I know that many of us used to run a Celeron of that vintage. I ran a 300A at 450MHz for several years without an issue. Amazing CPU value for the time, it would rarely come again.

I don't remember having performance issues with my PII 400 on NFS3 (with a voodoo 4500), so I would think a Celeron 500 is safe.

this review is interesting,
you can see good gains on quake 3 with faster cards, Unreal Tournament is more difficult
http://www.anandtech.com/show/429/9
http://www.anandtech.com/show/429/16

hardware transform & lighting came with the Geforce and Radeon

Here's my Celeron Mendocino's specs.

Celeron 466 MHz.
ASUS CUSL2 motherboard.
2x 128MB SDRAM @ 100MHz.
Creative Labs 3D Blaster 3DFX Voodoo Banshee 16 MB AGP.
Creative Soundblaster Live! PCI.
Creative DXR2 DVD decoder card.
Linksys PCI network card.
Matsushita DVD-ROM drive SR-8586.
24x10x40 CD Writer.
Western Digital WD64AA 6.4 GB hard disk.
OS is Windows ME.

SPBHM wrote:

I don't remember having performance issues with my PII 400 on NFS3 (with a voodoo 4500), so I would think a Celeron 500 is safe. […]
Show full quote

I don't remember having performance issues with my PII 400 on NFS3 (with a voodoo 4500), so I would think a Celeron 500 is safe.

this review is interesting,
you can see good gains on quake 3 with faster cards, Unreal Tournament is more difficult
http://www.anandtech.com/show/429/9
http://www.anandtech.com/show/429/16

hardware transform & lighting came with the Geforce and Radeon

Interesting find it looks like it pairs well with a Geforce 256 and rage pro is way at the bottom. I dont have a 256 but i do have a Geforce3 Ti200 maybe ill see where that leads

Back in the day I have used my C300A (OC to 450) with a variety of cards, the top one being a TNT2. It's interesting to see that a Rage 128 (Fury) Pro is on par and even beats the TNT2 in most of those graphs.

I've never used a Mendocino for very long, but I believe it's performance in 3D games generally beats the K6-3, and the K6-3 benefits from cards up to a Geforce2 MX or Geforce 256 in most resolutions, and maybe a Geforce2 GTS at high res. So I'd say the Mendocino can definitely use at least those cards if not something faster. The GF3 Ti200 is probably overkill but if you already have it then go for it.
Whether it's a good fit depends if your goal is to get the most possible out of the CPU or the most possible out of the video card, but I'm assuming the former.

I do have a GF2 MX as well so maybe ill play around with both. I know from experience if I go to high of a video card my benching scores will be much lower.

Back in the day, i had also a Celeron 466Mhz (overclocked at 525Mhz). First, I've paired it with a Voodoo 2000 AGP, later then i've paired it with an Asus V6800 deluxe (GeForce256 DDR).
At the end performance was much better.

Considering this sum of benchmarks, ok it was done with a quite stronger CPU, but for comparison:

A Geforce2-MX400 would be between Geforce256 & Geforce256-DDR.
A Geforce2-MX equals the Geforce256 result.
A Geforce2-MX 200 is the level of Voodoo3 3000 and RivaTNT2 Ultra.

I have a Celeron Medocino System. I actually really like it.

Its a 466@580mhz (83fsb)
256mb Ram PC133
Shuttle Hot 687z Intel ZX MATX board
Geforce 2 MX440
AWE64 Soundcard
60gig DiamondMax Hard Disk.

Seem rock stable at the speed and performs well with games. I have a Elsa Gladiac 920 GFC cards i might test out with it.

Ok I tested it out with a GF2 MX400 and there is no difference at all in frame rates compared to the 128 pro, so I bumped it up to a GF3 Ti200 and performance was very bad. In unreal tournament the intro screen was lagging bad.

This is absolutely reasonable when you see the anandtech.com benchmarks of 'SPBHM'.

With Unreal Tournament (1024x768,16bit), you increase your FPS with a Geforce256 DDR (23.1) compared to a rage 128 pro (17.7) about 30%.

With Quake III (1024x768,16bit), you increase your FPS with a Geforce256 DDR (64) compared to a rage 128 pro about (33,8) about 89%.

It's clear that with that CPU + GPU configuration, you will not have much fun with Unreal Tournament. Better take a high end PIII, a PIV or Athlon (XP)...

I've dusted off my Abit BP6 board and its dual Celeron 533s so I can put my Voodoo5 5500 to the test, so yeah, I suppose I am running Mendocinos once again.

The problem is that Mendocino Celerons can't have their multipliers lowered to my knowledge, so I'm stuck running them at 533 MHz while on a 66 MHz FSB, whereas they'd be much better off at that same speed on a 100 MHz FSB, if not faster.

I'd prefer to have faster CPUs to drive that Voodoo5, though, particularly for Unreal Tournament. UnrealEngine1 games want a CPU in excess of 1 GHz to maintain 60 FPS, generally speaking, and it doesn't help that the engine isn't SMP-compatible like Quake III Arena is.

melbar wrote:

This is absolutely reasonable when you see the anandtech.com benchmarks of 'SPBHM'. […]
Show full quote

This is absolutely reasonable when you see the anandtech.com benchmarks of 'SPBHM'.

With Unreal Tournament (1024x768,16bit), you increase your FPS with a Geforce256 DDR (23.1) compared to a rage 128 pro (17.7) about 30%.

With Quake III (1024x768,16bit), you increase your FPS with a Geforce256 DDR (64) compared to a rage 128 pro about (33,8) about 89%.

It's clear that with that CPU + GPU configuration, you will not have much fun with Unreal Tournament. Better take a high end PIII, a PIV or Athlon (XP)...

I do have tons of p3 builds high and low end as well as Athlon builds, im just messing around with this celeron board just cause I can 🤣

having a voodoo would probably be very positive for NFS3 at least, I think the game had a performance gain on my PII using Glide and not D3D

I'm running a mendocino celeron 500 on a soyo sy-7iwm/l board. It's based on the intel 810 and unfortunately it has no agp and no isa slots. The integrated video (i752) 2d core was developed by chips & technologies and is great for dos but i can't get sound under real mode dos. With cache disabled (disabling L1 also disables L2) performance is close to a 386sx-16 and with throttle and the two slowest settings without disabling cache i get the equivalent to a 486sx-20 and a 486dx-40, in windows it's even slower.
With the integrated sound crystal cs4299 doom has sound fx with the wdm drivers while with the vxd drivers i get no sound at all for dos games. Now i have a crystal cs4281 card installed and it's very compatible under a windows dos box.

I used to run a Mendocino 400MHz on a MS-6159 I think (µATX s370 without AGP port and with onboard sound).

Ran it with a PCI TNT2-M64 16MB, 192MB SDRAM (PC-100 @ 66 cl2) and some smallish harddrive (less than 10GB iirc) and Windows ME and ran it for several years.
It ran very well, especially since it was only my second ever build to ever be completed. For some reason I disabled its onboard sound and added a dedicated Solo-1 sound card and a NIC that I ended up never actually using.

At some point I was going to relocate the internals into another case and do a smallish upgrade (either a Mendocino 466MHz or go straight to the 533MHz one, max this board will support), but I kinda got left hanging halfway and the system is now in a box.

The board came out of some throw-away HP or so which had a burned-out PSU and for some reason it always had the habit to hang for a veeeery long time during POST...but it did work virtually flawlessly and gave me very little trouble (can't say that about the 486 I completed at roughly the same time).

I do remember it running Unreal (non-Tournament) well enough, but it's been so lang ago that I used it, can't remember all the details anymore.
Fond memories 😀

Im really shocked that this plays UT at playable frames

Im actually runing a celeron 300A @ 450mhz in my "1998" rig

It has :
2x Voodoo 2 12MB in SLI
128MB of ram
3com ethernet card
ati rage pro AGP (I'm still looking for something a little bit faster and that was released in 1998 just like the riva TNT, but I didn't find any of those atm)
4 GB HDD (I have bigger ones but that one was directly available, so I used it)
YMF724 sound card
The motherboard was manufactured by octeck and offers nothing more than a standard i440BX board

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

Im really shocked that this plays UT at playable frames

I'm not really surprised, quite frankly.

I've played the original Unreal on both Celeron-400 + TNT2 M64 and K6-III/400 + Voodoo 2 and it was very playable all the way.
There might've been a little bit of slowdown at few specific parts in the game where lots of stuff happens, but I always view those as a kinda automated bullettime which always happens when there's tons of enemies for me to shoot 😁

But seriously, it was very playable with these systems and I barely noticed any speed improvements when playing Unreal on a much faster s370 rig.