NE2000 compatibles and 3Com 3C509 variants.

I think your priorities are off, or your choice of hardware is wrong.

Do you really gain anything with AGP + 2xV2 versus just a Voodoo 3000 AGP?
Do you really need two PCI sound cards?
Do you plan to use any ISA sound cards at all? If not, why start with a board that has ISA in the first place? Why not go for a board with more PCI slots?

Do you actually have all this hardware already and need to work around it?

dr_st wrote:

I think your priorities are off, or your choice of hardware is wrong. […]
Show full quote

I think your priorities are off, or your choice of hardware is wrong.

Do you really gain anything with AGP + 2xV2 versus just a Voodoo 3000 AGP?
Do you really need two PCI sound cards?
Do you plan to use any ISA sound cards at all? If not, why start with a board that has ISA in the first place? Why not go for a board with more PCI slots?

Do you actually have all this hardware already and need to work around it?

No to the first question but as with many retro builds, the desirable setup is not always the most efficient or the most powerful. In my case I want the V2 SLI experience but the AGP card is just there to a) not eat a PCI slot and b) allow me to play anything I can't use the V2s for.

Yes I need 2 sound cards because A3D and SB tech are both awesome in non-overlapping ways.

I'm using the board because I have it and it's too much of a coincidence that it's period appropriate for me to pass up and pay $$$ for a very similar board. It also had a genuine P2 w/ MMX installed and is quite a nice board IMO (it's an asus P2B). I only need something new enough that the CPU does not bottleneck the V2s (which according to Phil is about 400+ MHz). Anything newer would make me feel bad about putting old technology into it... kind of deflates my excitement about building a truly period specific rig. ISA was still around in the late 90s.

To some extent I'm working around hardware I have but that's not entirely a bad thing. Most of the hardware goes quite well together so I'm not shoehorning anything in there that shouldn't be, just because. Also, working with what you've got in creative ways can be rewarding in its own right.

oeuvre wrote:

NE2000 compatibles and 3Com 3C509 variants.

The 3c09 cards seem to have win98 drivers (or at least w95 drivers parading as w98 drivers). I don't know anything about either of them so I guess I'll go with 3com. I just need 10baseT RJ-45 for basic networking.

Modem is a different story. I have a few but no clue where the drivers went.

Or "just" get a mobo with 5 pci and 2 isa ?
The abit bh6 and asus p2b-f have what you might want

Otherwise, yeah, go for 3c509
As for the modem, why not getting a serial one ? That will be one slot free for something else ^^

Serial modem meaning external? Sorry I'm not familiar with modem tech that much. I've seen some external ones that connect through what appears to be a D-Sub style port...

What do you even need a modem for?

I find the sound of modem squelch soothing 😀 Don't you?

Actually it's nice to have in case of a power failure (usually the phone lines are unaffected by the utility company's problems) and I also like to design projects based on the unique property of modems being able to interface with machines using nothing but audio.

The issue that I see is that this system is sort of caught between eras.

Assuming that you want to get good performance out of games, you'll want something capable of playing higher-end of EAX and A3D 2.0 games at higher resolutions.

I recommend that you use a Pentium III-600 or better, and a TNT2 or better paired with the rest of your existing setup. Verify Pentium III compatibility for your motherboard revision at the link below. This should give you a bit more headroom, with no effects on the bottom end of playability. Half-Life is an example where it would certainly benefit from a stronger processor.

http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheidegger/p2b_p … pgrade_faq.html

You make a good point about Half-Life, which has always been a CPU-intensive game. I have a celeron 700 board with blown capacitors -still kinda works but I never cared much for celeron. Just a personal prejudice I guess. The P2 I have now is a 400 MHz cpu but I'm going to set the multiplier on the board to 4.5 to get 450 out of it. When I looked at the testing Phil did on Voodoo cards, I noticed that in every test, the results started to become cpu independent above 400 MHz so while I may get a bit of extra graphics performance from a cpu upgrade, the yield would likely be low. Also, my AGP card in this case is going to be a Radeon 7000... not the strongest card in the world, sure but certainly a capable card for the era in question, with enough ram to get the job done.

Is there an example game you were thinking of that is sort of end-of-life-cycle for the hardware, that you don't think would run on 450 MHz or the V2 SLI? My concern is more with the V2's mere 8MB (Texture mem I mean).

I don't think you'll be able to reach 450MHz because usually the fastest p2s are partially or totally locked

Isn't that because the multiplier gets maxed out? mine goes up to 8 or something. I could boost the FSB to 103 but due to the RAM and PCI sync, that would very much be my second choice.

No it's just the cpu that will ignore what multiplier you chose

Gahhhrrrlic wrote:

You make a good point about Half-Life, which has always been a CPU-intensive game. I have a celeron 700 board with blown capacitors -still kinda works but I never cared much for celeron. Just a personal prejudice I guess. The P2 I have now is a 400 MHz cpu but I'm going to set the multiplier on the board to 4.5 to get 450 out of it. When I looked at the testing Phil did on Voodoo cards, I noticed that in every test, the results started to become cpu independent above 400 MHz so while I may get a bit of extra graphics performance from a cpu upgrade, the yield would likely be low. Also, my AGP card in this case is going to be a Radeon 7000... not the strongest card in the world, sure but certainly a capable card for the era in question, with enough ram to get the job done.

Is there an example game you were thinking of that is sort of end-of-life-cycle for the hardware, that you don't think would run on 450 MHz or the V2 SLI? My concern is more with the V2's mere 8MB (Texture mem I mean).

I suppose that in my mind, the set of games with GLIDE support on a Voodoo2 and the set of games with EAX or A3D support is not big enough to solely use the Voodoo2 as the 3d accelerator. The Radeon 7000 is a decent complement. The Voodoos will be GPU bound at 1024x768 on a P2-400, but the Radeon won't be.

I'd recommend the Pentium III - 600MHz Katmai (SL3JM). It's a 50% clock speed increase, and will definitely work on your board.

Half-Life, for instance, has a minimum CPU speed of 500MHz listed, so this should help there.

I'm editing this to remove incorrect information! This is true of the Steam version, not of the original.

How can Half-Life can have a 500MHz cpu requirement when in 1998, the year it was released, the fastest x86 cpu was the pentium 2 450 ?

Actually the "minimum requirements" are really low (too low ?) : pentium 133MHz with 24MB of RAM

Deksor wrote:

How can Half-Life can have a 500MHz cpu requirement when in 1998, the year it was released, the fastest x86 cpu was the pentium 2 450 ?

Actually the "minimum requirements" are really low (too low ?) : pentium 133MHz with 24MB of RAM

Correct. I had found the information for the Steam version it seems. That really didn't seem right. I've edited the post to avoid misinformation.

Back in the day I played through Half-Life on a Pentium MMX 233 with a (heavily overclocked) Voodoo 1. It ran absolutely fine.

Gahhhrrrlic wrote:

No to the first question but as with many retro builds, the desirable setup is not always the most efficient or the most powerful. In my case I want the V2 SLI experience but the AGP card is just there to a) not eat a PCI slot and b) allow me to play anything I can't use the V2s for.

I think there are almost no games that can run on a P2@400 but can't run on Voodoo 2 SLI or (Voodoo 3).

dosgamer wrote:

Back in the day I played through Half-Life on a Pentium MMX 233 with a (heavily overclocked) Voodoo 1. It ran absolutely fine.

Runs fine on a Pentium MMX 200 with Voodoo2 as well. I did have problems running Blue Shift on that setup tho.