Since your card load-out is so high, maybe ditch the Live! and its bus mastering issues.

I say keep this sb live as judging from your cpu and graphics card I'm guessing your going to be using this rig to play later windows games which will sound way better on the live than the awe64. I always run a pci and isa sound card if my a slot availability allows it. Isa is the only way to go for dos but for windows games pci is king!...later windows games that is eg: Quake 3, Warcraft 3..

Checkout my rig which is similar to what your planning on doing.

My latest Windows 98 Pentium 3 rig.

Oh, regarding the psu, as you said you've had no issues in the past using a 520w psu. Going down to a 350w psu or similar will restrict your options greatly. What if you choose to upgrade to a fx5950, add a Zip drive and add some extra case fans for instance....350w would be pushing it. I only use lower wattage PSU's for older rigs like a 486. Otherwise I use 500w or higher. Just to play it safe. Don't want to have to rip yours out and upgrade it just because you decided to make some upgrades.

borgie83 wrote:

Oh, regarding the psu, as you said you've had no issues in the past using a 520w psu. Going down to a 350w psu or similar will restrict your options greatly. What if you choose to upgrade to a fx5950, add a Zip drive and add some extra case fans for instance....350w would be pushing it. I only use lower wattage PSU's for older rigs like a 486. Otherwise I use 500w or higher. Just to play it safe. Don't want to have to rip yours out and upgrade it just because you decided to make some upgrades.

This all depends on what the 5v lines can deliver. When building such an old rig using a modern PSU, the 12v line(s) shouldn't be a problem.
But I do see most modern PSU's often have only 15 amps on the 5v line, which I think is little.

Tualatin doesn't need that much power (about half as much as a fast Athlon XP) and draws it's power from the 5v line. Most fans however draw power from the 12v line. AGP cards that have a Molex connector typically also draw the extra power from the 12v line (there may be exceptions that I don't know about though), but other stuff like a ZIP drive (I know you only used them as examples 😀 ) do draw power from the 5v line (I have one internal ZIP drive right here and it mentions 0.8A max power draw from the 5v line). It all comes down to picking your parts right.

350W PSU's from a good brand are very useful though. Virtually all of my newer retro rigs (the fast single cores) use a 350W PSU of decent quality and good graphics cards (good enough to play BF2, FEAR and UT3), but I did pick my parts with care, also when it came down to power consumption.
Venice core Athlon 64's along with a GF 6800 (vanilla), 7600GS's and one with a FX5900 Ultra, one harddrive, one optical drive and one or two fans and perhaps a NIC or sound card all powered by 350W PSU's and every part cherrypicked to be able to work together. Haven't had any significant problems with these configurations yet 😁
I once made a thread that included quite a bit of information (it's in my sig, the "good reading for people new to"-thread) but I'm not sure if I ever included the power consumption of the more modern AGP cards, but the power consumption of CPU's was definitely included 😀

It's kinda worrying though if you don't have good 5v PSU's already, they are becoming harder and harder to find, provided you don't want to buy a new expensive PSU. Old units will often be worn or even defective (the last 2 old PSU's I bought second hand that had like 30A on the 5v line but very little on the 12v line, were both defective. But at least they were also very cheap heh).

This would actually be nice food for a whole topic of it's own 🤣!

And I surely agree with one thing Borgie83, better safe then sorry 😀

Thanks Borgie83 and Tetrium. I will probably hold out until the SeaSonic S12-II 520W comes back into stock. Those I know will work as it powers my current retro rig that I listed in My Retro 3Dfx Build

Borgie83, I noticed in your thread (nice system btw) that you have an Aerocool Strike-X 500W and from the screenshot it shows a combined 150W which is higher than SeaSonic. Would this be better for my retro rig? I have never heard of Aerocool before; are they as good as SeaSonic?

@Speed King, yes it would work great in your rig. I'm not going to lie though and say it would work "better" because seasonic make quite good PSU's. Well, I've used the strike-x twice now and never had issues at all. Not only do they have 80+ Bronze efficiency, but they're quiet, have braided cables and look great! I'm just about to buy another one for my next P3 Tualatin build. They range from $55-$75 on sale. I never pay full price for any hardware.

In regards to aerocool themselves, they have been around for a fair while now starting out by making case fans I believe (someone correct me if I'm wrong) and in recent times they've come out with a vengeance with their cases and PSU's. Their cases are by far the best I've seen. Quite good quality and excellent cooling.

Ps: nice build! Glad to see someone else throwing a 5.25" floppy in their semi modern retro rig 😀

I will say though, in regards to choosing windows ME over 98 SE due to usb support. My pentium 2 build running windows 98 se has 8 usb ports (2 on the motherboard + 4 via usb pci card and 2 on the front of the case) and usb works absolutely fine. I use the generic usb drivers though. Windows 98 SE will give you real mode dos and good usb support. You can even install the unofficial service pack to obtain the windows ME/2K theme making it look like ME anyway. Best of both worlds 😀

http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/win9 … age-drivers.php

Thanks Borgie83. I might look look into the Strike-X; it is currently out of stock as well locally. We will see which one gets in first.

I used ME for USB Mass Storage support, not USB support in general. The ME theme doesn't bother me although I do prefer the stock look of Win98SE which is what will be on this proposed build.

With my previous build I decided to cram it full of all the different drives I could. I remember the 5.25" drives as a kid and thought why not.

I would prefer to keep the live so I may try to get a SATA to PATA adapter and connect my SATA DVD-RW to the secondary IDE channel. Hopefully the SBLive and VIA 686B decide to play nice.

I put the rig together today with a few modifications as things didn't go to plan.

For some reason the Soltek board will not boot from the Sil3114 card I had. On my other MSI 694T it would show up on the first BIOS screen and then set the boot option to SCSI first, it would boot off SATA devices no problem (Ignoring the data corruption issues). This board seems to ignore it completely which is a shame as I thought it would suffice for the optical drive. I also tried my IDE to SATA adapter to connect the optical drive to the mainboard's IDE controller but that caused it to freeze upon drive detection. Interestingly the adapter worked with an OCZ Vertex 2 that I had spare so it must have been something to do with the optical drive itself. In the end I had to source an older IDE optical drive.

I also ditched the idea of having the AWE64 Value as the SIMMConn adapter or the RAM I had in it wasn't getting detected, so I am just sticking with the SB Live Platinum with Live Drive which I got cheap, boxed, still sealed, apparently new.

The major disappointment was the ATi Rage Fury MAXX. The card worked flawlessly on an old 440BX board previously, but I could not get it to work properly in this VIA 694T board. I tried the driver ISO from VOGONS driver collection, and the updated one on AMD's website, but no matter what, as soon as I tried to change to anything higher than 16 colors, I would get greeted with a black screen after reboot. I tried loading different versions of the VIA 4in1 drivers from 4.21 through 4.43 as googling showed that this fixed it for some people back in the day; no joy. I set the board to run in AGP 2x mode in the BIOS (I know the card is AGP anyway) and disabled the other fancy AGP features that would cause issues on Geforce cards and VIA chipsets back in the day, but still no joy. Knowing I have a card that worked previously on an Intel chipset, I either have a card that died in storage, or is incompatible with VIA chipsets. At the moment I have a 4MB Diamond S3 ViRGE PCI card so I could at least check to ensure the rest of the system is working. Does anyone else have experience with a Rage Fury MAXX on a VIA chipset? The card is pretty cool and I'd love to get it to work.

Below are the updated specs:

Pentium III-S 1.4GHz (Tualatin - not modded)
Thermaltake Socket A/370 CPU cooler
SOLTEK SL-65KV2-T (VIA Apollo Pro 133T)
512MB Hynix PC133 SDRAM
ATI Rage Fury MAXX 64MB
2x 3Dfx Voodoo 2 1000s in SLI
Sound Blaster Live Platinum with Live Drive
40GB Seagate IDE HDD (Mainboard didn't like the 320GB)
Lite-On IDE DVD ROM
SMC USB 10Mbit Ethernet (Out of PCI slots)
Seasonic S12-II 520W PSU
Coolermaster Elite 335u

VIA chipset are plain awefull.
When I switched from P2 to P3 years ago, I went from 440BX to some VIA sh*t (ASUS CUV4 something). Never had something this bad, between disk accesses freezing windows, usb peripherals lacking power, and video card incompatibilities.
Bought a TUSL2-C shortly after, life went back to being normal.

Hmm I like VIA. Of course I would always prefer an Intel chipset, but had a good run with VIA stuff. My Super Socket 7 has a VIA chipset and is running DOS and Windows 95 with Voodoo without any issue.

My Tualatin boards is also VIA with an ISA slot. Also no issues.

Same here. I've had 440BX, 815E and 694 boards, and I'd rate the Aopen AX33 the best one out of all (it's VIA 694). I think the bad reputation came from very early boards.

I've given up on the Rage Fury MAXX. Google suggests that it has major issues with VIA chipsets and this black screen on anything else but 640x480@16 color is one of them. Last time I ran the card was to do a series of benchmarks and that was on a 440BX board with a 100MHz FSB Celeron 1000A in a SlotT adapter. I suspect if I switched back to my BX board then it will work.

Getting annoyed with it all I decided to drop the 2xV2s and S3 card and put in my spare V5 and Matrox m3D making the only difference between the two systems is the PCI SB Live Platinum as apposed to the ISA SB AWE 64 Gold. I think I am getting hit by the VIA 686B bug as if I install windows fresh (will take ages for all my games) I have no problems but i get a bit of sound crackling, but if I restore from an image of my other machine, half way through the restore (20GB) I get DMA write errors, CRC errors, etc. In the end I got it to work by turning on Verify each block and safe writes in the image restore options and let it run overnight. It seems as if when you copy a tonne of data over the VIA IDE controller, corruption occurrs. Back in the day my VIA board had the 686A south bridge and I had the SB Vibra 128 PCI instead of the live and I remember hearing about the issues with the 686B and SB Live but never thought much of it. I guess now I know what headache it is. Does anyone have a copy of George Breese's PCI Latency patch that was meant to help fix the issue? I have windows installed from the image but I don't want it to get corrupted over time. Thanks

Just build another rig for that MAXX, I kinda like VIA chipsets but the bugs just put me off and the speed on some boards is horrendous.

Speed King wrote:

Does anyone have a copy of George Breese's PCI Latency patch that was meant to help fix the issue?

I have attached two versions of the file. You can go through his website for advice selecting the apt version for your motherboard.