While it may have been the PSU giving you trouble on boot-up, I just thought I'd add: I've seen other Intel-brand boards do the same thing when they detect power-loss (which, being brand new, is how it'd "start") - they want to beep and then "restart" or otherwise throw up errors even when all the hardware is fine. Usually a BIOS update addresses it.

Very nice build overall, and it will be cool to see it expanded into a gaming monster. Out of curiosity, have you considered a PCI-X videocard (like a Parhelia)?

Yeah, I'll monitor the PSU. Since I swapped over to the Seasonic I didn't have any issues starting up.

I've not considered any PCI-X cards, what are they like? I did a quick search on ebay which returned very few all of which were over £100, ebay seems to just pull through PCI-E 16x items. Any models to look out for?

foey wrote:

Yeah, I'll monitor the PSU. Since I swapped over to the Seasonic I didn't have any issues starting up.

I've not considered any PCI-X cards, what are they like? I did a quick search on ebay which returned very few all of which were over £100, ebay seems to just pull through PCI-E 16x items. Any models to look out for?

IIRC there's not many PCI-X cards out there - I know Matrox made a Parhelia for PCI-X, and if I remember right there's a FireGL Z1/X1 variant on PCI-X as well (that's a Radeon 9500/9700 family part). PCI-X certainly has the bandwidth to do it, so they should be similar to their AGP or AGP Pro counterparts. Should still be better than a straight PCI card like an FX 5200 though. 😀 And yeah, a lot of stuff will show PCI-E because heaps of folks believe its "PCI eXpress" or whatever else... 😒

I LOVE THIS BOARD!

If your going to "game" on this board, i'd suggest a pci version of the voodoo 5. Find a MAC version and flash it for intel. It should still run @ 66mhz on the pci bus.

A long time ago, I had this board with 6gb of ram. I wanted to put 3x voodoo 5's into it and do a tri-monitor quake3 setup. Sadly I ended up selling the board. I do buy Tyan's version later and I have it on my shelf.

as for memory, here is a deal on 6x 1gb sticks of ram: http://www.ebay.com/itm/301211546733

Very nice looking system. There have been quite a few people doing dual tully systems on here recently and I'm so envious. It would be awesome trying to build a day-to-day web-browsing/youtube/watching videos/playing music system based on some older hardware like this. How does a system like this cope with video playback in VLC?

Congrats on an awesome system 😀

Thanks Guys

A couple more updates this evening, its turning into a proper usable machine now!

First off, I replaced the Power Supply from the Antec which was giving me bleeps before booting. The Power supply is a Seasonic S12 500w.

I've installed a sound card which someone gave me from a old system, not sure if any good - Terratec Aureon 7.1. I also fitted a SATA RAID Controller card, I've had it since 2004 and was in my Athlon XP System, I've added two 80Gb WD SATA Drives and configured for RAID 0.

Not bad for a SATA1 controller, running 2x80Gb WDs

Need to tidy up the wires a little but its getting there...

Have to say this thing is rapid! I've installed a couple of bits and its very responsive. Unsure if I should install SP3 along with some updates. Its crying out for a decent graphics card, the 4mb Rage XL is dire! I'm tempted to put in my Voodoo 3 2000 PCI Card.

Voodoo3 couldn't hurt, even as a temporary solution - I do like LuckyBob's idea with 3x5500s!

As far as SP3, I'd be hesitant - I remember it increasing memory footprint and removing some legacy stuff all at once. I don't recall it being any slower or faster, just that it uses more resources (it runs more stuff in background) - if you have tons of memory (2GB+) it probably wouldn't hurt anything. If you aren't going online with this build, I'd probably just leave it with SP2 working and be done with it.

There are Matrix Parhelia PCI cards as well that work in the 64 bit PCI slots.

I've been looking at graphics cards this morning.

It would be fantastic getting a Voodoo 5, however they are hard to come by now and don't fancy spending a fortune on one. Back in 2007 I had one of them which a friend gave me. I think used it to upgrade someones machine 😒

The Matrox cards look like a bit of a mixed bag for games. All of the cards on the PCI-X interface are very expensive

I'm tempted to get the following to see how quick games can run. I think this is probably the quickest PCI card?

Zotac GT 610 512MB GDDR3 DVI VGA HDMI PCI Graphics Card

- Nvidia GeForce GT 610 GPU
- 512MB GDDR3 Memory
- DVI VGA HDMI Outputs
- PCI Interface

Your thoughts guys?

If I remember right gandhig (hopefully I'm spelling that right) has reported numerous issues with a PCI version of a newer nVidia card, I forget if it was a 5xx or 6xx board though. Might be worth a quick search.

As far as a quick PCI card, the fastest "native" card I'm aware of is the Quadro FX 600 PCI, but something like the GT 610 should probably be faster in theory. I don't know if you'd realize much of that though - most of the newer cards' advantages will be with shader performance in newer titles, which will be hung-up by the Pentium IIIs, PCI interface, etc more than anything else.

I was in a similar position (maxing out pentium iii era hardware, though not nearly as glorious as that board) anyway, if I was in your shoes, knowing what I know now I would save up and bite the bullet for a PCI-X card. A while ago I bought a zotac 430(?) PCI card, having a fit of the giggles, you know, 🤣 I gonna have a pentium 3 with hdmi, usb2, sata, etc.

Anyway, long story short I was never able to get the damned thing to work, it just would not function. Thing is those cards were made for really low end modern boards that have PCI, or something like that. I don't think zotac made them to cater to the "I'm gonna push this ancient dinosaur as far as it can go" crowd.

So the card I have in there now is a Jaton branded radeon 9000(?) PCI. It was either that or my Geforce 6(?), but I went with my Radeon because it has 1GB of RAM, twice as much as the geforce....and twice as much as the computer itself.

I still think a trio of voodoo 5's is the way to go.

obobskivich wrote:

If I remember right gandhig has reported numerous issues with a PCI version of a newer nVidia card, I forget if it was a 5xx or 6xx board though. Might be worth a quick search.
As far as a quick PCI card, the fastest "native" card I'm aware of is the Quadro FX 600 PCI, but something like the GT 610 should probably be faster in theory. I don't know if you'd realize much of that though - most of the newer cards' advantages will be with shader performance in newer titles, which will be hung-up by the Pentium IIIs, PCI interface, etc more than anything else.

I was actually controlling myself not to post in this thread as my GT520 PCI was longingly looking at those PCI-X slots, the reverse PCI bridge being 66MHz capable(but not 133 MHz or whatever the latest PCI-X version defines) and is also not 64 bit capable. However feipoa had earlier mentioned that in one instance, it was not always a happy understanding between the PCI graphics card and the PCI-X slot.

I may deserve it if someone in this forum wants to have a go at me for bearing with my GT520 fiasco till now 😵 . Warning: But I can't take responsibility for whatever follows, as my hand has been forced 🤣 .

Here we go. Due to the onboard reverse PCI bridge in modern GPU's, there is a definite penalty in performance especially in older systems(which is more prominent before P4) compared to a native PCI based graphics card. I can't be 100% sure however as there may be some role of the nvidia driver(not optimized for this setup)in it, but the end result is what matters. If the OP has enough patience, he can check this thread wherein joint testing/inputs by SPBHM, feipoa, Standard Def Steve, d1stortion, swaaye, kithylin and many others has proved it sufficiently.

IMO, even though these old 5 or 6 series Geforce cards are native PCI, the GT520/610 or even better the GT430 PCI should be much faster in a system with more juice(like the OP's dual Tualatin) by means of its modern architecture especially in modern games. Importantly if the OP wants to play games upto 2001-02 he would be better off going for a old series native PCI graphics card that involves no risk. However if he gets greedy and wants to stretch that to slightly more modern gaming upto say 2005-06 and HD video/flash acceleration, he may atleast benefit from the modern GT430, if not GT520/610 PCI. The resolution sweet spot for this GT520 PCI card (or) PCI bus (o)r both seems to be 1024x768(not much fps hit) which obviously depends upon the game complexity,coding and other features too. Hence it can't be generalized and just an observation. Below is a chart showing performance that can be expected of GT520 PCI in different capacity systems:

Another thing is that my case was slightly different in that my P3 is relatively underpowered coupled with the probability that the 'VIA' chipset's PCI bus implementation is not upto the mark. The missing hub architecture between the north-south bridges might have played a role too. So the OP's case seems to be on the better side, but obviously no miracle can be expected.

The Zotac GT 610 PCI is just a rebrand of the GT 520 PCI(6+1+0 = 5+2+0 = 7, it's the same 😎 )

obobskivich wrote:

gandhig (hopefully I'm spelling that right)

I can totally understand that due to the cultural divide 🤣 . No prizes for guessing the namesake.

Very nice system!

luckybob wrote:

I still think a trio of voodoo 5's is the way to go.

I think you're really onto something - sure it'd be utter madness, but it'd be AWESOME. 😁 One question I have though, and I'll admit I'm not extremely familiar with the relevant 3dfx hardware before asking: would there be an issue with Windows and having 6 GPUs with such a configuration? I know that WindowsXP won't work properly with >4 GPUs (I've confirmed this with nVidia cards in SLI) - it does all sorts of weird stuff when you start it up (basically nothing will work until you get it back down to 4 GPUs or less). But would the trio of dual-chip 3dfx cards actually be counted as six, or only as three, or would it even be a problem to begin with? 😕

I know in win98, it supported 9 monitors. I can't imagine 2000 (what you should use) would be less.

luckybob wrote:

I know in win98, it supported 9 monitors. I can't imagine 2000 (what you should use) would be less.

[edited with better information]

Did a bit of searching - XP has a soft limit of 10 displays, but third-party software like UltraMon, DisplayFusion, PowerDesk, etc can exceed that. See here:
http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/faq.asp#MaxMon

Keep in mind that some Matrox and Samsung solutions (and maybe others, I don't know) will "hide" the true number of physical monitors from the system and present very large logical displays that are actually represented through multiple physical displays (the TripleHead2Go is an example).

GPU-wise I've never gotten more than 4 to work in XP, with nVidia cards (I don't have the relevant 5+ ATi or 3DLabs cards to test with another mfgr) - adding another videocard made the system very unstable/unusable, but removing that card and all was well again. 😦 The only reason I bring it up is if it would cause problems with triple dual-GPU cards (like the 5500); if Windows "sees" each card as a single GPU/renderer/card then it won't matter, but if it "sees" each card as two GPUs/renderers/cards (like it does with the GeForce 7950GX2) it may matter. However, in theory, with this triple-head setup you really wouldn't need the "slave" cards to be the same as the "master" since likely only one board is doing the rendering, so you could have a 5 5500 as the main card and a pair of 4500s or whatever-you-like as the additional boards. This assumes you have some nifty way of getting the 5500 to render to 3 displays (SoftTH requires DX9, I'm guessing Matrox's hardware is unsupported for 3dfx drivers/hardware, but there's probably some specific games (especially sims) that should work fine).

Don't get me wrong - I still think it's an awesome idea to have multiple 5500s in one machine, I'm just curious exactly how/if it'd work out at the end of the day.

Unrelated:

I did a bit of looking for PCI-X/PCI cards and found these, which I don't know anything about:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/BarMed-Coronis-KM5700 … d-/111379333276
http://www.ebay.com/itm/BarcoMed-Coronis-Barc … d-/370833632617

Supposedly they'll do 2560x2048 though.

And I found this too:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/MATROX-MDP-2MP-S01-0E … D-/131212773600

I have some bad news!

Ever since building the machine its been hard to boot. Taking a couple of times to boot up.

Power on, fans spin up - nothing on the screen, Hold Power button ~ 5 seconds, fans power down, Power on fans spin up then the board normally posts. Towards the end of last week it took two power ons and power off.

Now it refuses to boot. Power it on, fans spin up, no beeps, no power light no post. Nothing on the screen.

I've tried reverting back to the other power supply, but gives me the same 1-5-4-4 beeps which I've read is a Power control fault. The Seasonic gives me no beeps.

I've pulled the board out of the case, connected just the Monitor and PSU and still the same. I have no other RAM to try, I suppose that could be the only other thing? But when it boots, its been rock solid working without any issues.

Any ideas guys? 😢

is the 12v power connector connected? I've done that before.