First post, by paradigital
- Rank
- Oldbie
I’m just in the process of setting up a machine based on a DFI P5BV3+ motherboard, a K6-III 450 (not a K6-III+ unfortunately), and a Voodoo 3 2000 AGP.
I’m using a standard 40GB Maxtor 7200 RPM IDE drive (40 pin cable not 80, pretty certain ATA66/100 didn’t appear until a number of years later!), 512MB RAM (2x 256MB PC133, I’ve got no good PC100 that will run CAS 2, but this PC133 will happily downclock and run tight timings), and have installed a bare Windows 98SE system.
After that I’ve installed the VIA 4-in-1 drivers (4.43), and the Voodoo 3 drivers fresh from the CD. I then installed 3dfx tools and the overclock tab unlock. I then proceeded to install Quake 2 and the MiniGL patch.
I fired up Quake 2, but it felt amiss, a bit sluggish at even 800x600. Now sure my memory might be failing, but my old Compaq Presario 5170 (P2-350) with a PCI Voodoo 3 2000 felt faster than this (back when this kit was new I might add). I couldn’t remember the console command for showing the current FPS, but did manage a timedemo, netting me a whopping 42FPS at 800x600.
I tried a bit of overclocking on both the CPU and GPU, CPU is now at 100x5 (100x5.5 was a no go even with more vcore, I tried up to 2.7v on this 2.4v chip, 95x5.5 was fine, but unstable likely due to the out of spec bus speeds) and the Voodoo 3 is happy at 175MHz without any instability or untoward graphical corruption.
I then installed 3DMark99 MAX and barely scraped 2000 marks on default settings (still overclocked on both the CPU and GPU I might add). This looks to be around 55-60% of what similar aged systems are getting from a google around (including on Vogons), I’m being outpaced by a P2-450 overall, even though I’m getting just over 5,000 CPU Marks in 3DMark99 MAX.
I assumed it was a driver related issue so first tried a “revert to factory defaults” in 3dfx tools, but that made little to no difference. I then tried the latest official drivers, and the AmigaMerlin latest. Still no real improvement.
Am I really expecting lower overall performance than a PII (even though my CPU score is higher)? Or am I doing something wrong and/or missing something obvious? Do I need to get Win98 fully updated first?
Any help appreciated.
I don’t have these kinds of issues with my Win2k machine (dual P3 1.13 Tualatin, GF4 4600Ti, 2GB RAM), but I was missing a proper DOS compatible / Win9x machine.