the MX 440 is as fast/faster than the high end VGAs from around 2000 (p3/k7 era) I think

DX7 games really benefited from k7/p3, it looks to me like this build would have to much GPU compared to CPU performance.

I don't care about the gpu/cpu unbalance in this case. Will the k6-2 be a serious bottleneck though? Thanks.

in my opinion it's a huge bottleneck for the reason I mentioned, Dx7 = p3 era, mx 440 = p3/p4 era.. k6 2 is extremely slow in some dx7 games,

for example without the 3dfx render UT it will run extremely poorly,

I think targeting older games and using a 3dfx card probably makes more sense for a k6-2!?

I see. I can put a voodoo3 agp 16mb instead. That would solve UT engine's games problem.

if you want to play dx7 games, even the slowest dx7 cards: gf256sdr, gf2mx and mx200 are enough for socket7 cpus, so mx440 is a waste although i don't think it would do anything bad either.

Specifically which DirectX 7 games are you planning to play? Many 2000-2001 games are going to run very poorly. By that time most K6 people were moving to a Duron or Coppermine Celeron. In practice a K6-2 500 MHz is going to be around a P2-266 for 3D game performance.

I had a Geforce2 MX on a K6-3 MVP3. At the time, the 3DMark 2000 benchmark database had results showing scores leveled off with the GF2MX cards. There wasn't much gain (at least in that benchmark) with anything faster than that at 1024x768.
It's memory speed becomes an issue at higher resolutions though. I think the performance fell some at 1280x1024 and it definitely did at 1600x1200. The 4MX cards have better memory performance so they might have an advantage at those resolutions. Back then I think people talked about the same issue being an advantage for the Geforce 256 DDR.

I ran into some weird performance issues with my setup. End result was it ran best in AGP 1X mode with an older set of drivers (5.32 IIRC).

Mismatching really doesn't strike me as a big deal. It's not like the 4MX is a rare luxury item that would be particularly useful elsewhere.

SPBHM wrote:

for example without the 3dfx render UT it will run extremely poorly

Wouldn't a Glide wrapper still work?

as others have stated, an SS7 build will be pretty severely underpowered for that era no matter what GPU you use.

a Coppermine 700Mhz PIII or above would be much better

Agreed on using a different CPU - P3/P3 Celeron is a very fine choice (and may even use less power). The MX 440 is a good choice if you want something quiet and simple, but if you want to run relatively demanding titles at high settings/resolutions you probably would do well to also consider a more robust graphics cards (GeForce 4 Ti, for example, would be a good starting point).

I seem to recall reading an online article about being able to play 2000's and even some 2001's games with a 400MHz k6-2, provided you have a T&L capable card and two voodoo2 in sli mode to cover different needs from different game engines and stay with 800x600 resolutions. Can't find that article anymore.

I can also go the Coopermine path.
For a Via Apollo Pro 133A chipset board with a 1.0GHz Coppermine would there be any gains in using a Ti4200 or a the MX440 is enough fot the cpu?

TELEPACMAN wrote:

I seem to recall reading an online article about being able to play 2000's and even some 2001's games with a 400MHz k6-2, provided you have a T&L capable card and two voodoo2 in sli mode to cover different needs from different game engines and stay with 800x600 resolutions. Can't find that article anymore.

We don't need articles because most of us have built all of the combinations and tried them. 😎

Voodoo cards and T&L GPUs just help you squeeze the most out of a CPU bottlenecked situation. Glide is the most efficient choice if available. Hardware T&L is not as beneficial as it may seem though. The games back then didn't use it well. Games that are built around it are even more demanding because they use it to up complexity of everything and assume you have more CPU too.

I can also go the Coopermine path.
For a Via Apollo Pro 133A chipset board with a 1.0GHz Coppermine would there be any gains in using a Ti4200 or a the MX440 is enough fot the cpu?

I'd go Ti 4200. It's nice to have D3D8 features and the extra fillrate for higher resolution or for antialiasing.

Taking that ti4200 and the 1.0GHz to a i815 would be better? Thanks 😀

TELEPACMAN wrote:

Taking that ti4200 and the 1.0GHz to a i815 would be better? Thanks 😀

The only negative for 815 is the 512MB limit. But of course in 2000-2001 that was an absurd amount of RAM.

VIA Apollo Pro 133A can take a lot more RAM. The problem here is VIA AGP is second rate on compliance and performance. Memory performance is worse too AFAIK, but it would be intangible in practice.

+1 to everything swaaye said; the GF4 Ti would be a nice advantage over the MX in adding D3D8. A GF3 or Radeon 8500 (or Parhelia) could also likely provide that in a usable way, depending on what kinds of games/resolutions/etc you need to support (if you want really high resolutions, AA levels, etc you might consider going with a GeForce FX/6 or Radeon 9/X as an alternative - all of those cards will likely cost around the same $20-$50 used). I've never had any issues with my i815 board (I have a 1GHz CuMine + i815 system and it's been solid for close to a decade). The 512MB memory limit isn't a huge deal imho - that's generally the limit for Windows 9x as well, and as swaaye said, it's also a crazy amount of RAM by 2000-2001 standards (so even if you put Windows 2000 on it, it shouldn't be any problem; XP with all of its patches/updates/add-ons may want more, but base SP1 should be fine). Especially if the machine is just going to be dedicated to gaming and not used for web-browsing or other tasks (so it won't have a ton of background applications eating up resources).

noshutdown wrote:

if you want to play dx7 games, even the slowest dx7 cards: gf256sdr, gf2mx and mx200 are enough for socket7 cpus, so mx440 is a waste although i don't think it would do anything bad either.

Yeah, but if you can pick up an MX440 for the same price, why wouldn't you? MX440 is still cheap right now so there's not much reason not to have one.

On the Pentium 4 machine I built for Splinter Cell I went with Windows XP SP2. It's lightning fast and the GeForce4 is indeed a nice card to go with it.

A fast K6 works very well with Voodoo 2 and GeForce 4.

You are making me want to build both. 😐 But I still have a few questions.
For the Win98SE Coppermine 1.0GHz I only have parts that allow me to build:
- i815 with 256MB at 133MHz
- or Apollo Pro 133A with 384MB,
for both I have FX5200 128MB/Ti4200/MX440 , I will add one or two Voodoo2 for straight Glide compatibility.
The i815 has at the moment a 1200 celeron tualatin which I'll replace for the faster coppermine.
Do you recommend getting a 1.4-S or that would stress too much the voodoo2 gear? Also, for the 1.4-S would a FX5900 be a better companion? Sorry for so many questions.

I don't know if you are driven by a need to mess with random hardware, or if you just want to game, but I would go with 815 without a second thought. VIA is definitely not on the same quality level.

Use as much CPU power as you want. Very few Windows 9x games are negatively affected by extra CPU speed. There are even SVGA DOS games that benefit from maximum CPU power.

And use whatever GPU you like. 5900 is nice and you can run one with even a K6 if you so desire (if the flaky Super 7 board will behave). For DirectX 7 games, unless you want 1600x1200 or higher and 60 fps, a 5900 is unnecessary. Ti 4200 will most likely satisfy. It's certainly vastly faster than Voodoo2 SLI.

Also you might like the site some of us worked on.
http://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Main_Page