winuser3162 wrote on 2024-05-09, 20:54:

Cyberdyne wrote on 2024-05-09, 20:47:

Hey in the ISA era most of us had somekind of cheap clone sound. Or a Vibra16. In post ISA era most had integrated sound. In pre 3D most had just a VLB/PCI dumb framebuffer. Lucky ones had a S3 Trio or Cirrus CL-GD. Unlucy ones had somethin bizare or little incompatible or slow in some modes. Post 3D every "real gamer" had a Voodoo. But after Riva TNT wiped all up. And rest is history.

yeah the way i understand it, you were lucky if you had a s3 trio or something of that sort 93-95, 3dfx voodoo graphics then came along and blew everything out of the water in 96-97 but not too long after, nvidia came in the later half of the 90's 98-99, and the wiped slate clean with their riva tnt and tnt2 cards.

I would note one important thing: in the mid-1990s, large OEM PCs tended to have soldered (discrete) graphics, while white box AT clones (and built-to-order machines from the likes of Dell/Gateway/Micron) had VLB and then PCI and then AGP cards.

That's the world in which the Voodoo came out, and why I think the Voodoo's 'add-in' nature was so important. You could take a random Packard Hell or HP or Compaq with soldered graphics, put a Voodoo in the PCI slot, and off you go... (and unlike trying to add a PCI 2D video card, you wouldn't need to worry about whether you could properly disable the soldered graphics, etc.)

By the time NVIDIA came along and started to recombine 2D + 3D acceleration, they were lucky that the market was moving away from 'go with your parents to the big computer store and buy a Compaq or AST' and so you had a lot of machines with AGP slots which were ideally suited for those kinds of cards. And a 20 year old gamer, unlike a 12 year old, has a lot more ability to buy a decent motherboard with AGP while the 12 year old is far more stuck...

VivienM wrote on 2024-05-09, 21:18:

I would note one important thing: in the mid-1990s, large OEM PCs tended to have soldered (discrete) graphics, while white box A […]
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winuser3162 wrote on 2024-05-09, 20:54:

Cyberdyne wrote on 2024-05-09, 20:47:

Hey in the ISA era most of us had somekind of cheap clone sound. Or a Vibra16. In post ISA era most had integrated sound. In pre 3D most had just a VLB/PCI dumb framebuffer. Lucky ones had a S3 Trio or Cirrus CL-GD. Unlucy ones had somethin bizare or little incompatible or slow in some modes. Post 3D every "real gamer" had a Voodoo. But after Riva TNT wiped all up. And rest is history.

yeah the way i understand it, you were lucky if you had a s3 trio or something of that sort 93-95, 3dfx voodoo graphics then came along and blew everything out of the water in 96-97 but not too long after, nvidia came in the later half of the 90's 98-99, and the wiped slate clean with their riva tnt and tnt2 cards.

I would note one important thing: in the mid-1990s, large OEM PCs tended to have soldered (discrete) graphics, while white box AT clones (and built-to-order machines from the likes of Dell/Gateway/Micron) had VLB and then PCI and then AGP cards.

That's the world in which the Voodoo came out, and why I think the Voodoo's 'add-in' nature was so important. You could take a random Packard Hell or HP or Compaq with soldered graphics, put a Voodoo in the PCI slot, and off you go... (and unlike trying to add a PCI 2D video card, you wouldn't need to worry about whether you could properly disable the soldered graphics, etc.)

By the time NVIDIA came along and started to recombine 2D + 3D acceleration, they were lucky that the market was moving away from 'go with your parents to the big computer store and buy a Compaq or AST' and so you had a lot of machines with AGP slots which were ideally suited for those kinds of cards. And a 20 year old gamer, unlike a 12 year old, has a lot more ability to buy a decent motherboard with AGP while the 12 year old is far more stuck...

agree with every point here, really hit the nail on the head.

funding a high end pc at 12 would have for sure been much more challenging compared to an employed young adult unless your were a 12 year old born into insane amounts of wealth or royalty then by all means buy an SGI system if you wish. (not sure if those big expensive beautiful machines can run games)

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-05-09, 21:16:

to be a well off adult/computer gamer in the 90's would have been an awesome time to be one. i have friends who were pc "gamers" who were also adults during this time. this is how i got my voodoo 1 (which now doesnt work unfortunately) for free.

It would have been an expensive time to be a computer gamer, though. Like, honestly, you'd be spending... I don't know how many thousands of dollars every three years on new systems, pretty much. And the new systems would have required new monitors at the rate at which monitors were improving in the 1990s.

But sure, it would have been more awesome than being stuck with the computer your parents could afford for five years during the 90s.

(And yes, I think 3 years would have been about right, aligned with the big hardware leaps and the new OSes - a 486DX2/66 in 1992, then a P133 in 1995, then... a PII 400/450 in 1998, then... not sure what you would have picked for your XP system in 2001, maybe you'd have held out for a P4 Northwood in early 2002, or an Athlon XP, or... I guess a Willamette...)

(And it's funny, after putting together that list, I do agree with you. You could have had a lot of fun if you could have afforded those 4 systems in the 1990s...)

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-05-09, 21:23:

funding a high end pc at 12 would have for sure been much more challenging compared to an employed young adult unless your were a 12 year old born into insane amounts of wealth or royalty then by all means buy an SGI system if you wish. (not sure if those big expensive beautiful machines can run games)

And even if your family had a fairly high amount of money... doesn't mean you can convince your parents to spend that money on overtly gaming-centric things.

A good friend of mine at the time (and still today) had much more family money than me to spend on computers, and really, he had a high-end IBM Aptiva, then a high-end Dell PII 300MHz that he ordered with the optional SCSI card/4GB SCSI hard drive, then his parents needed that computer for themselves so they got him a high-end PII 450 with a SCSI card and a 9GB SCSI hard drive. I think he added a Voodoo/Voodoo 2 to at least one of those machines, but it tells you something that someone who was spending $4000+ CAD on a PC... was buying SCSI hard drives and not $1000 GPUs like you would in the 2010s. He also had nice monitors - typically high-end ViewSonic CRTs. And... well, frankly, I think it would have been much easier for a 15 year old to convince his parents to spend money on faster hard drives or nicer monitors than on a $1000 gaming video card (if such a thing existed, of course, which it didn't...).

I know his parents, I just... don't know... if they would have been comfortable spending the same amount of money on something like today's Alienware systems if they existed back then.

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-05-09, 20:16:

i never really understood what a "pentium overdrive" was. sounded cool though, i liked the logo design too.

A "Pentium OverDrive" was a Pentium-grade processor that you could put in to your existing 486 motherboard (and not just enthusiasty motherboards, also large OEM motherboards) and... fairly substantially increase its performance.

Like many other types of upgrades in the 1990s (I am more familiar with the Mac side, where there were tons of weird options from the likes of DayStar Digital), you have to look at it in the context of rapidly-improving performance, rapidly-expanding software requirements, and very high prices for new systems (and especially for RAM). According to Wikipedia, a Pentium OverDrive was $299USD. A new Pentium system in 1995 would have been... US$2000+, not including a monitor. So if you could spend $299 and extend the life of your 486 by another... 18... months, that was a great investment in that context.

And those things were even marketed at corporate IT. I know it sounds insane in 2024 to think about corporate IT installing dozens of processor upgrades, but back then, it would have made a ton of sense if your existing fleet needed just a little extra oomph for Office 95.

(Interestingly, the friend I mentioned in the post right above this one - before his IBM Aptiva, he had another computer in which his parents had a Pentium OverDrive installed...)

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-05-09, 20:13:

[...]

Wow! people really showed up to LAN event with their parents packard bell OEM home PC? nobody could PAY me to do that.

Oh, I certainly did. Then again, Packard Bell themselves paid me, I worked on their UK/IE helpdesk for a few years around the turn of the millennium 😜

Despite generally being an awful employer (somehow managing to combine worst parts of Japanese and French management practices...) they sold old parts and systems to employees for rock-bottom prices. Which was all I could afford given what they paid me...

Their systems weren't even too bad, the problem was they aimed for the lowest possible user group (minimal budget and minimal knowledge) and the software package was designed to match. Get rid of that and just install clean Windows or Linux and things generally worked out-of-the-box and in particular their Aztech sound cards were great for DOS and WIn9x.

I have a ludicrously pimped 1999-era PB system here, slot 1 with onboard Voodoo3. I've overclocked its BX chipset to 133MHz, upgraded to a P3-1400S Tualatin and use an Intel X25-E SLC SSD.

dionb wrote on 2024-05-09, 22:08:

Oh, I certainly did. Then again, Packard Bell themselves paid me, I worked on their UK/IE helpdesk for a few years around the tu […]
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winuser3162 wrote on 2024-05-09, 20:13:

[...]

Wow! people really showed up to LAN event with their parents packard bell OEM home PC? nobody could PAY me to do that.

Oh, I certainly did. Then again, Packard Bell themselves paid me, I worked on their UK/IE helpdesk for a few years around the turn of the millennium 😜

Despite generally being an awful employer (somehow managing to combine worst parts of Japanese and French management practices...) they sold old parts and systems to employees for rock-bottom prices. Which was all I could afford given what they paid me...

Their systems weren't even too bad, the problem was they aimed for the lowest possible user group (minimal budget and minimal knowledge) and the software package was designed to match. Get rid of that and just install clean Windows or Linux and things generally worked out-of-the-box and in particular their Aztech sound cards were great for DOS and WIn9x.

I have a ludicrously pimped 1999-era PB system here, slot 1 with onboard Voodoo3. I've overclocked its BX chipset to 133MHz, upgraded to a P3-1400S Tualatin and use an Intel X25-E SLC SSD.

Never new 3DFX made integrated chips.

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-05-09, 22:27:

[...]

Never new 3DFX made integrated chips.

They didn't, it's just a regular V3-2000 AGP soldered onto the motherboard together with 8MB SDRAM. Motherboard is an MSI MS-6168 (rev 2), one of two boards with Voodoo3 onboard.

dionb wrote on 2024-05-09, 23:09:

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-05-09, 22:27:

[...]

Never new 3DFX made integrated chips.

They didn't, it's just a regular V3-2000 AGP soldered onto the motherboard together with 8MB SDRAM. Motherboard is an MSI MS-6168 (rev 2), one of two boards with Voodoo3 onboard.

I wonder if that would have been one of the last examples of soldered-on desktop graphics... by 2000 or so, at least on the Intel side, large OEMs seemed to have all embraced the i810 and its successors and the on-chipset intel graphics.

I also remember someone on reddit who picked up some HP thing that had a sticker advertising NVIDIA TNT graphics. Not clear if it was soldered-on or if it was a weird chipset that nvidia did in partnership with someone else (ALi? right before the end of their chipset-making days?)... but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a discrete TNT/TNT2 card in an AGP slot.

The big OEMs sure loved them soldered graphics in the mid-late 1990s.

In a pre 3D era. It really did not matter, if you had card or integrated video. Sometimes even integrated was better. Because they usually used somethin cheap and compatible like a Cirrus. And they always had local bus connection, so they were fast. Loved my small desktop IBM PC 330 486DX66 and my Compaq Deskpro 2000 Pentium 133. One had Cirrus other had S3. Both had excellent video.

VivienM wrote on 2024-05-10, 00:46:

[...]

I wonder if that would have been one of the last examples of soldered-on desktop graphics... by 2000 or so, at least on the Intel side, large OEMs seemed to have all embraced the i810 and its successors and the on-chipset intel graphics.

Integrated is cheaper than onboard, onboard is cheaper than separate card. As soon as the performance of integrated chipsets was 'good enough' (for procurement departments, not end users - I remember in 2000 having my system with Celeron 333 and onboard ATi Rage Pro being replaced by Celeron 700 and integrated i810. In Win98SE desktop it was like someone left the handbrake on 😦 ) onboard was dead for most applications. It only lived on in servers where the loss of bandwidth due to integrated stuff was unacceptable.
[q]The big OEMs sure loved them soldered graphics in the mid-late 1990s.[/quote]
Lower TCO due to lower purchase costs and fewer truckrolls - a card can get loose, fall out...

Cyberdyne wrote on 2024-05-10, 05:33:

In a pre 3D era. It really did not matter, if you had card or integrated video. Sometimes even integrated was better. Because they usually used somethin cheap and compatible like a Cirrus. And they always had local bus connection, so they were fast. Loved my small desktop IBM PC 330 486DX66 and my Compaq Deskpro 2000 Pentium 133. One had Cirrus other had S3. Both had excellent video.

Thing is, integrated graphics didn't really exist in the PC until the 3D era. The first logically integrated chipset, SiS' 5511+6202 in 1995, was 2D only and still had separate VGA chip, it just shared the 5511 memory controller. Afterwards this was integrated into a single chip solution, the SiS 5596 in 1996. Then SDRAM support was added in the 5597/5598 chips in 1997. Those were the only integrated solutions that did not support 3D, and as of 1997 3D wasn't a thing in the low-end discrete solutions it was replacing either. They also didn't sell very well, mainly due to performance simply not being anywhere near good enough, even for non-gaming office work.

All subsequent integrated solutions, from SiS 530, Intel 810 and Via MVP4 onwards were - on paper at least - 3D accelerators. Performance was never the goal, it was to have something good enough for the office purchasers who didn't care about performance or the bottom end of the home market who couldn't afford to care. That's ironic given integrated video designs originated at SGI, where it was explicitly used to increase performance by putting all memory bandwidth into one pool that allowed either CPU or GPU access it. This philosophy was tried exactly twice in the PC world, with the ALi Aladdin 7 chipset that had a dual-channel SDR-SDRAM memory controller and an ArtX precursor to the Radeon design for VGA. You've probably never seen one, in fact likely never heard of it, which says all you need to know about its commercial success. Second time was with nVidia's nForce and nForce2 chipsets, which paired dual-channel DDR with a GeForce2MX core. The latter were very succesful as they were the fastest SoA chipsets, but due to high price they ended up in the performance segment where nobody was interested in the integrated Gf2MX. The chipsets were too expensive to compete with Via KM133/266 in the bottom-scraping segment even if they blew it away in terms of performance. So nVidia dropped that idea afterwards.

Cirrus Logic never made or was involved in an integrated solution. All systems with Cirrus Logic VGA had discrete onboard controllers with their own video memory, or add-in cards with the same.

Cyberdyne wrote on 2024-05-10, 05:33:

In a pre 3D era. It really did not matter, if you had card or integrated video. Sometimes even integrated was better. Because they usually used somethin cheap and compatible like a Cirrus. And they always had local bus connection, so they were fast. Loved my small desktop IBM PC 330 486DX66 and my Compaq Deskpro 2000 Pentium 133. One had Cirrus other had S3. Both had excellent video.

And I had an "IBM" nee Acer Aptiva with soldered-on ATI Rage II+, I think, and... it was a disaster due to bad drivers. I don't remember the details, but IBM only published one version of Win95/98 drivers that had one set of problems, then ATI had their own newer drivers but again only released one or two versions with lots of bugs. I... suspect... one reason for the driver neglect is that this particular variant of this particular chip was only used for soldered solutions. (Saying this now, 25 years later, I wonder if you could have modded the drivers for the closest-equivalent card to work with this...)

(This is the era where ATI really acquired its reputation for bad drivers... a reputation they would only start to shake with later drivers for the 9700/9800s in the mid-2000s)

The big problem with these soldered solutions is that they didn't give you an expansion slot, so even if my Rage II+ was AGP, any replacement would have been PCI... (which I suppose might actually have been just fine...)

The only "amazing" thing about these Celerons was the overclocking capability compared to the price back then. Looking at it from 2024, just get a Pentium 2/3 if you after pure performance. The celeron is of interest if your goal is to play with overclocking for the sake of it, that's about it.

Sorry for my definition. For integrated i meant all video controllers thad did not reside in a separate card. Meant integrated in motherboard. Not only integrated in the chipset.

I recently acquired a Hypertec Phoenix 370/S from 2001. It's basically a computer on a card. Information about it is scarce. Does anyone know what video chipset it uses?

dionb wrote on 2024-05-10, 10:47:

increase performance by putting all memory bandwidth into one pool that allowed either CPU or GPU access it. This philosophy was tried exactly twice in the PC world, with the ALi Aladdin 7 chipset that had a dual-channel SDR-SDRAM memory controller and an ArtX precursor to the Radeon design for VGA.

Intel tried much earlier commercializing JAWS concept with DELL - Dell PowerLine 450DE/2 DGX Graphics Workstation
First demonstrated in October 1991
Re: Dell 486 help

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2024-05-10, 12:15:

The only "amazing" thing about these Celerons was the overclocking capability compared to the price back then.

No. Celeron 300A was _the_ fastest intel CPU on the market (after overclocking to 450MHz) between August 1998 and February 1999. Integrated 128KB L2 cache running at full core speed was slightly faster than Pentium2 512KB L2 running at FSB speed. So $150 + a piece of electrical tape bought you more performance than $670 P2.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/174/4

I have one or two slot one celerons if I recall,

Apparently there is a way to multi processor mod them.

A dual celeron setup would be kinda fun.

Sphere478 wrote on 2024-05-10, 20:02:

I have one or two slot one celerons if I recall,

Apparently there is a way to multi processor mod them.

A dual celeron setup would be kinda fun.

dual OC celerons would be awesome.

So, I ran a Slot-1 Celeron on an Abit BH6. A 300A@464, until upgrading it to a 600 MHz Coppermine Celeron in a slotket, running 900. 1004 MHz unfortunately wasn't stable.

As for dual Celerons, I had an Abit BP6, which was just that. Ran it for a while with 366s at 550. Actually I ran it today (well, yesterday, it's 5 minutes past midnight).