Just worked out a deal for a P5A-B 1.04 from the same seller. Had some leverage based on the other being non-functional. She had a 3000 as well, so grabbed that for next to nothing. Also sending a PCI USB card. Do these things generally have drivers for DOS? Guess I could always boot to Windows to move files around that way if not. The USB dongle I have is for the FIC, so would need to find one for the ASUS if this doesn't work out.

Fingers crossed that this one pans out. I'll have some good points of reference at least to do some definitive testing once it all arrives. I'll post again with those bench results as compared to my last ones in case it helps someone else. That other thread about the vid cards is interesting too. Without proof yet, I have to imagine that Glide is somewhat more friendly and performs better than going outside of the 3DFX world, at least for the games that support it.

Ok, so got the 1.04 P5A-B. Installed the K6-III 450 and OC'd to 550. Um yea, faster...here are the same benchmarks:

3D Bench - 449.4 FPS
PC Bench - 176.1 FPS
Doom - 491 Realtics or whatever - is this FPS?
Quake - 88.6 FPS

I should note that I also replaced the V3 3500 AGP with a V3 3000 AGP. Did this simply to avoid the bulky dongle thing on the 3500.

Only hope that this new speed demon will slow down enough to still run the really old stuff successfully. I'll be testing all that over the
weekend and will let you know. I'll have to check how the CF card performs as well with this new config.

So, that was definitely it! I haven't booted Windows yet or tested any of the games I was having speed issues with, but these benchmarks do tell a story.

Thanks to all that helped! Mostly out of the weeds for now...

New post just so it's clearly separate from all the success...

Trying to install Windows and it's just hanging bad. Installs really slow and won't completely boot. I'm still using the flash card as mentioned in the beginning of this thread. I am trying a couple of micro-drives now too to see if it makes a difference. Initially in this thread, it would boot fine, just ran games very slow. Now, it's crazy slow as mentioned half-way down the thread when I changed out the processor to an MMX 233. Same thing now even when back to the K6.

Could a BIOS setting be doing this? I disabled SMART already... what about UDMA with regards to the flash drive/reader? Any other settings to be aware of?

Thanks again.

EDIT - got the microdrive formatted and running Win98 okay now. Not sure why the CF card went haywire. Maybe need to low level format it and try again. I'd rather use the CF card if possible.