Would you also include 3dMark99?

I think you might like this thread.

I am currently waiting for a SiS 530 board to benchmark, probably with much fewer games since it takes a lot of time to do all of them.

blank001: Sure, done 😀

F2bnp: Beautiful, thanks! 😀

I want to build a retro gaming computer too, But good motherboards with AGP slots are hard to find.
Super socket 7 mobo with AGP is rare and expensive.
So I selected an Intel BX440 mobo with AGP slot and a P-3 500mhz. CPU.

Is this adequate or is an AMD K6-2 3+ CPU better.

Will be using with 256 ram and Voodoo-3.

Pentium 3 500 is in general quite a bit faster than even the fastest K6-III+. However, K6-III+ has an unlocked multiplier and can have its individual caches manipulated using SETMUL, a 3rd party program.
If you want to know more about performance, I linked to a benchmark thread just two posts above yours.

Oh good, I've been testing my K6-III+ rig lately and it feels a bit slow. performance comes somewhere between a PII 300 and a PII 350

Gigabyte GA-5AX
K6-III+ @ 550mhz
256MB SDRAM
TNT2 Ultra
Yamaha audition 32
I forget the exact HDD model but its a Maxtor ATA 133 running off a PCI ATA133 card

running all benchmarks at 800x600

3DMark 99 - 3269
Quake III - 40 FPS
Quake II - 37 FPS
MDK2 - 27 fps
Expendables - 27 FPS
PCPC bench 2.10 - 79

for comparison my Gateway slot one PC with a PII @ 350mhz gets
3DMark 99 - 2985
Quake III - 43 FPS
Quake II - 64 FPS
MDK2 - 37 fps
Expendables - 39 FPS
PCPC bench 2.10 - 93

haven't run 2000 and 2001se yet. comparing it to my 350mhz slot 1 machine with the same video card it lags behind it in most benches but I feel like it should be doing a little better.

Yeah some of these are a little bit off. For Quake 2 you really want to use the AMD 3DNow! Patch if you haven't, you should see a really nice boost. For the rest of these, make sure to use the ALi AGP Utility and set Write Combining options properly (I usually put it on "ALL"), there have been some threads about that so take a look there.

Even so, I don't know how far that TNT2 can take you, if you feel up to it and once you have done the above tweaks, I would really love to see those games benchmarked again, ideally with some more from my list added in, just be careful to follow my methodology so that we can compare the results.
3Dfx will undoubtedly be faster though, by how much really is debatable, but it has been proven time and time again that the lower overall CPU overhead and tight integration of 3DNow! optimizations in their drivers (and MiniGL, especially 1.47) really help those K6 CPUs.

F2bnp wrote:

Yeah some of these are a little bit off. For Quake 2 you really want to use the AMD 3DNow! Patch if you haven't, you should see a really nice boost. For the rest of these, make sure to use the ALi AGP Utility and set Write Combining options properly (I usually put it on "ALL"), there have been some threads about that so take a look there.

Even so, I don't know how far that TNT2 can take you, if you feel up to it and once you have done the above tweaks, I would really love to see those games benchmarked again, ideally with some more from my list added in, just be careful to follow my methodology so that we can compare the results.
3Dfx will undoubtedly be faster though, by how much really is debatable, but it has been proven time and time again that the lower overall CPU overhead and tight integration of 3DNow! optimizations in their drivers (and MiniGL, especially 1.47) really help those K6 CPUs.

I'm using a TNT2 mainly just to use something different. seems everyone uses a V3 in these rigs and although that mat be the best overall choice I already have a few Voodoo PC's so I wanted to go a bit different. plus the 32 bit color is nice.

I was not using the 3D now! patch with Quake II, I'll have to apply that.

any chance you can give me a link to the ALi AGP Utility? I can't seem to find it. what I do find just seems to be chipset drivers. Latest I found was version 1.9 which installed fine but I don't see any utility to set options anywhere.

3D mark 2000 and 20001SE seem to lock the system up almost immediately after the benchmark starts. I've read the Gigabyte GA-5AX has some issues with Nvidia cards so maybe this is the problem? I'll try a later driver and see if that helps any. *update* later video drivers seem to of fixed this issue

I also have a Soyo SY-5EMA+ V 1.1 which I think is K6-III+ compatible. think that would make a better motherboard choice?

soviet conscript wrote:

I'm using a TNT2 mainly just to use something different. seems everyone uses a V3 in these rigs and although that mat be the bes […]
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F2bnp wrote:

Yeah some of these are a little bit off. For Quake 2 you really want to use the AMD 3DNow! Patch if you haven't, you should see a really nice boost. For the rest of these, make sure to use the ALi AGP Utility and set Write Combining options properly (I usually put it on "ALL"), there have been some threads about that so take a look there.

Even so, I don't know how far that TNT2 can take you, if you feel up to it and once you have done the above tweaks, I would really love to see those games benchmarked again, ideally with some more from my list added in, just be careful to follow my methodology so that we can compare the results.
3Dfx will undoubtedly be faster though, by how much really is debatable, but it has been proven time and time again that the lower overall CPU overhead and tight integration of 3DNow! optimizations in their drivers (and MiniGL, especially 1.47) really help those K6 CPUs.

I'm using a TNT2 mainly just to use something different. seems everyone uses a V3 in these rigs and although that mat be the best overall choice I already have a few Voodoo PC's so I wanted to go a bit different. plus the 32 bit color is nice.

I was not using the 3D now! patch with Quake II, I'll have to apply that.

any chance you can give me a link to the ALi AGP Utility? I can't seem to find it. what I do find just seems to be chipset drivers. Latest I found was version 1.9 which installed fine but I don't see any utility to set options anywhere.

3D mark 2000 and 20001SE seem to lock the system up almost immediately after the benchmark starts. I've read the Gigabyte GA-5AX has some issues with Nvidia cards so maybe this is the problem? I'll try a later driver and see if that helps any. I also have a Soyo SY-5EMA+ V 1.1 which I think is K6-III+ compatible. think that would make a better motherboard choice?

32bit color is kind of overrated on these cards, they are too slow to pull it off, unless you want to compromise with low resolutions.

I think this is the utility.

Yes, these lockups are probably due to the chipset. Early, non Intel, AGP systems often have issues with AGP cards. 3Dfx cards are not affected because they don't make use of the features AGP provides, they just use it as a 66MHz PCI.
I would suggest installing the ALi AGP driver, replacing the TNT2 drivers with something from late 1999 or early 2000 and fiddling with the ALi AGP Utility.

No comments on that Soyo board, I think the ETEQ chipset is essentially a rebranded VIA MVP3 or VP3.

Well, I'm thoughly confused. both the Quake II 3DNow! patch and the AGP utility seem to of had almost no effect.

after patching quake II for 3DNow! I get maybe 2-5 FPS higher but that's it. the AGP utility seems to work since it asks me to reboot once I change any settings but my benchmarks are pretty much the same. I tried "Turbo" mode and manually adjusting things to no effect.

The utility refuses to let me enable AGP Fast Write mode and when I do set Allocation to "ALL" after the reboot if I go back into the utility it says "disabled"

I was however able to improve stability. I was previously using older video drivers from about 2000 but I updated them to ver. 28.32 from 2002 and the thing has been rock stable without a single crash. 3DMark 2000 and 20001SE also run all the way through now instead of locking up the PC.

The only clue I have is in Quake II when you hit the ~ bar right away at the top of the command lines it says something like "GL_renderer TNT2/PCI/3DNOW!" not sure if it should say PCI there or if that's an indication something isn't jiving correctly as its an AGP card.