It's very expensive frankly. I found an ABIT AS8-3rd Eye for 20$ locally, I think I'll go with that. Hopefully it will run well.

I need to make a choice.

Things I want to do.

Test some new AGP cards.
Test some new motherboards.
Build a new dual Pentium Pro system
Install DOSBox on some of my new systems and bench them.
Pit a K6-3+ @4.5*135 vs some PII (I need some new numbers to throw in the mix next time the topic comes up.)
Build the year 2003 system I should have built a year ago.

I think I will go ahead with the year 2003 build and use it to test some new AGP cards...

kanecvr wrote:

Can anyone recommend a GOOD LGA775 + AGP motherboard? I seem to have no luck sourcing a decent one - preferably one that can do a little OC as well. I'm only looking to run 2000-2004 and a some newer games on it - Doom 3, Quake 4, Black and White 2 (witch for some reason keeps crashing on 64 bit OSes) etc.

There's some odd-duck ASRock boards that will support LGA775 + AGP, but probably aren't the best for overclocking. Out of curiosity, why not just switch to PCIe? It'd probably be cheaper in the long run. 😊

I found the motherboard I am going to use for my year 2003 build 😀, thats like half the job done right?

Its the MSI K8T Master2 FAR, one of few boards available for a K8 build the summer 2003 shortly after the Opteron was released. The bad news is that because the motherboard is a first generation socket 940 board it dosnt support any other CPUs than 0.13 um Sledgehammers so no dual cores or 3 GHz single cores. The fastest CPU the board supports is the Sledgehammer version of the 2.4 GHz Opteron 250 but the fastest CPU released in 2003 was the 2.2 GHz Opteron 248.

In any case before I do the build I will do a test run to see if the board still works, Its about 2 years since I tinkered with it the last time. I will also test some new AGP cards (I know the X1950 has two bad caps...) 😀

I have been doing some searching online (very enjoyable) and located a cheap CM-32L and CT5330 so far. I am not buying probably. 🤣

Picked up this not-so-retro motherboard to continue experimentation with my XP/W98se combo rig. Has W9x drivers and supports C2D etc.. The current rig has a board limited to single-channel ram, this MSI should get me dual, plus more OC options..

Picture is of the eBay offering - I don't have it yet. Other specs: E6700, 2gb DDR2/533, 7900GTX (modded drivers for W98), 200gb sata2 HD (XP), 80gb IDE (W98), SBLive!, CoolMaster Hypre 101+ with dual fans. RLOWE memory patch to get W98 running on this..

EDIT: Oops gotta reduce res on pic..

tincup wrote:

Picked up this not-so-retro motherboard to continue experimentation with my XP/W98se combo rig. Has W9x drivers and supports C2D […]
Show full quote

Picked up this not-so-retro motherboard to continue experimentation with my XP/W98se combo rig. Has W9x drivers and supports C2D etc.. The current rig has a board limited to single-channel ram, this MSI should get me dual, plus more OC options..

Picture is of the eBay offering - I don't have it yet. Other specs: E6700, 2gb DDR2/533, 7900GTX (modded drivers for W98), 200gb sata2 HD (XP), 80gb IDE (W98), SBLive!, CoolMaster Hypre 101+ with dual fans. RLOWE memory patch to get W98 running on this..

EDIT: Oops gotta reduce res on pic..

I've never found any drivers for any pci-express chipset for win98se, so more than likely you won't get video running without chipset drivers as well. Remember to use a small hard drive (or at least a small partition), Win98 flakes out and acts weird with partitions above 20 GB. Make a thread on it, I'd be interested to know if you get it working and how.

obobskivich wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

Can anyone recommend a GOOD LGA775 + AGP motherboard? I seem to have no luck sourcing a decent one - preferably one that can do a little OC as well. I'm only looking to run 2000-2004 and a some newer games on it - Doom 3, Quake 4, Black and White 2 (witch for some reason keeps crashing on 64 bit OSes) etc.

There's some odd-duck ASRock boards that will support LGA775 + AGP, but probably aren't the best for overclocking. Out of curiosity, why not just switch to PCIe? It'd probably be cheaper in the long run. 😊

I want to use my AGP cards in a fast system. I have quite a few fast AGP cards (X1950, X800XT, 6800GT, 5900XT, 9800PRO etc) that I want to try under win98 and older games. Win98 alone negates the use of PCI-E because of lack of drivers. I did try to get PCI-E working on one of my odd-ball PCI-E motherboards (socket 478 + DDR2 + PCI-E VIA Chipset Biostar P4M900-M4 board) witch does have some theoretical win9x support but it would bsod constantly after I installed the video card drivers (PCI-E 6600GT)

O another note - out of boredom, I build a 1991 -1996 DOS gaming rig to use in place of my 586 while I find ram for it (the board doesn't take EDO). Configuration is below:

- Intel Pentium 133MHz
- Jetway J-656C (Socket 7 Intel 430TX based with 4xSIMM, coast module, 256k on board, PS/2 and button-cell battery plus a working turbo button! Turbo seems to clock the CPU down to 66MHz? and is kind of unstable)
- 4x8MB EDO
- Eagle S3 Trio64 2MB
- Matsonic ALS120 ISA (this thing is AWSOME! Sound quality is decent and it can emulate everything from an Adlib to a SB16!)
- 4GB Quantum Fireball HDD (I wonder how long this one will last)
- MS-DOS 6.22 + Win3.11
* All it needs now is a voodoo1 witch I can't seem to find anyware.

It's a little to fast some games, but using the turbo button makes it perform similarly to a 66MHz 486. If anyone is interested of details and pics about the motherboard let me now.

obobskivich wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

Can anyone recommend a GOOD LGA775 + AGP motherboard? I seem to have no luck sourcing a decent one - preferably one that can do a little OC as well. I'm only looking to run 2000-2004 and a some newer games on it - Doom 3, Quake 4, Black and White 2 (witch for some reason keeps crashing on 64 bit OSes) etc.

There's some odd-duck ASRock boards that will support LGA775 + AGP, but probably aren't the best for overclocking. Out of curiosity, why not just switch to PCIe? It'd probably be cheaper in the long run. 😊

I had one of those boards. An ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2. http://www.asrock.com/mb/VIA/4CoreDual-SATA2/
It had both AGP and a PCI Express slot. It was a great transitional board for me. I wanted to upgrade to Core2 Dual, but couldn't afford to get a new video card or memory. This one supported my old hardware (an ATI HD4650 AGP and 2GB DDR400) and would allow gradual upgrades. This one also supports the quad core CPUs, but they were just not good value for money for me at the time.

Today, I checked the ram chips on my Voodoo3 2000 PCI and downloaded the datasheets for them. They're rated for 166MHz, so I overclocked the card to that from 143MHz. I ran 3dMark2001 and managed to get a whopping 5 marks extra over my Voodoo3 2000 AGP. I think I'll try running 3DMark1999 and see if there's a more pronounced difference. In the meantime, I've swapped in the AGP card, because I've noticed some tiny instabilities in the PCI card's display and the AGP is more stable at high resolutions. I've also noticed some artifacting in DOS display modes. This was happening before the overclock. Maybe the RAMDAC is going bad?

Had to do something worthwhile during the lengthy power outage that ended just a few minutes ago. One of the many advantages of having a retro laptop with a good battery.

Try this attached TSR program to get more use out of that screen's real estate.

Also.... I did 16-color icons for some streamers I watch. The one that turned out the best is definitely the Vinesauce one and I don't even watch it that much.

leileilol wrote:

Try this attached TSR program to get more use out of that screen's real estate.

vexp13.zip

Heh, didn't realize this was a thing. Tried it out, and the results are surprisingly not horrible.

I managed to get two oldies up and running yesterday. The first is a Compaq Contura Aero 4/33c up and running.. with working battery and original WFWG 3.11 Compaq edition! It's a fantastic sweet little machine.

The second old notebook I got to run again is a Compaq Contura 400cx which contains a Windows NT3.1 install, this one has still some issues since the screen loses signal at times.

I plan on getting the 400cx stripped this weekend to see if the lcd cable has issues, and when I put it together I plan on upgrading the RAM from 8mb tot 20mb. Still in doubt what to de with the WinNT 3.1 install since not much works on that platform.. L/

Skyscraper wrote:

I found the motherboard I am going to use for my year 2003 build 😀, thats like half the job done right?

Its the MSI K8T Master2 FAR, one of few boards available for a K8 build the summer 2003 shortly after the Opteron was released. The bad news is that because the motherboard is a first generation socket 940 board it dosnt support any other CPUs than 0.13 um Sledgehammers so no dual cores or 3 GHz single cores. The fastest CPU the board supports is the Sledgehammer version of the 2.4 GHz Opteron 250 but the fastest CPU released in 2003 was the 2.2 GHz Opteron 248.

I have very similar board here - K8T Master2 FAR7. Basicaly it is just a newer revision with support for 90nm Opterons, including dualcores.
I don't think you want to build retro PC based on this board... it is just bad. VIA chipset is slow, bad compatibility, problematic sata, everything. Bios settings are very limited, overclocking possibilities almost non existing, very strange RAM timing which can't be changed. And my board can't even run DDR400 memory, only 333 is stable.

Strange DDR timing is visible here:
http://abload.de/img/2xo280_cb_r11.5_2.34mjp00.png

In my game benchmarks K8N Master2 (nForce Pro 2200) + single Opteron 242 is 20% faster than K8T800 + O242.

Btw - I'm plannig to build similar rig myself - probably 2x Opteron 254 + K8N Master2, not sure about the graphics part yet. 😀

havli wrote:

I have very similar board here - K8T Master2 FAR7. Basicaly it is just a newer revision with support for 90nm Opterons, includin […]
Show full quote

Skyscraper wrote:

I found the motherboard I am going to use for my year 2003 build 😀, thats like half the job done right?

Its the MSI K8T Master2 FAR, one of few boards available for a K8 build the summer 2003 shortly after the Opteron was released. The bad news is that because the motherboard is a first generation socket 940 board it dosnt support any other CPUs than 0.13 um Sledgehammers so no dual cores or 3 GHz single cores. The fastest CPU the board supports is the Sledgehammer version of the 2.4 GHz Opteron 250 but the fastest CPU released in 2003 was the 2.2 GHz Opteron 248.

I have very similar board here - K8T Master2 FAR7. Basicaly it is just a newer revision with support for 90nm Opterons, including dualcores.
I don't think you want to build retro PC based on this board... it is just bad. VIA chipset is slow, bad compatibility, problematic sata, everything. Bios settings are very limited, overclocking possibilities almost non existing, very strange RAM timing which can't be changed. And my board can't even run DDR400 memory, only 333 is stable.

Strange DDR timing is visible here:
http://abload.de/img/2xo280_cb_r11.5_2.34mjp00.png

In my game benchmarks K8N Master2 (nForce Pro 2200) + single Opteron 242 is 20% faster than K8T800 + O242.

Btw - I'm plannig to build similar rig myself - probably 2x Opteron 254 + K8N Master2, not sure about the graphics part yet. 😀

I think your board is a bad apple 😀. My board do support overclocking but it dosnt have an AGP/PCI lock so its a bit limited. I do also have to choose if I want to be able to set memory timings or memory speed as no BIOS seems to be able to do both. The board do auto detect PC3200 ECC REG memory at the correct speed and do run stable, at least with 2x512MB. The issue is just that I dont have any good ECC REG PC3200 1GB sticks so I had to resort to PC2700 memory.

The performance is pretty much what I would have expected, I posted some 3dmark scores in the 3dmark 2001 thread. Its no speed demon but pretty fast for a year 2003 board with CPUs from 2003.

Interesting, it seems by K8T is damaged somehow... or maybe wrong BIOS. Your scores are looking good, even a bit better than my nForce + A64 FX-51 (single) + GF 7900GS stock.
I guess it is time to check the other FAR7 (I have two of them 😎 ), maybe it will perform better.

Some ECC Reg. DDR overclock very well - all my modules run stable at least one step higher (266 -> 333)... some of them even faster - like theese 2x 512MB DDR 266.

I finished configuring my YMF719-based ISA sound card on my Pentium machine. With the turbo switch hooked on both FSB clock and multiplier jumpers, this machine can be set as 75MHz (50MHz x 1.5) and 133MHz (66MHz x 2) as long as you switch it before turning the machine on. Once it is on, the turbo switch can't modify the multiplier anymore, so I can get 100MHz (50MHz x 2 or 66MHz x 1.5), and the board seems to have no issues changing the FSB on the fly.
Surprisingly enough, the sound card works better here than on the machine it was on previously (a Compaq Deskpro with an MMX200). I used to have weird issues where the mouse would stop working in Warcraft II when using WSS mode. Played a few missions yesterday and it was 100% fine!

I'm stuck in the hospital, but I have a WIP Thinkpad r50e. I sourced it from shopgoodwill and it came without charger or hard drive and caddy. I ordered everything but I'm still waiting on the caddy. I have the drive, but without the caddy, the laptop won't initialize the ide slot. So, I'm playing doom 2 off the CD using my old dos boot CD. I also got tomb raider running, but the boot disk doesn't use emm386, so I can only load the training level without crashing. I'm just tickled at playing games on a system with no hard drive!

Refurbished an old SS7 cooler and gave my newly aquired AWE64-Gold a shower.
Two new looking piece of hardware in the storage box, yet again. 😀
(Missing two screws, I know. Did not have any more than those)

I just played a 1VS1 AOE2HD session: took 5.5 hours. 😀 In the end I won: the opponent could not take it anymore.