The fastest P3 Slot1 I can find right now is 630 MHz, I guess I will wait for a 1ghz one to show up. Oh well, I'm in no hurry 😀

God Of Gaming wrote:

The fastest P3 Slot1 I can find right now is 630 MHz, I guess I will wait for a 1ghz one to show up. Oh well, I'm in no hurry 😀

You want one with 100 MHz FSB

The fastest one you will likely find will be 850 MHz, the 1000 MHz Slot-1 Coppermine with 100 MHz FSB is rare.

God Of Gaming wrote:

The fastest P3 Slot1 I can find right now is 630 MHz, I guess I will wait for a 1ghz one to show up. Oh well, I'm in no hurry 😀

http://www.ebay.com/itm/291412182362 (admittedly was the first result for "slot 1 pentium 3")
http://www.ebay.com/itm/291418348324
etc

obobskivich wrote:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/291412182362 (admittedly was the first result for "slot 1 pentium 3") http://www.ebay.com/itm/2914183483 […]
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God Of Gaming wrote:

The fastest P3 Slot1 I can find right now is 630 MHz, I guess I will wait for a 1ghz one to show up. Oh well, I'm in no hurry 😀

http://www.ebay.com/itm/291412182362 (admittedly was the first result for "slot 1 pentium 3")
http://www.ebay.com/itm/291418348324
etc

That 800 Mhz CPU with 100 MHz FSB seems reasonable priced (but not cheap).
A decent slotket and a FCPGA Coppermine 800 (100) would cost about as much.

And here is the Pentium 3 1000 MHz Slot 1 CPU with 100 MHz FSB... the price...is high
http://www.ebay.com/itm/RARE-Intel-Pentium-II … =item4176cea5a5

Skyscraper wrote:

That 800 Mhz CPU with 100 MHz FSB seems reasonable priced (but not cheap). A decent slotket and a FCPGA Coppermine 800 (100) wou […]
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That 800 Mhz CPU with 100 MHz FSB seems reasonable priced (but not cheap).
A decent slotket and a FCPGA Coppermine 800 (100) would cost about as much.

And here is the Pentium 3 1000 MHz Slot 1 CPU with 100 MHz FSB... the price...is high
http://www.ebay.com/itm/RARE-Intel-Pentium-II … =item4176cea5a5

The price is outrageous. 😲 At that point why not just get a Slotket and 370 CuMine? 😊

Going for a socket A is then kinda more attractive as motherboards and CPUs are plentyfull and dirt cheap around here... I should check if there are any alternatives to that abit kt7a board, something with better capacitors 😁

I've deciced, I'll go the Abit KT7A route. There are 3 of them for sale nearby and they are dirt cheap. As long as the capacitors are the only problem, I will try to replace them with higher quality caps. If I fail, I have 2 more tries 😀 Then, using the modded bios I will use an Athlon XP-M, and rather than overclocking it as high as it will go, I will see if I can undervolt it instead. Now all that's left is to choose good PC133 SDRam sticks.

God Of Gaming wrote:

I've deciced, I'll go the Abit KT7A route. There are 3 of them for sale nearby and they are dirt cheap. As long as the capacitors are the only problem, I will try to replace them with higher quality caps. If I fail, I have 2 more tries 😀 Then, using the modded bios I will use an Athlon XP-M, and rather than overclocking it as high as it will go, I will see if I can undervolt it instead. Now all that's left is to choose good PC133 SDRam sticks.

XP-M have lower stock voltage than AthlonXP/Athlon, so even setting them at "stock" will be significant power savings (they're usually 1.35-1.45Vcore). They will usually default-boot at whatever the board's lowest clock settings are, for example 100x5, as they're fully unlocked. Setting one at ~600-1200MHz core (ideally you want the FSB as high as feasible, but very low multipliers (like 3x) usually aren't possible; but setting 200x5 versus 100x10 would be ideal, if the board can do it) would be a good path to a quiet and efficient PC in lieu of a Pentium 3, as long as you're okay with the limitations of a somewhat newer platform. You'll be limited on how low you can underclock it, but if you can also disable the cache that can work to slow it down further - it may or may not be enough to allow for speed sensitive games to work. 😊

I haven't started building this yet as I'm a bit busy with other stuff and also I don't have enough money right now for an overkill pc case (maybe SilverStone Raven RV03 or Corsair Graphite 760T) and very overkill power supply (thinking of Seasonic Platinum 400W Fanless), but I have 3 more questions to establish what the final build would be.
1) What CRT monitor should I look out for? Anything better than Dell P1130 or Sony Trinitron G520?
2) Will an ATi Radeon 8500 AGP work in this old AGP slot? I want to try out the TruForm technology, and it looks like the 8500 is the only graphics card that provides full hardware acceleration for it 😀
3) Which keyboard and mouse would be best for it? Maybe IBM Model M keyboard and Microsoft Intellimouse 3.0 or something like that? I have a Corsair K90 keyboard and CM Storm Sentinel Advance II mouse on my main gaming PC, but I doubt those would suit this retro build or even work with it.

I would make sure if you're using a voodoo 2 (and especially voodoo3) on a faster CPU that they have adequate cooling or the cards can immolate themselves:
Voodoo2 vs modern motherboards

The voodoo3 on a pentium 4 gets way too hot to the point you cannot touch it at all-- and I added extra heatsinking.

God Of Gaming wrote:

1) What CRT monitor should I look out for? Anything better than Dell P1130 or Sony Trinitron G520?
2) Will an ATi Radeon 8500 AGP work in this old AGP slot? I want to try out the TruForm technology, and it looks like the 8500 is the only graphics card that provides full hardware acceleration for it 😀
3) Which keyboard and mouse would be best for it? Maybe IBM Model M keyboard and Microsoft Intellimouse 3.0 or something like that? I have a Corsair K90 keyboard and CM Storm Sentinel Advance II mouse on my main gaming PC, but I doubt those would suit this retro build or even work with it.

1) There are other Trinitron offerings badged as Dell/Sun/SGI/ViewSonic/etc, and there are competitors from Mitsubishi, and others. If your goal is a nice CRT, I think any of them would be a good choice in principle - given the age of these things, I'd preference "good working order" over absolute brand/model street cred if that makes sense.

2) Yes; it's a universal AGP slot, and 8500 is a universal AGP card. Keep an eye on the specific model of 8500 you're looking at - ALL of them are called "Radeon 8500" but they're not all the same card - there's an LE, a DV, AIW, etc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Radeon_R200 … 2F8500LE.2F9100) - the "full" card is clocked at 275/275.

3) Why wouldn't your modern keyboard and mouse work? They're USB HIDs, and KT7 isn't *that* old. 😊 If you're going with Windows 2000 or above on the KT7 system, you may also consider Input Director.

Thanks a lot for all the replies, you helped me out big time, the build is now pretty much decided, it's the following:
case: AeroCool XPredator X3 White
motherboard: ABit KT7A-RAID re-capped
CPU: AMD Athlon XP-M 2500+ (mobile Barton)
RAM: 2x256MB SDRAM
graphics cards:
*3dfx Voodoo5 5500
*Rendition Verite 2200
*Gigabyte Radeon 8500 128MB
sound cardsL
*Diamond MonsterSound MX300
*Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1
*Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold
monitor: Dell 21" P1130 Trinitron
keyboard: IBM Model M
mouse: MicroSoft Intellimouse Explorer 3.0

I might have some trouble tracking a few of the expansion cards out, but I will keep looking for them, to begin with I'll take what I can find right now, which is a Voodoo3 instead of Voodoo5, and Turtle Beach Montego II instead of Diamond MX300, and a normal AWE64 instead of the Gold version. Also I cant find any Radeon 8500 right now at all, but I hope one would pop out at some point. Or I might look at ebay, though I'd prefer getting one locally if possible. It's good that my keyboard and mouse would work, but I dont think the software for them would support windows 98 so that I can set macros and stuff, and without their software, they might be inferior to the model m and an intellimouse in pure feel I guess. Besides they're cheap, so why not 😁

Last thing, it occured to me yesterday, I might have trouble with the power supply. Without much thought I was gonna get Seasonic Platinum 400W Fanless, which I thought is overkill enough, but upon a closer look, on the 3.3V and 5V rails it only has 20A/20A and 100W combined, which will likely not do for a PC like this. After some digging I saw all modern power supplies are like that. I guess I'll need to look for an old high-quality 5V-heavy PSU, but I'm not aware of any good ones, back in those days I was using the cheap crappy unit that came with the case, not knowing better...

raymangold wrote:

The voodoo3 on a pentium 4 gets way too hot to the point you cannot touch it at all-- and I added extra heatsinking.

Is it ok if I try to keep the bus clock low and increase the multiplier instead? If not, would it be ok if I lower the cpu clock down to under 1ghz when I use the voodoo? With the Barton's improved IPC it should be still better than an old CPU even at low clocks I think 😀

God Of Gaming wrote:

Thanks a lot for all the replies, you helped me out big time, the build is now pretty much decided, it's the following: case: Ae […]
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Thanks a lot for all the replies, you helped me out big time, the build is now pretty much decided, it's the following:
case: AeroCool XPredator X3 White
motherboard: ABit KT7A-RAID re-capped
CPU: AMD Athlon XP-M 2500+ (mobile Barton)
RAM: 2x256MB SDRAM
graphics cards:
*3dfx Voodoo5 5500
*Rendition Verite 2200
*Gigabyte Radeon 8500 128MB
sound cardsL
*Diamond MonsterSound MX300
*Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1
*Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold
monitor: Dell 21" P1130 Trinitron
keyboard: IBM Model M
mouse: MicroSoft Intellimouse Explorer 3.0

I might have some trouble tracking a few of the expansion cards out, but I will keep looking for them, to begin with I'll take what I can find right now, which is a Voodoo3 instead of Voodoo5, and Turtle Beach Montego II instead of Diamond MX300, and a normal AWE64 instead of the Gold version. Also I cant find any Radeon 8500 right now at all, but I hope one would pop out at some point. Or I might look at ebay, though I'd prefer getting one locally if possible. It's good that my keyboard and mouse would work, but I dont think the software for them would support windows 98 so that I can set macros and stuff, and without their software, they might be inferior to the model m and an intellimouse in pure feel I guess. Besides they're cheap, so why not 😁

I didn't check on their specific software, but out of the box they should plug and play as a keyboard and mouse. If you need macros, that'd be worth investigating - I know there are keyboards that support special keys in Win9x (like media buttons), but I'm not sure about hooking up whizbang gaming keyboards and such.

Last thing, it occured to me yesterday, I might have trouble with the power supply. Without much thought I was gonna get Seasonic Platinum 400W Fanless, which I thought is overkill enough, but upon a closer look, on the 3.3V and 5V rails it only has 20A/20A and 100W combined, which will likely not do for a PC like this. After some digging I saw all modern power supplies are like that. I guess I'll need to look for an old high-quality 5V-heavy PSU, but I'm not aware of any good ones, back in those days I was using the cheap crappy unit that came with the case, not knowing better...

Not all modern power supplies are like that. The very newest 80-Plus Unobtanium units can be, but there are still PSUs that will deliver 200W+ on the 3.3/5V, which will be perfectly suitable for a machine like this unless you're stacking it with a ton of hard-drives, fans, water cooling equipment, etc. The AthlonXP doesn't draw *that* much power, especially if you're going to underclock a mobile. Look at some of the PSUs from StarTech and Thermaltake.

Alternatively, find a motherboard that supports the 12V P4 connector and will work in Windows 9x, and you can use a modern PSU. The easiest nod would be a Pentium 4 system with an 800-series chipset, but there are AthlonXP boards that will also work. I've heard nForce 2 and Windows 98 are a bad combo, but I've never personally tried it so I can't offer any more than that. I can tell you 845/865/875 all seem to play quite nice with 9x though. The 850 (Rambus P4) and 848 are also supported afaik; I don't know about the 855 though (Pentium M).

Is it ok if I try to keep the bus clock low and increase the multiplier instead? If not, would it be ok if I lower the cpu clock down to under 1ghz when I use the voodoo? With the Barton's improved IPC it should be still better than an old CPU even at low clocks I think 😀

AFAIK the issue is believed to be the result of the CPU being so much more powerful than what the Voodoo2 is "designed for" and you get higher-than-1998 levels of performance, and higher-than-1998 levels of heat. I didn't observe any significant problems testing a single Voodoo2 with a 2GHz P4, which is roughly equivalent to a 1.2-1.4GHz CuMine/T-bird. The Barton XP will be slightly better per clock than that - running at 1-1.5GHZ should be just dandy for a 9x gaming system, performance-wise, and should run the CPU fairly cool. Ideally you do not want to run a low FSB and high multi either - you'd want to do it the other way around. 😊

Temperature wise, you'd have to measure to get an accurate idea of what's going on. Just touching the component isn't an accurate gauge - many ICs can run at 50-70* C with no problems (some at over 100* C), which is nothing you'd want to touch to your bare skin for any length of time, but perfectly fine to the component. Based on my own testing with a P4, it's nothing I'd be overly worried about with a ~1.5GHz Athlon, but certainly something to keep an eye on, especially if you're putting this in a case with very limited airflow, and planning to stack multiple heat-producing cards right on top of each other (e.g. Radeon 8500 right next to Voodoo2 SLI right next to some other card, so there's very little space for ventilation, and they all produce heat).

obobskivich wrote:

Based on my own testing with a P4, it's nothing I'd be overly worried about with a ~1.5GHz Athlon, but certainly something to keep an eye on, especially if you're putting this in a case with very limited airflow, and planning to stack multiple heat-producing cards right on top of each other (e.g. Radeon 8500 right next to Voodoo2 SLI right next to some other card, so there's very little space for ventilation, and they all produce heat).

I think I'm gonna use this case:

I chose it because A: it has plenty of cooling, including 2 fans on the side to blow directly on the expansion cards and CPU, B: because it has removable air filters all around, C: it has 8 expansion brackets instead of the common 7, which is what I'll need so that I can use the ISA slot at the bottom of the KT7A, D: it has just enough front panel slots for a CD-Rom, 5.25" floppy and 3.5" floppy, and E: It looks cool 😀 The window will show-off the nerdfest inside. The white color should be a good reference to how cases 20 years ago were mostly white. I hope I won't have any heat issues whatsoever. For the CPU heatsink I might go for a Zalman CNPS7000B-Cu. For power supply, I asked in one other forum, and they told me to find an old Antec SL-350 and re-cap it. I guess all I have to do now is start buying 😀

That case should be absolutely fine - it's total overkill for the system you're building. No need to buy and recap an old PSU either - like I said, there are modern PSUs that will serve a machine like this with no problems, and will likely be more efficient while doing it.

Any models in particular?

Look for stuff that follows an older ATX standard. I have seen some 1.3 spec power supplies on newegg before for example. EDIT: like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … 011&ignorebbr=1 or this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … 003&ignorebbr=1

God Of Gaming wrote:

Also I cant find any Radeon 8500 right now at all, but I hope one would pop out at some point. Or I might look at ebay, though I'd prefer getting one locally if possible.

Radeon 9100 is a renamed 8500LE. If you mainly want TruForm and exact performance is not too important you could look for a 9100, they are probably more common than 8500.
With locally I suppose you mean Bulgaria, ordering online is OK? I found there with a quick search (interesting how cyrillic characters are mangled in the URL):
http://bazar.bg/%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%8F%D0%B2%D0%B … deon-9100-128mb
This one claims to be a 8500, but doesn't look like it at all:
http://shop.itr.bg/product-50004606/-%D0%92%D … DVI-TV-OUT-.htm

God Of Gaming wrote:

it has 8 expansion brackets instead of the common 7, which is what I'll need so that I can use the ISA slot at the bottom of the KT7A

Nope, you don't need a case with eight expansion slots! The ISA slot on the KT7A is shared with the lowest PCI slots, i.e. you can insert either a PCI or an ISA card. A standard case would be fine.

(Standard) ATX has seven slots, period. Baby AT has eight.

@tayyare - about the win98 memory issue - I've had absolutely no issue with machines running win98se with 1GB and 1.5Gb of ram. My high-en win98 rig right now is a Athlon 2600+ / Abit NF7-S / 2x512MB DDR400 / Geforce 4 Ti4200 AGP8X / Sound Blaster Live! / old 450W enermax PSU from 2004 / 80GB Maxtor HDD. It never game me any headaches with 1GB, either when installing or when running. Using 1.5GB win 98 setup acts wierd, but if you install it with 1GB in you can later add the extra 512Mb and it will run fine. Oh, and before you guys can grill me about the need for 1,5GB, the machine dual-boots XP.

@OP - A few things I'd look out for when building a win98 rig (that can run later games as well):

- Stay away from Nforce chipsets! Reasons:

A) While nforce 2 motherboards generally overclock better then VIA alternatives, and have slightly better AGP performance, Win98 drivers for them are BAD. ( for example, I can't install my NF7-S's on-board lan card under win9x - no one provides divers for it! - the Nvidia win9x drivers pack installs everything but the lan card, and installing the Abit drivers makes win98 bsod ).

B) Memory compatibility is horrendous on nforce motherboards. They only take some brands / speeds, and most of the time they won't run properly even with modules it posts with. Dual-Channel memory - althrough performance gains on socket A paltforms are negligeble, it would be nice to have working - but it's buggy and unstable on nforce chipsets, even when using identical modules (especially on the Abit NF7-S!*) - my Asus A7N8X seems to run Ok in DC mode with two kingston 512Mb modules, but both the Abit won't run DC at all, and the Epox BSODS randomly. Plus, there is no way to run ram in single channel mode on all slots on some motherboards (like the aforementioned Abit NF7-S) so you end up being unable to use one of it's tree memory slots. My Epox 8RDA3 (also nforce 2) on the other hand does work in single channel mode with all slots populated if banks 0 and 1 are of different size.

C) No AGP 3.3V support

*Now don't go thinking the Abit NF7 is a bad board - it's not. It's one of the fastest and most overclockable socket A board I've ever had the pleasure of working with! As long as you don't try to use dual channel memory mode and stick with windows XP. I got my 2600+ to 2,2Ghz (200x11) at stock voltage using it! The Epox won't drive it past 2Ghz and the Asus requires me to raise vcore for stability.

My advice is to only use nforce chipsets under winXP. I would recommend you get a KT600 or KT880 based board - driver support is lovely for Win9x - most of them have SATA - they support most memory modules - dual channel works correctly - there is no incompatibility with some ATi cards (i.e. the Radeon 9800PRO/XT witch all 3 of my nforce2 boards hate)

- Get a Power Supply with a strong 5A rail! This applies to both socket A and socket 478 systems. In my experience, most modern 80+ PSU's don't provide enough amperage on the 5V rail to correctly run a power-hungry high end Athlon or Pentium 4. The system might BSOD randomly. I recommend at leas 18A on the 5V line - if possible 25A would be best. Most modern PSU's have 10-15A on 5V, so be on the lookout for that.

- For the best Win98 gaming experience, I recommend getting a Voodoo3 (or voodoo 5 if you're lucky to find one at a decent price). Some windows games are only accelerated trought Glide (Pandemonium 2, V2000 for example) and some older DOS games CAN be accelerated trought GLIDE with unofficial patches (descent 2 / carmageddon 1). Some games look nicer under glide then under directX or openGL (i.e. Unreal). To use a Voodoo 3, you need an AGP 3.3V 1x/2x/4x compatible motherboard. For socket A, that's easy to find - all VIA KT133, most VIA KT266 and some VIA KT333 chipset motherboards support 3.3V AGP cards. They are cheap and easy to find. Socket 478 is tricky - I have a Mercury i845 board with SDRAM and it doesn't support 3.3V cards.

- Voodoo 2 cards don't like Athlon XP systems, especially Nforce based ones. I finally got my kit running right with a KT266 board, but only after I disabled the USB 2.0 controller (although there was no resource conflict). On my Abit NF7-S and Epox 8RDA3, the cards install, no resource conflicts, 3DFX tools runs fine, but cards don't output video (there is sound tough). If you plan to use a Voodoo 2, get a hold of a Slot 1 or socket 7 k6-2 system.

In my opinion, best thing for win95-win98 games you can get is either a socket 370 pentium 3 system or an early socket A system with an athlon xp cpu. The latter is quite a bit faster and easier to find, and most come with one ISA slot.