Looking forward to the review F2bnp 😀

My Soyo 6BA+ III decided to fail on me. Power Led is on, the motherboard won't power up no matter what. I'll give it a good clean and day in the sun and try again.
Worst case scenario, I'll be using my QDI Brillianx 1S or some other Intel OEM board (which btw rocks!).

"He's dead Jim."

And with this quote, I bid my Soyo 6BA+ III farewell. In its place, I installed my Intel 440BX OEM board which seems to work just fine. This was lifted off an old Compaq machine, pretty slick stuff I must say.
If all goes according to plan, I'll have 98SE installed in a few minutes and start installing games right after that 😀.

Is it really DEAD dead, not just resting?

If the board has a AMI bios put the bios rom named xxxxxxxx.rom on a floppy
Push the power button then press ctrl + home
The board should update the bios from the floppy

Im sure award has a simular wake the dead procedure, I just never had to use it.

Skyscraper wrote:

Is it really DEAD dead, not just resting?

Lol. First thing I thought of was this

He's not dead, he's just resting.

Skyscraper wrote:

Is it really DEAD dead, not just resting? […]
Show full quote

Is it really DEAD dead, not just resting?

If the board has a AMI bios put the bios rom named xxxxxxxx.rom on a floppy
Push the power button then press ctrl + home
The board should update the bios from the floppy

Im sure award has a simular wake the dead procedure, I just never had to use it.

Award BIOS. But even so, the board does not power-up at all. I've tried manually short circuiting the power switch pins, running the mobo outside of the case and it won't power up. Oh whelp.

F2bnp wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

Is it really DEAD dead, not just resting? […]
Show full quote

Is it really DEAD dead, not just resting?

If the board has a AMI bios put the bios rom named xxxxxxxx.rom on a floppy
Push the power button then press ctrl + home
The board should update the bios from the floppy

Im sure award has a simular wake the dead procedure, I just never had to use it.

Award BIOS. But even so, the board does not power-up at all. I've tried manually short circuiting the power switch pins, running the mobo outside of the case and it won't power up. Oh whelp.

Have you checked all the capacitors? Bad caps are a #1 cause for "dead" motherboards, and if so is usually totally fixable by replacing the capacitors. 😀

BTW, it's rare, but sometimes bad/dead capacitors show no signs of being blown at all.

Usually they will "bulge" at the top or have corrusive liquid leaking from them, etc but not always. 😀

PhaytalError wrote:

Have you checked all the capacitors? Bad caps are a #1 cause for "dead" motherboards, and if so is usually totally fixable by replacing the capacitors. 😀

BTW, it's rare, but sometimes bad/dead capacitors show no signs of being blown at all.

Usually they will "bulge" at the top or have corrusive liquid leaking from them, etc but not always. 😀

I hear ya. Most of time however, it is probably worth it to just buy another board. I will look into the capacitors on the board, although nothing seemed wrong with them.
Speaking of which, the OEM board doesn't work properly either, it hangs when trying to initialize the AGP Port drivers, when installing the default 440BX INF drivers. I think I remember it doing that again sometime ago.

I'm quite an unlucky fellow it seems, QDI Brillianx here I come! 🤣

Testing is currently underway, everything is peachy 😀.
I'm writing everything down.

I think this will be a very exciting test 😁. Hopefully, we can get the data to the Vogons Wiki once I have finished and compiled everything.

Something that I noticed during testing:

I think Unreal Tournament absolutely loves SSE. The Pentium II 400 scores are somewhat disappointing, but PIII 450 scores that I have seen are a good bit better, not to mention PIII 500. So either that, or it scales insanely well when you increase the frequency!

Unreal also loves 3dfx

A single Voodoo 2 is pretty much all you need for Unreal.
Even a Voodoo Banshee dominates every other non 3dfx card from the time period and even stand up against cards from 2000 and 2001

True. I am using a Voodoo 3 3000 (at 183MHz though). It wasn't until fairly recently with the help of UTGLR that Unreal Engine 1 games started behaving just as well or even better than Glide on non 3dfx cards.

Skyscraper wrote:

and even stand up against cards from 2000 and 2001

Um... no? A 2001 card plays in a completely different league in terms of fillrate, compared to Banshee. UE1 is a fairly CPU limited engine, but still in high resolutions there would be a big difference.

Although it is true that as far as first party renderers go, the game only looks correctly with Glide.

I just tested a gf4 mx440se with a p2 450, worse fps in Unreal (gold, so tournament engine) than with the Banshee or Voodoo 2.
Not much use with high resulution if you have bad fps even at low resulution. Unreal should be played at 800*600 😉
Im sure its a cpu bottleneck and that the Banshee/Voodoo 2 is just a little less cpu dependant.

Pretty much any 3d card from 1999 and forward beats the Banshee or the Voodoo 2 when it comes to fillrate and performance in D3D or non 3dfx opimized Open GL.

When you said 2001 card for some reason I assumed that you would use a contemporary CPU then. With a PII 450 it is no wonder you would get better framerates with Glide, given that you don't run high resolutions. With your use case you could swap the Geforce with a TNT2 and see no difference...

I played the game in 1024x768 on a Voodoo3, which runs it a lot smoother than Voodoo2 SLI due to the better memory architecture. For UT as I wrote above I think the gameplay is a bit too sluggish at times with this resolution on Voodoo3.

I meant with a CPU that is relevant for this thread.

Lately I have acually played Unreal using a K6-2@500 and a Voodoo 2. Now I have switched to a Banshee, its smooth enough at 800*600 with both cards.
I have not tested the gf4 mx card with the K6-2 but I just tested lots of cards and CPUs with a Slot-1 AT-motherboard to see if it would be a huge upgrade over the K6-2.

Guys, please do not derail this. The thing is, the Unreal Engine was initially a Software Rendered only engine and then ,with the release of the Voodoo Graphics, Glide. It was practically built around it and initially Unreal only shipped with Glide support.
They added D3D ,OpenGL ,SGL (and perhaps S3 Metal, maybe this was only on UT) a while later through patches and kept improving on them. But the truth is, these never ever managed to become as good as Glide. This plagued all Unreal Engine games, GeForce 2 owners playing Deus Ex were really pissed off.

We now have proper renderers (I myself prefer UTGLR, although some people swear by the DX10 renderer) and can enjoy the games properly on any system that doesn't have a Voodoo card. 😊

fyi - UTGLR works on Geforce 3 and Radeon 8500. 2001 cards.

Yeah prior to that Glide was definitely the smoothest experience. Metal is pretty good but detail textures don't work right, though of course the S3TC textures are a unique advantage compared to Glide. Metal does indeed work with original Unreal but maybe only with Savage3D / 4.

UTGLR and DXGLR (Deus Ex) worked flawlessly on my Ti 4200, so it should work on the GF3 too.

I finished benchmarking with the PII 400, I also did a couple of tests at 450MHz (4x112MHz) which should be almost equal to 500MHz (5x100), mostly 3DMark stuff to compare the difference with the PIII 500.
I will now start testing with my PIII 500 and I have a spare Klamath 233 which seems to do 300 easily. Should I include that too? Should I also include a Celeron (I'm going to use the Klamath with the L2 cache disabled)?

Which CPUs would you like to see, which do you consider relevant?

If the pII 233 is unlocked you could use it as 3x100 instead of 3.5*83, perhaps that is what you already did.
Could be good for compairng against a K6-2 and K6-3 @3x100 since the K6 architecture dosnt scale good with increased clock speed.

If if you cool it enough many pII 233 will do 350 which would match a real pII 350 perfectly
You can also downclock the PII 400 to 266 since some people say that a K6-3@600 is worse than a pII@266 FPU wise 😀
Perhaps test the pIII 500 @333 mhz to compare against the K6-2 and K6-3 @333, there is endless possibilities 😁

I was hoping to select just a few so as to cover as much as possible. Otherwise, this will take eons to finish hehehehe.
Unfortunately, my QDI detects the CPU and doesn't allow you to go lower than the default FSB. Doesn't allow much overclocking either, when using a Deschutes I had three options : 100 , 103 and 112 MHz FSB
At least on Klamath you can change the multiplier.
The PII 233 is unlocked, I ran it at 300 using a multiplier of 4 on the standard 66MHz bus 😜.

I think I'll clock the Klamath at 266MHz, it seems to be the sweet spot.

So I'm halfway through with the PIII 500, should be done in two or three hours. 3DMark loves SSE so darn much...