Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-06-24, 16:29:

I think I'm fortunate that my Voodoo 3 only draws around 15W. If I were to put a more power hungry GPU in there, I don't know if this PSU would hold up.

According to this V3 2000 draws 11W. I don't know for certain that chart is 100% correct but it seems accurate to me.

AXP 2100+ Thoroughbreds TDP is 62.1W so if its max power draw is more or less around that and you add the 11W from the V3 2000 you get ~73W. Add everything else you have in there and you probably end up somewhere around 80-90W. Seasonic S12III 650W specs say the power limit for 3.3/5V is 100W.

Seasonic is a good brand and might run the PC even if it would draw a bit more than the specified power limit at least for some time, but might be for the best if you don't upgrade to AXP 3100+ / Voodoo5 5500 and fill the PC with weird 5.25" crap LGR style 😀

You could also see how that AXP 2100+ undervolts and free up some watts that way. My cedar mill P4 undervolted from 1.225V to 0.96250V which was hilarious, biggest undervolt I've personally done.

Sombrero wrote on 2023-06-24, 20:22:

AXP 2100+ Thoroughbreds TDP is 62.1W so if its max power draw is more or less around that and you add the 11W from the V3 2000 you get ~73W. Add everything else you have in there and you probably end up somewhere around 80-90W. Seasonic S12III 650W specs say the power limit for 3.3/5V is 100W.

Cheers! Aside from the two sound cards, there is only a DVD drive and a single SSD in there, as well as the Audigy front panel. I don't think those should put me over the PSU specs.

You could also see how that AXP 2100+ undervolts and free up some watts that way. My cedar mill P4 undervolted from 1.225V to 0.96250V which was hilarious, biggest undervolt I've personally done.

I'd love to try undervolting the CPU, but this ECS board has no voltage control options whatsoever. Not in the BIOS and not via jumpers, just nothing. It's one of its bigger drawbacks, but I knew that going in, having read a couple of reviews before I got it.

While doing some more tweaking on this build, and installing WinXP on a second drive for maintenance purposes, I noticed something odd. Seemingly at random, one of my drives would go into PIO mode, instead of using UDMA. This usually happened while copying larger files (500 MB and up) and could be seen in Device Manager. The only way to get the drive out of PIO mode was to uninstall the IDE controller and let the system add it back on the next reboot. But that only helped until the next large file transfer, which sent it back into PIO mode.

I spent a lot of time troubleshooting this, at first suspecting the SATA to IDE adapters, but that wasn't it. At one point, I even thought that some of the capacitors on this motherboard might be bad, or that it could be broken somehow, but then it hit me. While I was initially testing the board on my workbench, I didn't use a sound card, and I hadn't encountered this PIO problem. When I put everything into the case, I added back my Audigy of course. Could this be the dreaded VIA vs. SBLive/Audigy bug? Only one way to find out. And sure enough, after pulling the Audigy out of the case, all the drive issues magically disappeared.

I've done some reading on this, and it seems like Creative fixed this on their end at some point, likely with the release of the Audigy 2. I have a ZS version of that card, so I tried it out. And indeed, it doesn't suffer from this issue. I could use this ZS card, but I dislike the fact that it doesn't have digital CD audio when using VxD drivers. I guess I could get the original (non-ZS) Audigy 2 and see if it is affected by the VIA bug. If I manage to buy one cheap locally, I'll report back with my findings.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-06-25, 18:40:

While doing some more tweaking on this build, and installing WinXP on a second drive for maintenance purposes, I noticed something odd. Seemingly at random, one of my drives would go into PIO mode, instead of using UDMA. This usually happened while copying larger files (500 MB and up) and could be seen in Device Manager. The only way to get the drive out of PIO mode was to uninstall the IDE controller and let the system add it back on the next reboot. But that only helped until the next large file transfer, which sent it back into PIO mode.

I spent a lot of time troubleshooting this, at first suspecting the SATA to IDE adapters, but that wasn't it. At one point, I even thought that some of the capacitors on this motherboard might be bad, or that it could be broken somehow, but then it hit me. While I was initially testing the board on my workbench, I didn't use a sound card, and I hadn't encountered this PIO problem. When I put everything into the case, I added back my Audigy of course. Could this be the dreaded VIA vs. SBLive/Audigy bug? Only one way to find out. And sure enough, after pulling the Audigy out of the case, all the hard drive issues magically disappeared.

I've done some reading on this, and it seems like Creative fixed this on their end at some point, likely with the release of the Audigy 2. I have a ZS version of that card, so I tried it out. And indeed, it doesn't suffer from this issue. I could use this ZS card, but I dislike the fact that it doesn't have digital CD audio when using VxD drivers. I guess I could get the original (non-ZS) Audigy 2 and see if it is affected by the VIA bug. If I manage to buy one cheap locally, I'll report back with my findings.

One of those early VIA issues is what held me back still because of my memories was horrid because before that, I was not impressed with P4 Celeron motherboard kit that I tried on a loan that I worked for a shop to get the feel of it because I was happy with Athlon XP, Back in the day, had so much trouble as well with built up Athlon XP machine with the early VIA chipset, all I could is vaguely remember similar to A7V but bit later, I think one generation later but did have 686B. Shows up as crash and graphics screws up when playing games.

Even now, I'm going to have a try again with much newer VIA chipset K8T800 on socket 754 motherboard and another 754 based on SiS 760L/964L motherboard.

Cheers,

I managed to snag a non-ZS Audigy 2 (SB0240) from my local classifieds (pic in the first post). As expected, it doesn't trigger the VIA chipset bug. Both SSDs now remain in UDMA mode and transfer speeds are always fully maxed out. And best of all, digital CD audio works correctly under Win98 even with VxD drivers. The downside is that I can't use the Audigy 1 front panel, since the pinout is different on the Audigy 2. But overall, I'm very happy with this purchase.

In conclusion, when using a VIA chipset from this time period, I recommend staying away from SBLive and Audigy 1 cards, just as a precaution. Not every motherboard may be affected by this problem, but it's better to be safe than sorry. Audigy 2 and ZS cards seem to have fixed this issue and can be safely used on VIA chipsets.