I just thought I'd mention that I've seen sluggish GUI performance with K8T800 and other similar vintage VIA chipsets. It's probably only noticeable when you work with a variety of chipsets though. I'm not sure if motherboards vary in this respect. 3D isn't affected by it.

A few years back, after watching windows redraw after being minimized and restored, I did some testing with Tom2D and it was quite measurable.

But I tend to avoid VIA for this reason.

computergeek92 wrote:

I've decided to go with the 754 board. Chipset is VIA K8T800. Hopefully it's still there on Friday. I'm planning on maxing it out with the 3700+ and 3GB DDR 400 plus a 320GB sata hard drive. The surprise is my case will be the legendary Gateway 2000 P5-200 full tower! I found the best board that will fit the semi-proprietary built in ATX IO shield. Next I need to find the best video card for this system...

Here is what the monster case looks like:
https://ixquick-proxy.com/do/spg/show_picture … a526bdfd7a5Here is what this beast looks like:

What will you be playing on it, and what resolution do you want to run said games at?

swaaye wrote:

I just thought I'd mention that I've seen sluggish GUI performance with K8T800 and other similar vintage VIA chipsets. It's probably only noticeable when you work with a variety of chipsets though. I'm not sure if motherboards vary in this respect. 3D isn't affected by it.

A few years back, after watching windows redraw after being minimized and restored, I did some testing with Tom2D and it was quite measurable.

But I tend to avoid VIA for this reason.

I have tons of VIA boards, from cheap Jetway to expensive Asus / Abit - none exhibit the behavior you mentioned. In some cases better than nforce boards (socket A nforce 2 vs socket A KT880). Both 2D and 3D performance is splendid. The only difference is system stability (cheap boards can be quirky).

It's also a good idea to take articles and on-line information about old hardware with a gran of salt. I've read countless articles and magazines all praising the same hardware, and when testing it I always found something better. Here are some examples:

1. TSENG ET4000 being the fastest ISA card -> WDC WD90Cxx ISA cards are up to 15% faster and don't exhibit those faded vertical lines on LCD monitors. If you find a WDC card, buy it. I promise it's worth it.
2. Matrox cards having better image quality then S3 cards -> this one is partially true - while all matrox cards have superb image quality, some S3 cars from "budget" manufacturers have horrible image output, especially LCD monitors. On the other hand, cards made by ELSA or Diamond rival Matrox, all DOS games run correctly on them and are easier to find.
3. VIA Chipsets are bad / slow / unstable -> I don't even know where to start with this one. While it's true that there are horrible via boards by budget manufacturers, the same is true for most chipsets, including intel. From personal experience, VIA makes great super 7 / socket 370 and socket A chipsets. The MVP3, Apollo Pro 133 and KT880 are some of the best chipsets I've ever had the pleasure to use. They have their own downsides (except for the KT880 - this one is perfect - seriously get an Abit KW7 or a MSI KT880 Delta - they will blow your mind*).
4. Asus makes the best hardware period. - major bullsh1t. I've seen as many dead asus laptops, video cards and motherboards as other manufacturers - just look up the Asus ROG forums. They are on par with most big manufacturers, but have a better marketing campaign. I've been burned by Asus products just as much as other brands. Oh and Asus has HORRIBLE customer support. They still haven't returned my T100TAL and it's been RMA'd four weeks ago! Calling them leads no-ware since they keep you on hold or give you the run-around.

*faster then the nforce 2, not fussy about memory, great overclocking on some models (the ones I mentioned above) and no problems when using ATi video cards.

kanecvr wrote:

I have tons of VIA boards, from cheap Jetway to expensive Asus / Abit - none exhibit the behavior you mentioned.

It might vary by board. I had a DFI K8M800 board that was slow enough that I noticed and felt like benchmarking it. It was fine in 3D. Feel free to explore this yourself. I don't have a K8T800 board anymore but do have a KT333 that I like.
Re: VIA vs. 2D speed

By the way, the lists of debunking hardware myths happen here pretty often and it just tends to be inflammatory. People have different experiences. I don't like ASUS either though, for the record, for exactly the same reasons. 😉 I have done the notebook RMA game with them.

I have that exact board in need of a recapping. It posts but freezes right after. I'll give it a go this week and report back.

Quick note - I noticed various bugs on via boards when using certain nvidia forceware drivers. For example using 42.xx on win98 causes your video card to work at AGP 2x - updating to 44.xx makes it run at 4x again (this only happens on KT133 and KT266 chipsets). Using later revision nvidia drivers caused laggy sound, while others did not. I've experienced this on intel i865 boards as well (the sound issue). It's quite possible that your 2d deceleration might be driver related - not necessarily video - might be a via 4in1 driver bug (don't use the latest driver, it sucks) or something else causing the slowdown.

kanecvr wrote:

Quick note - I noticed various bugs on via boards when using certain nvidia forceware drivers. For example using 42.xx on win98 causes your video card to work at AGP 2x - updating to 44.xx makes it run at 4x again (this only happens on KT133 and KT266 chipsets). Using later revision nvidia drivers caused laggy sound, while others did not. I've experienced this on intel i865 boards as well (the sound issue). It's quite possible that your 2d deceleration might be driver related - not necessarily video - might be a via 4in1 driver bug (don't use the latest driver, it sucks) or something else causing the slowdown.

I ran GF3, 5900, and 6600GT with various drivers and used the stock XP AGP GART driver and also the VIA Hyperion driver of some revision. I mostly likely verified that AGP was at 4x or 8x. Radeon 8500 performed similarly on Catalyst 4.2. It's all there in the link. This was 4 years ago and the board is history so I'm not going to be doing any testing at this point.

My ECS K7VTA3 V6 (KT333) board might be similar but I've never checked. I don't know if I've even run XP on it... A surprisingly solid board though compared to other KT266/333 boards I've had. Who woulda thunk it with ECS. Maybe it's the simplicity of the thing. I use it mostly for Voodoo5 on 98SE.

But on the topic of Athlon 64 AGP boards, I would like to cast a vote for the MSI K8N Neo2. As long as you don't want to run NT6 with a dual core because that doesn't work correctly with nForce3. In the last year I've been trying various nForce3 939 AGP boards and this one is my favorite so far.

Not a fan of the nforce 3 boards. The're ok, but I mostly run win98 on my retro rigs and nforce 3 win98 drivers suck (bsod fest). I do like the nforce 4 (a lot) but that's for winXP / PCI-E stuff.

I currently run a ECS KV2-Extreme VIA K8T800 PRO in my main retro rig (it dual boots 98 and xp) and i've not seen any slowdowns. The only problem I'm facing UI wise is that my 6800 AGP does not support HW acceleration in chrome - it works fine with a x1950xt tough.

I did bench a few 754 boards while trying to find the perfect s754 chipset - that means speed, stability and good win98 drivers. I tried a DFI LANPARTY UT (nf3) witch I quickly binned due to poor win98 driver support, an Asus K8V Deluxe (K8T800) and a Jetway A689DAS (ALi M1689) and settled on the ALi board for my 754 build. It's marginally faster then the nf3, overclocks like a champ (2333MHz on a 3000+ at default voltage is no sweat) and has great win98 drivers - even better then the K8T800. So far it's my favorite 754/939 chipset, but the're very rare.

Yeah I haven't messed with 98 on the NF3. I think I had it running on some NF3 board at some point though. I really only desire XP on these.

I had a DFI NF3 Ultra-D awhile back. It had an incredibly annoying VRM squeal problem whenever any remotely demanding video card was installed. I could not for my life figure out exactly what inductor or other component was producing the noise though. Uhg.

The browser hardware acceleration thing is interesting. I think I once had a Radeon 9600 working with Chrome acceleration in Windows 7...

swaaye wrote:

I had a DFI NF3 Ultra-D awhile back. It had an incredibly annoying VRM squeal problem whenever any remotely demanding video card was installed. I could not for my life figure out exactly what inductor or other component was producing the noise though. Uhg.

It was probably the MOSFET itself vibrating and the LC tank causing the resonance was comprised (at least partly) of parasitic L and C.
.

PCBONEZ wrote:

It was probably the MOSFET itself vibrating and the LC tank causing the resonance was comprised (at least partly) of parasitic L and C..

You're right. I remember now. It was a MOSFET. I remember putting my finger on a MOSFET and it changed the tone.

This also reminds me that I also had the DFI NF4 Ultra D around that time and it also had some squeal, but to a lesser degree.

My mom's daily pc is a 754 K8T800 based Biostar motherboard. 2gb of DDR400, 1.8ghz mobile Sempron running at 2.1ghz paired with a 1gb HIS agp 8x HD4670. That system runs amazingly fast and stable! I think a Geforce 6800 or something like that would be a good combo for an XP machine 😀

Athlon64 is far better choice, more mainboards for them have SATA, some PCIE, and Athlon64 have SSE2 and AthlonXP don`t have it.

I'm been trying to piece together a socket A win98 machine for awhile now but almost every mb I come across has bad caps that arnt worth the time or money to recap.after reading this though I think I'm going to go for socket 754.

Athlon 64, I've had the worst luck with socket 462 systems... dunno why, curse of the hardware gods mayve. 😢

sgt76 wrote:

Athlon 64, I've had the worst luck with socket 462 systems... dunno why, curse of the hardware gods mayve. 😢

I agree its better to go with Socket-754 or Socket-939 for a Windows XP build but if going with Socket-A my tip is to avoid the Asus A7N8X as it uses a 5V power design for the CPU.

My Asus A7N8X Deluxe killed my rare 2333(166) MHz version of the Barton XP 3200+ when restarting during a benchmark session. The temperature was OK and the voltage set was only ~1.8V so there must have been a voltage spike or something like that which killed the CPU.

PSU talk moved to new thread.