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My ultimate dual 440LX / Voodoo2 SLI build

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Reply 20 of 89, by BetaC

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pixelatedscraps wrote on 2021-03-18, 16:53:

I remember the excitement at this newfangled slot mechanism. A cartridge! It was almost like having a SNES again 😉

Has anyone had much experience with dual Slot 1 builds? Are there any issues with drivers or gaming performance under Windows 98, specifically with the LX chipset and the initial Klamath / early Deschutes?

It’s exceptionally rare for something to actually utilize both of the processors during this era, especially if you care about games. They’re cool as all hell, though.

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Reply 21 of 89, by pixelatedscraps

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Damn, I guess that puts that idea to rest. Short and sweet though it was.

Does anyone have an opinion on the Asus P2L97 with a Pentium II 333Mhz? I’ve found a great deal at $25 including 384MB RAM. I’m aware it’s an AGP board (the Millenium II I have is PCI) which I don’t have but I like how it is a late 1997 board and comes bundled with an early Deschutes chip, both completely feasible for this build. I can’t remember if one can bypass the AGP and plug in a 2D VGA and 3D Accelerator into two PCI slots but if it’s not feasible I guess I have to keep looking.

My ultimate dual 440LX / Voodoo2 SLI build

Reply 22 of 89, by vetz

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The Asus P2L97 is a good 440LX board, so for $25, I'd say that is a good deal.

You can always choose to not use the AGP slot.

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3D Acceleration Comparison Episodes

Reply 24 of 89, by pixelatedscraps

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Good to know. Order has been placed and now it’s time to hunt down a case, a period accurate keyboard and mouse, a Quantum Fireball HDD and a CD-RW. Plus all the software and games again!

My ultimate dual 440LX / Voodoo2 SLI build

Reply 25 of 89, by Joseph_Joestar

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pixelatedscraps wrote on 2021-03-19, 07:07:

a Quantum Fireball HDD

Eh, I would strongly suggest getting something else. I used a 20GB Quantum Fireball LCT in my Celeron rig for several months, and it noticeably slowed down the rest of my system while being loud as heck. Replacing it with a Western Digital Caviar sped things up considerably.

That said, this is a component that I wouldn't want to keep period correct. I have since gotten a SATA to IDE adapter and a cheap 120 GB Kingston SSD. Works flawlessly while being completely silent.

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 26 of 89, by pixelatedscraps

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Damn. I used to love the name hence the desire to have it back in this build. I may have to supplant this desire and add either a zip or a tape drive instead 🤣

How come you chose the SSD over the CF card route? I do love the ease of drag and drop onto a memory card.

My ultimate dual 440LX / Voodoo2 SLI build

Reply 27 of 89, by Oetker

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pixelatedscraps wrote on 2021-03-19, 09:51:

Damn. I used to love the name hence the desire to have it back in this build. I may have to supplant this desire and add either a zip or a tape drive instead 🤣

How come you chose the SSD over the CF card route? I do love the ease of drag and drop onto a memory card.

An SSD is faster and more resilient to a lot of writes, I'd use a CF cards for 486 and older systems, not a P2 running W98.

Regarding your question about prebuild machines and their quality, it's just a sample size of 1 but my Compaq retro PC seems to be of high quality, no leaking caps, heatsinks on the MOSFETs, compatible components. Completely weird form factor though, but it's an SFF model. Issue for me personally is that the BIOS lacks settings.

Reply 28 of 89, by Joseph_Joestar

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pixelatedscraps wrote on 2021-03-19, 09:51:

How come you chose the SSD over the CF card route? I do love the ease of drag and drop onto a memory card.

Performance mostly. I do have a CF to IDE adapter as well, and it works great for DOS 6.22. However, it was a bit too sluggish under Win98SE. Might just be the combination of my adapter and CF card brand (Transcend 4GB 133x) since other people seem to have had better experiences.

With an SSD, everything is lightning fast, and I can enable DMA in Device Manager which gives me a bit more performance. Be advised that you need to use a 128 GB disk or smaller under Win9x. Larger disks may cause issues.

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 29 of 89, by chinny22

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Agree with majority thats already been said.
I just wanted to say I wouldn't worry about the video card been PCI as you have already paid for it. None of those games in your list are overly demanding.
I'd only spend more money IF games start to stuggle, or you it while waiting for a really good deal on a faster card.
To give you an idea Feb 98 I got a Gateway P2 400, BX motherboard, 64MB Ram, 16MB TNT, onbaord SB 64 PCI,

Reply 30 of 89, by dionb

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Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-03-19, 07:37:
pixelatedscraps wrote on 2021-03-19, 07:07:

a Quantum Fireball HDD

Eh, I would strongly suggest getting something else. I used a 20GB Quantum Fireball LCT in my Celeron rig for several months, and it noticeably slowed down the rest of my system while being loud as heck. Replacing it with a Western Digital Caviar sped things up considerably.

That said, this is a component that I wouldn't want to keep period correct. I have since gotten a SATA to IDE adapter and a cheap 120 GB Kingston SSD. Works flawlessly while being completely silent.

The "LCT" stands for low-cost technology, it was the bottom of Quantum's 3.5" range with performance to match. The other Fireballs at the time were some of the fastest drives in their category - the CX was the fastest 5400rpm, the Plus KA was the fastest 7200rpm drive. Note however that these are 1999 drives, so not period-correct anyway. In late 1997, the Fireball ST would be more appropriate (and despite being two years older, it would still be faster than the LCT), in sizes between 4.3GB and 6.4GB.

If you don't want that level of period correctness, I second the idea of SSD instead. The issue there is that Win98 has no idea about SSDs, so for partitioning (aligned along sectors) you need to use a different computer, you need to manually disable swap (or put it on a different drive after all) and even then you're dependent on the drive's wear leveling to avoid killing the flash too early. That means it's very important to leave a LOT of free space, and ideally go for technology with as little write amplification as possible, so SLC rather than MLC and definitely not TLC. Because of this hassle, I actually use HDDs for Win9x systems. DOS doesn't write anything near as much, so I'm happy to use CF for that. Win2k and later can be coaxed to be nicer to SSDs so that's what I use there.

Reply 31 of 89, by Joseph_Joestar

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dionb wrote on 2021-03-19, 12:20:

The issue there is that Win98 has no idea about SSDs, so for partitioning (aligned along sectors) you need to use a different computer, you need to manually disable swap (or put it on a different drive after all) and even then you're dependent on the drive's wear leveling to avoid killing the flash too early.

Agreed, it's best to format the drive on a modern computer and leave about 30% free space unpartitioned.

As for wear and tear, the lack of Trim on Win9x doesn't seem to matter much for modern SSDs, since they perform garbage collection in firmware when the computer is idle. I leave my retro rigs to idle in the BIOS for 12 hours once per month, as per this recommendation. Haven't noticed any performance degradation so far.

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 32 of 89, by vetz

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pixelatedscraps wrote on 2021-03-19, 09:51:

Damn. I used to love the name hence the desire to have it back in this build. I may have to supplant this desire and add either a zip or a tape drive instead 🤣

How come you chose the SSD over the CF card route? I do love the ease of drag and drop onto a memory card.

You don't need to go the SSD route. Yes, it's convenient and much quicker than anything released back then, but I use a highend 7200 RPM IBM Ultrastar SCSI drive in my 1997 build. The drive was announced and released in end of 97, but didnt hit store shelfs untill jan 98, so it's kind of bending it, but I think it's allowed.

The RedHill guide has its own page dedicated to the IBM Ultrastar 9ES: https://www.redhill.net.au/d/75.php
There is even an even more highend model, the 9LP/18XP (9gb and 18gb respectively) that you can get.

The performance I'm getting out of it is quite good comparing to contemporary drives and it isn't noisy (the 10000 rpm disks offer better performance, but be aware of noise!). I'm actually quite surprised on how well it works. The good news is that these drives are cheap on Ebay, especially the 80 PIN scsi, but just buy and adapter for a few dollars so you can connect it to 68 pin controller. You can find Adaptec 2940W SCSI controllers cheap on Ebay as well.

3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)
3D Acceleration Comparison Episodes

Reply 33 of 89, by Anonymous Coward

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The "LCT" stands for low-cost technology, it was the bottom of Quantum's 3.5" range with performance to match. The other Fireballs at the time were some of the fastest drives in their category - the CX was the fastest 5400rpm, the Plus KA was the fastest 7200rpm drive.

I was pretty familiar with the Quantum lineup from this era, but I've never even heard of the LCT!
You'd best be avoiding the Plus KA. Those drives basically killed the company, because they were unreliable crap. Fast unreliable crap. Also avoid the IBM Deathstar 75GXP.

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V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 34 of 89, by flupke11

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I have a 300GB raptor with a Startech ATA to SATA converter in a 2002 Win98SE P4 system. I would not mind doing the same in my yet to be created P2L97-A system (integrated Ati Rage 4 MB).
It is a good compromise between staying close to the authenticity of the system by using a spinning disc, but allowing better than contemporary performance and reliability.

<edit>
This thread made me dust off the P2L97-A, and after updating the BIOS, I'm currently running a Celeron 600@750 (83Mhz FSB). Yup, that's a coppermine based Celeron. So this platform is very versatile.If the OP needs more performance, it's easy to grab the extra MHz (those Celerons shouldn't be expensive).
I don't know what voltage is going into the Celeron, though. The slocket is set at 1,8, but I do not know if the board's VRM can go that low. At 1,8 , the board is already overvolting the poor cpu, let alone 2,0 😀. Just measured the output on the HIP6004A and it's happily providing 1,8V.
If only I knew this back in 1999, I could have kept the system in use 😀

Reply 35 of 89, by cyclone3d

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When looking for stuff, I sometimes go on Yahoo Japan auctions. If the shipping wasn't so crazy to the USA, I would buy a lot more stuff on there.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 36 of 89, by vetz

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cyclone3d wrote on 2021-03-19, 22:39:

When looking for stuff, I sometimes go on Yahoo Japan auctions. If the shipping wasn't so crazy to the USA, I would buy a lot more stuff on there.

I know this is a bit offtopic, but that is a very good option for the OP who lives in HK. Also shipping from Japan is actually quite reasonable compared to many other countries. The USA has the most expensive international shipping of any country I know about.

3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)
3D Acceleration Comparison Episodes

Reply 37 of 89, by pixelatedscraps

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I buy a lot of my vintage audio (another passion/vice) from Buyee.jp the shipping rates are very reasonable and everything, as always with Japanese sellers, is immaculately maintained and packed. Had not thought to browse it for this project though, so thanks for the reminder!

Am the proud owner of a gorgeous Yamaha CA-2000, pair of Rogers LS3/6 BBC and gold limited edition Technics SL1210 MKII because of their service. I can also highly recommended Zenmarket for those wanting to buy Japanese clothing and shoes, too.

My ultimate dual 440LX / Voodoo2 SLI build

Reply 38 of 89, by pixelatedscraps

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dionb wrote on 2021-03-19, 12:20:
Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-03-19, 07:37:
pixelatedscraps wrote on 2021-03-19, 07:07:

a Quantum Fireball HDD

That said, this is a component that I wouldn't want to keep period correct. I have since gotten a SATA to IDE adapter and a cheap 120 GB Kingston SSD. Works flawlessly while being completely silent.

If you don't want that level of period correctness, I second the idea of SSD instead. The issue there is that Win98 has no idea about SSDs, so for partitioning (aligned along sectors) you need to use a different computer, you need to manually disable swap (or put it on a different drive after all) and even then you're dependent on the drive's wear leveling to avoid killing the flash too early. That means it's very important to leave a LOT of free space, and ideally go for technology with as little write amplification as possible, so SLC rather than MLC and definitely not TLC. Because of this hassle, I actually use HDDs for Win9x systems. DOS doesn't write anything near as much, so I'm happy to use CF for that. Win2k and later can be coaxed to be nicer to SSDs so that's what I use there.

Correct me if I’m wrong but weren’t there a few PATA SSD drives out in the wild back in 1997-1998?

My ultimate dual 440LX / Voodoo2 SLI build

Reply 39 of 89, by dionb

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pixelatedscraps wrote on 2021-03-20, 12:03:

[...]

Correct me if I’m wrong but weren’t there a few PATA SSD drives out in the wild back in 1997-1998?

Yes, in fact there had been SSDs since 1978. In the mid 1990s the main application was for aerospace, where vibration, shock and temperature extremes ruled out traditional hard drives. Possibly the first Disk-On-Module devices were around by then, although I'm struggling to find clear dates for their introduction.