The Story
It was only recently when I sourced some Voodoo2s and decided to butcher floppy cables in an attempt to make an SLI cable, and when I came up with something that can actually be connected without fear of nuclear explosion, I had to find a way to test it. The original plan was a 1GHz/133 fsb Coppermine paired with a Radeon 9600 Pro and a pair of Voodoo2s, but, uhm, things didn't go exactly as expected 😐

After having nightmares getting the Voodoo2 drivers to work with my socket 370 motherboards (see below), it suddenly occured to me that a i440BX should have been more appropriate. I did not want an overclocked AGP though; had to stay with a 100MHz bus. A day later, and after having been through the driver hell, I eventually got to something workable. The build is currently like this:

The Actual Specs
M/B: Soyo 6BA+IV
CPU: Pentium 600E (100MHz FSB) on a slocket
RAM: 256MB/PC100
HDD: Maxtor 40GB
GPU: nVidia GeForce4 MX440 64MB (passively cooled)
2x Creative Voodoo2 12MB with homemade SLI cable
Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value PCI
OS: Windows ME 🤣

I love you too, VIA
I don't know if any members here have had different experiences with this kind of hardware, but I never ever got the Voodoo2 to work on a VIA-based P3 motherboard. Not on 98SE, ME, 2000. Not with the latest reference drivers, FastVoodoo2s or older versions. It almost always led to abrupt CTDs, bad crashes and weird overall behaviour afterwards, like weird cursors, missing icons etc., as if some kind of memory corruption has taken place. It appears that there is a known(?) problem caused by 3dfx's fxmemmap.vxd, and with somebody on the net claiming that an older version of this file might work, I wasted time trying every possible mix and match. For the life of me, I couldn't get a single V2 card to work at all on any of my VIA boards, and I tried three of them: the ASUS CUV4X (RIP), the QDI Advance 10F and the dual s370 MSI 694D Pro-AR (they are all seem to be built around the 694X/686A combo). Generally, while googling for information I came across lots of threads blaming VIA chipsets for issues with other hardware, however I don't know how common or rare these issues are. What surprised me the most though, is that after switching from 1000/133/694X to 600/100/440BX, the latter feels snappier and more responsive. Might just be me though, can't really prove it...

Why Windows ME?
It is one of the few times where Win98SE gave me big headaches. After running infinst and forceware they would start to lock up every now and then. Having been through all of the testing I mentioned above, having wrecked nerves, and thinking that I wouldn't really use the machine for anything other than some gaming (Unreal mostly), I didn't really have the courage to troubleshoot properly. WinME just worked right out of the box and already had drivers for both the 440BX chipset and the HPT366 UDMA controller, as well as a proper USB stack, and didn't crash on me once after installation, so they're a keeper for now - I'm done here!

Todo
- Find a P3 800MHz and get it in there (hmm, can the 6BA+IV do 10x100?)
- Fans for proper airflow in the case
- Find a better D3D card

...or move to i815 and use one of the faster chips and sdrams and that Radeon?

Benchmarks (800x600x16)