan in the front but I do not think it does much good other than adding a little noise.
I was hoping that the power supply as you wrote would get rid of the hot air and that cool air would enter the case right where the video card is mounted.

It works sort of fine. I still need to improve the cooling but only because my FX5900 Ultra is one hot running card.
It has always been running extremely hot. It idles @ 79 degrees C and reaches 100+ degrees C during load and thats on an open test bench.
I have tested to remount the cooler but it did not help and the situation isnt helped by the fact that Nvidia removed the lower 2D voltage for the FX5900 in the 5x.xx drivers.
Now when the card is mounted in the case it idles at up to 87 degrees and maxes out @ 115 degrees C. The GPU throttle temp is insanly high, 140 degrees C.
The card is not showing any signs of instability at all but I am thinking of changing the video card cooler to a NV silencer to get the temperature in check.

nforce4max wrote:

Nice build, unlike most I don't like Enlight cases but not bad. That 5900 is a beast for a system like this.

The final choice stood between GF4 ti4600, FX5900 Ultra and GF 6800GT.
I liked the FX5900 Ultra best and so far the card has been a rock, a hot lava like rock.

Skyscraper wrote:

I got 772 CPU score @ 1607 mhz

Are you running Windows 98 or Windows XP ?

Dang that's nice.

I'm running XP SP3.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

I got 772 CPU score @ 1607 mhz

Are you running Windows 98 or Windows XP ?

Dang that's nice.

I'm running XP SP3.

My system only has Windows 98 SE installed.
Perhaps Windows 98 produces somewhat higher CPU scores in 3Dmark 2000?

my retro P3 system is almost half that of yours in performance except for the graphics card maybe. i get very low fps in almost all the games (upto 2000)!!! can you share your miniumum fps in games like half life1, expendable and others?

gandhig wrote:

my retro P3 system is almost half that of yours in performance except for the graphics card maybe. i get very low fps in almost all the games (upto 2000)!!! can you share your miniumum fps in games like half life1, expendable and others?

Is that the system in your sig?
I suppose your video card is much too new both for the CPU and for the games. The drivers will be optimized for faster CPUs, an older GPU with older drivers will probably run much better.
A GT 520 is on paper faster than an FX5900 Ultra (except for memory bandwith), but both are much faster than necessary to achieve excellent FPS on such old games. I suppose that a GT 520 might have trouble with older games, I don't know if 3D acceleration might even be disabled when older Direct3D versions are used.
Another problem might be the PCI slot. (I see that your mainboard doesn't have AGP.) I can very well imagine that a modern GPU might be crippled by PCI. At least texture load performance shouldn't matter when having lots of video RAM.

It is also possible that you have a more general configuration problem. Are you sure hardware 3D acceleration works on your system?

gandhig wrote:

my retro P3 system is almost half that of yours in performance except for the graphics card maybe. i get very low fps in almost all the games (upto 2000)!!! can you share your miniumum fps in games like half life1, expendable and others?

I will benchmark some games and post the results.
It may take a few days though because I am tinkering with my Athlon 64 toys at the moment.

Your system should be fast enough for everything up to year 2001 but as idspispopd writes your video cards it not optimal.
It would be a good idea to get a Radeon 9200 PCI or a PCI Voodoo 3 or some other nice PCI card from year 2000 - 2003.
Also install Windows 98SE instead if Windows XP if you get a video card that is supported under Windows 9x.

If you keep your current video card then install Windows XP SP1. Running Windows XP SP3 on that hardware will never be fast.
I do not know if newer Nvidia drivers demand SP3 though, worth looking into before wiping the system.

hi idspispopd, yeah that is my system in the signature.

it took me almost an year to get this modern gpu automatically detected by retro mainboard bios. i had to modify my bios to introduce a delay before pci bus enumeration during boot. apparently the pci-e to pci reverse bridge onboard the gpu will not be ready for a full second after power-on to comply with the specs. the disappointment of not being able to game retro classics like half-life1, deus ex1 after such a long struggle??

that aside, i'm pretty much sure 3D acceleration works(both directx and opengl) as i have tested with 3dmark2001, nvidia=5388 & onboard=failed. also the maximum fps i get in halflife1 is around 100 with the nvidia 520. with onboard trident graphics, i get 17 fps. my problem is with the minimum fps which dips to less than 20 at some scenes. for example, in the intro sequence fps drops from 70 to less than 25 around the first corner where it enters a open area.

regarding pci bottleneck-when i tried this pci gpu on a modern core duo system, i was even able to play games from around 2005 like NFS-MW smoothly at higher settings. i guess that should rule out pci slot bandwidth limitation. yeah sure even this entry level gpu will be hugely bottlenecked by pci slot, but i only want to play retro-classics. seemingly, many people had no trouble playing with voodoo pci, fx5500 pci etc.

i have applied many tweaks to the via chipset to bring the bandwidth efficiency from around 40% to 95% in Sandra 2003 benchmark. still no drastic improvement as expected. currently i'm analysing the performance monitor graphs generated during the gameplay for any bottlenecks.

hi skyscraper, thanks i will wait. finally a forum where i don't have to hear to throw away my supposedly junk pc.

The FX 5900 Ultra has been upgraded with cooling that actually cools the card 😀.

As I mentioned earlier my FX 5900 has been running hot, very hot.
While the temperature has not made the card unstable in any way it cant be good to have load temps way over 100 degrees Celsius.
I got a Thermalright cooler in the mail today. New in box but no manual, not that I need one.
The Asus V9950 is not supported by the cooler but I were confident that the cooler was going to fit one way or another.

The Asus V9950 FX 5900 Ultra and the new cooler, a Thermalright HR-03 GT.

It is not a perfect fit.

Good enough.

I do not think I used the correct mounting holes for the fan clips but who cares.

Once there was cable management now there is anarchy

Temps with the case open. With the Asus heater: 80+ degrees C idle, 100+ load. With the new cooler: 39 idle, 43 load.

The memory chips have lost their cooling but with load temps over 100 degrees C I think its more likely they were heated than cooled.
Now I can do that benchmarking we were talking about 😀.

@ Skyscraper:

Excellent!! 😁