Having used a dual slot 1 system for years I can thoroughly recommend using a socket instead! The default Intel coolers were horribly noisy with their tiny fans, and after I eventually found some third party replacements, it was somewhat quieter but still limited by some sub par thermal transfer pads.

If you were lucky, and had an OEM system with a fanless pentium 3, it was somewhat more pleasant - but the main fanless dual slot 1 systems I know of used a lot of other fans to cool the system, resulting in lot of noise.

I never quitened my system fully, because tower cases were still expensive, the one I had needed better cooling, and two slot 1 CPUs plus a FireGL 8800 (Radeon 8500) created a lot of heat.

AGP will probably be limited to 2x speed if running on a slot 1 system, 4x at best. There shouldn't be a problem running 3dfx cards under XP.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

XP. Fisher Price.

🤣, man. Perfect reference. I usually apply the popular, Vista Black theme for XP as it's much more beautiful.

Jorpho wrote:

This seems like a very strange combination. If you want to run 2000, XP, or 7, why limit yourself to a Slot 1 build? Anything that can take advantage of the dual CPUs will probably run much better on faster hardware anyway. I suppose faster hardware might not have the AGP support for the Voodoo 5, but isn't 3dfx support in NT-based systems already kind of limited?

I should give up trying to figure these things out.

Well Honestly Windows 2k only really makes sense below 600mhz, above that XP makes the most sense, and 7 makes no sense unless you have a Pentium 4 prescott or Athlon 64 E6 series CPU and at least 2gb of ram.

Jorpho wrote:

This seems like a very strange combination. If you want to run 2000, XP, or 7, why limit yourself to a Slot 1 build? Anything that can take advantage of the dual CPUs will probably run much better on faster hardware anyway. I suppose faster hardware might not have the AGP support for the Voodoo 5, but isn't 3dfx support in NT-based systems already kind of limited?

I should give up trying to figure these things out.

Yeah it's complicated with their 3.3v agp requirements. Also I'm set on making a dual cpu system. When you combine the requirements of dual cpu with agp 3.3v the options become very limited and hard to find. Also Slot 1 really kicks my nostalgia in to gear, on top of that I have strong memories with the 440bx p2b motherboard. So it all kind of works for me.

Windows 7 runs fine with 2x1,4Ghz PIII-S 😀

mzry wrote:

Yeah it's complicated with their 3.3v agp requirements. Also I'm set on making a dual cpu system. When you combine the requirements of dual cpu with agp 3.3v the options become very limited and hard to find. Also Slot 1 really kicks my nostalgia in to gear, on top of that I have strong memories with the 440bx p2b motherboard. So it all kind of works for me.

You see, if you've already abandoned practical considerations for the sake of nostalgia, it seems to me there is no "best OS" and you should just pick whatever meets your "nostalgia" desires.

Actually now it's down to 'whatever OS I can get to work' I've been trying all night to get windows 2000 / xp / 7 *anything* to install. Windows 2000 completes installation but then comes up with an NTDLR Boot ini failure on reboot. Windows XP hangs on 'setup is starting windows' and windows 7 stops during the partition selection screen with 'Device driver not available, no device found'.

I think these IDE to SATA converters don't seem to be playing nice with any version of windows. Who knows how I'm going to get around this. I'll keep trying.

mzry wrote:

Actually now it's down to 'whatever OS I can get to work' I've been trying all night to get windows 2000 / xp / 7 *anything* to install. Windows 2000 completes installation but then comes up with an NTDLR Boot ini failure on reboot. Windows XP hangs on 'setup is starting windows' and windows 7 stops during the partition selection screen with 'Device driver not available, no device found'.

I think these IDE to SATA converters don't seem to be playing nice with any version of windows. Who knows how I'm going to get around this. I'll keep trying.

a promise SATA controller?

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/SATA-7-15-TO-PATA- … UgAAOSw0JpV6VrQ

^ these things

I bought them because Phil from Philscomputerlab recommended them. But they don't seem to be playing nice with my system.

Hmmmmm. I just managed to get past installation and get windows 2000 booting, but then it blue screened with 'inaccessible boot device'. Maybe I need to force a small partition like Phil recommends (Which I haven't tried yet).

How have you configured the device in your BIOS? Is it set to auto-detect everything, or did you specify the parameters manually? Also, are you using an 80-conductor IDE cable? And are the jumpers on the drive set correctly?

In situations like this it is sometimes useful to boot Linux off a CD (or a USB drive if your motherboard supports that) and see if it can find all the drives.

I just have the bios on auto detect. I'm using a standard IDE cable (not sure what 80 conductor means) and the jumpers are set correctly.

There are two kinds of "standard" IDE cables: 80-conductor and 40-conductor. They are visibly different: the 40-conductor closely resembles a standard floppy cable, but the wires are much finer on an 80-conductor cable. 80-conductor cables are necessary for Ultra DMA as well as "cable select" jumper configurations. (I never trusted "cable select".)

80 conductor are also usually colored, Blue, Grey, Black in that order

Blue = Motherboard
Grey = Slave
Black = Master

Thanks guys, I was using some crappy old grey cable. I replaced it with a snazzy blue gigabyte cable with finer cable lines and it seems to be working alright now.