Mendocino Celeron 550Mhz or PIII Katmai 600 paired with 384MB RAM will make it a decent rig.

Celly 400 and bang the bus up to 100 you mean 😁

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-01-30, 19:23:

Celly 400 and bang the bus up to 100 you mean 😁

Imagine if its a Willamette P4 and Rambus ...

TO THE BIN IT GOES !

stamasd wrote on 2022-01-30, 14:52:

Now I WANT to do a XP build with a PII-350 and 64MB of RAM, just for the pain of it. 🤣

If I even have a 64MB DIMM.

Did you ever do a build with that NOS P-III 1.13 CPU from a few years back?

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-01-30, 19:48:

Imagine if its a Willamette P4 and Rambus ...

TO THE BIN IT GOES !

actually, no. I have found socket423 to be among the last/fastest platforms to have DOS sound support through PC/PCI so I have a number of those systems kicking around. 😀

liqmat wrote on 2022-01-30, 20:01:

Did you ever do a build with that NOS P-III 1.13 CPU from a few years back?

I don't remember. As old age advances and dementia sets in, memory becomes a vanishing thing. 😀
Seriously. I was just rummaging through my piles of hardware searching for something, I found a lot of items that I simply can't remember when and how I got. Like a RAP-10 and a GUS. 😀 Now I have to find a place for those in one build or another.

stamasd wrote on 2022-01-30, 20:06:

I don't remember. As old age advances and dementia sets in, memory becomes a vanishing thing. 😀

Let me remind you.

stamasd wrote on 2022-01-30, 20:06:

actually, no. I have found socket423 to be among the last/fastest platforms to have DOS sound support through PC/PCI so I have a […]
Show full quote

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-01-30, 19:48:

Imagine if its a Willamette P4 and Rambus ...

TO THE BIN IT GOES !

actually, no. I have found socket423 to be among the last/fastest platforms to have DOS sound support through PC/PCI so I have a number of those systems kicking around. 😀

liqmat wrote on 2022-01-30, 20:01:

Did you ever do a build with that NOS P-III 1.13 CPU from a few years back?

I don't remember. As old age advances and dementia sets in, memory becomes a vanishing thing. 😀
Seriously. I was just rummaging through my piles of hardware searching for something, I found a lot of items that I simply can't remember when and how I got. Like a RAP-10 and a GUS. 😀 Now I have to find a place for those in one build or another.

Was a joke mate, Im looking at building a Rambus P4 soon as I got sent 6 sticks of Rambus in a junk lot of memory and 4 sticks from a different junk lot so I need a system to test it on, besides OP would need a i740 to have a truly mediocre Intel build 🤣.

Was thinking of a 1.4 Willamette Rambus vs a 1.4 Tualatin DDR and seeing which one performs better for games. I own the Tually DDR setup just need to source a Rambus 423 board. I have a feeling the Tually will run circles around the P4 till you get to memory speed.

liqmat wrote on 2022-01-30, 20:10:

stamasd wrote on 2022-01-30, 20:06:

I don't remember. As old age advances and dementia sets in, memory becomes a vanishing thing. 😀

Let me remind you.

Ah that one. As far as I know, it's still NIB 😀

This was a fun read. I really enjoyed the predictions and then the reveal. So Awesome.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-01-30, 19:23:

Celly 400 and bang the bus up to 100 you mean 😁

Mendocino Celeron 366 - 5.5 x 100. It is much rarer to find Celeron capable of 600Mhz and be stable. But if one gets lucky then why not.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-01-30, 20:13:

Was thinking of a 1.4 Willamette Rambus vs a 1.4 Tualatin DDR and seeing which one performs better for games. I own the Tually DDR setup just need to source a Rambus 423 board. I have a feeling the Tually will run circles around the P4 till you get to memory speed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3dcuLVW6A0

Don't recall whether it's RAMBUS, though ..

H3nrik V! wrote on 2022-01-31, 11:54:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-01-30, 20:13:

Was thinking of a 1.4 Willamette Rambus vs a 1.4 Tualatin DDR and seeing which one performs better for games. I own the Tually DDR setup just need to source a Rambus 423 board. I have a feeling the Tually will run circles around the P4 till you get to memory speed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3dcuLVW6A0

Don't recall whether it's RAMBUS, though ..

Yep, i850 RDRAM board confirmed around 10m. So this is absolue best-case for the P4.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-01-30, 19:23:

Celly 400 and bang the bus up to 100 you mean 😁

thats one of the combinations that never worked 😀
Mendocinos (250nm) released in couple of batches. First releases of 300-333 and 366-433 tapped out slightly above ~450MHz. With the release of 466 or 500 Intel had to have worked all the kinks out in new revision and all of a sudden all newly manufactured celerons 366 and above were able to at least post at ~550MHz with many stable at 2.2V. 366@550 was such good value per $, it was ridiculous. Then a year later Coppermines released and out of the gate you got >800MHz for free. Once again first batch ended around 950MHz meaning 667/700 were poor choices without expensive 1MHz precision FSB motherboard, but with release of 733/766 you could suddenly OC to ~1150MHz. All in the $100-130 price range when full Pentium 2/3 were ~$500-800 😮 ! but Intel had no choice thanks to newly released Durons reaching 950MHz with pencil mod. Mmmmm good times.

This is a sweet system for 1999. Top of the line motherboard/graphics/accelerator/17 inch Diamondtron monitor. Even the speakers are on the nicer side for that time. Small amount of ram is understandable considering 1999 Jiji earthquake sent ram prices to the moon. P2 350Mhz instead of 300A@450 is the only weakness, either lack of research or erring on the side of caution ("overclocking is for kids/poor people/will destroy my computer").
The only thing missing from fully loaded 1999 setup would be Creative PC-DVD Encore drive/decoder combo and Cambridge SoundWorks speakers.

Maybe in the first couple of months after release when overclockers were excited about them most... they later could go over 600 but got really mired down soon after, 670 was the fastest I heard of, and I think that took dry ice or something. After the initial rush of each release, there were better chips following. But hardware sites had generally moved onto the next thing. Anyway, I personally had a 400 that easily did 600, stock voltage, think I tested it at 630 too but was a bit marginal there maybe would have got stable with voltage bump. That's one that got away though when I needed a CPU to stick in an mATX i810 I was building up for fam, it went in that with bus locked to 100 by wire trick. Did web hack duties for several years, I hoped to get it back again when they were done, but it went somewhere else.

The system came with a clean Windows XP SP1 install, so I played around with it a bit. The 64MB held up pretty well I must say. It swaps occasionally, especially during multitasking, but not too bad.

I will add some extra RAM to it and install Windows 98SE. I think I will replace the Viper V550 a nice 2D card like a Matrox G100. Maybe an upgrade to a Pentium II-450 (nothing says 1998 like a Pentium II imho).

The choice for 64MB RAM I do get, considering the RAM crisis at that time. But why splurge on the 3D redundancy? The budget for either would have been spend on a faster CPU or more RAM. Maybe the shop advised to come in later for an upgrade but the owner never did. We will never know 😉

Also I must say that I had higher expectations from the Iiyama (Vision Master Pro400) monitor. I have a Samsung SyncMaster 753DFX here and an LG StudioWorks 775C here, both appear to display sharper images.
Could this be due to the Voodoo pass through? Or are my other monitors just better (the Iiyama model is a year older).

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-01-31, 15:37:

Maybe in the first couple of months after release when overclockers were excited about them most... they later could go over 600 but got really mired down soon after, 670 was the fastest I heard of, and I think that took dry ice or something. After the initial rush of each release, there were better chips following. But hardware sites had generally moved onto the next thing. Anyway, I personally had a 400 that easily did 600, stock voltage, think I tested it at 630 too but was a bit marginal there maybe would have got stable with voltage bump. That's one that got away though when I needed a CPU to stick in an mATX i810 I was building up for fam, it went in that with bus locked to 100 by wire trick. Did web hack duties for several years, I hoped to get it back again when they were done, but it went somewhere else.

Glad to hear that experience with the Mendocino 400... I have 4 laying around waiting for me to dig out my BP6 from storage, hoping to have 2 of them run 600 in stead of the 366@550 mounted now 😁

Edit; had written Mendocino 600, should've been 400 😉

Gabriel-LG wrote on 2022-02-01, 20:01:

I think I will replace the Viper V550 a nice 2D card like a Matrox G100.

Diamond made cards with excellent quality VGA output. Plus G100 is limited to 16bit color above 1280 × 1024 while V550 will happily produce 32bit 1600x1200 @75Hz - perfect for selected monitor. You also get MPEG 1/2 motion compensation acceleration. G100/G200 have no real Video acceleration, only framebuffer scaling and VESA port for external accelerators.

http://web.archive.org/web/19990504204144/htt … rel/mgag100.htm (same text for G200 https://www.matrox.com/en/video/media/press-r … 0-graphics-chip) "The MGA-G100 integrates a video engine which supports both horizontal and vertical interpolation to scale video to full screen..... Providing high performance interfaces for external Video Decoder, Video Encoder, hardware Motion-JPEG and hardware MPEG-2 CODECs make the MGA-G100 the centerpiece of a fully multimedia upgradeable solution." is pathetic when compared to Nvidia TNT shipping motion compensation acceleration (not even present in Marvel G400 released a year later) in a chip faster and cheaper than G200.

Matrox also means broken opengl and barely accelerated D3D 5 while TNT gives you top of the line D3D 6.

Diamond Viper V550 16MB $200 September 1998 https://www.anandtech.com/show/195/5
Creative Labs Graphics Blaster TNT 16MB $169 September 1998, $125 November 1998 https://www.anandtech.com/show/182/5
MATROX G100 8MB $99 April 1998
optional DVD Upgrade Module (Hardware MPEG2 decoder) for G100/G200 $79 April 1998
MATROX MILLENNIUM G200 8MB $230 August 1998 https://assets.hardwarezone.com/2009/reviews/ … /g200/g200.html
STB Velocity 128 4MB $129 June 1998
Creative Labs 3D Blaster VooDoo2 8MB $229 June 1998 and dropping fast after TNT release
Diamond Monster 3D II 8MB $249 June 1998 and dropping fast after TNT release

Just for fun 1996 launch price of Voodoo Graphics 4MB $299, came down to $199 in 1997 after ram got cheaper.

Gabriel-LG wrote on 2022-02-01, 20:01:

Maybe an upgrade to a Pentium II-450 (nothing says 1998 like a Pentium II imho).

$650 CPU in volume orders in 1998 https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/relea … 98/dp082498.htm

Gabriel-LG wrote on 2022-02-01, 20:01:

But why splurge on the 3D redundancy? The budget for either would have been spend on a faster CPU or more RAM.

Glide. With V2 + TNT combo you got best of both Glide and OpenGL/D3D worlds for $50-150 more than buying any other 2D card.
Going generic $50 i740/S3 and SLI Voodoo2 would deliver beast gaming experience, but hurt picture quality on the desktop.

https://www.cnet.com/news/450-mhz-chip-spurs-price-cuts/ has a nice table
450-MHz Pentium II $665*
400-MHz Pentium II $589
350-MHz Pentium II $423
* Not out until August.

You would need to save $250 to bump this config from 350 to 450 without overclocking. This is why $149 Celeron 300A was such a crazy bargain. All of a sudden you had $300-550 to spend on other stuff and simultaneously same-better CPU performance.

as for ram 64 was enough for everything in 1999 https://www.anandtech.com/show/267/6
128MB DIMM was ~$200, 64MB ~$70-80 pre earthquake https://www.edn.com/panic-buying-sets-dram-pr … s-on-wild-ride/

If I was building this system at the end of 1998 with hindsight of current knowledge I would go:
Pentium II 350MHz -> Celeron 300A@450MHz = +$270
Diamond Viper V550 -> generic $50 i740/S3 = +$150
Diamond Monster 3D II 8MB -> 2xCreative Labs 3D Blaster VooDoo2 12MB = -$300 means 60fps 1024×768 gaming all day
or
Diamond Monster 3D II 8MB -> nothing = +$200 and swallow ~10% fps drop in Glide optimized games on TNT compared to single V2
generic "better" Taiwanese speakers -> Cambridge Soundworks 2.1 = surprisingly cost in the same ballpark, maybe ~$20 difference worst case.
A4Tech OK-720 -> IntelliMouse Optical = -$50 You get first good optical mouse with scroll wheel.
Sound Blaster PCI 128 -> Diamond Sonic Impact S70 = -$20 Cheapest A3D Vortex card with great audio quality
or
Sound Blaster PCI 128 -> Sound Blaster Live! Value = -$30 for EAX and same great audio quality

About the speakers:
Juster At 95A https://twitter.com/StevesTechShed/status/645317830586564608 https://i.pinimg.com/originals/39/81/be/3981b … a7b52db2981.jpg
Juster At 95B https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5SfTCVEd-w
SDTA G-401A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37rNwi8iUJ4
Active 75 https://twitter.com/foone/status/1230769894595026946
ESCOM branded https://twitter.com/McLambo/status/1034198048602128384
Target TRG-S100 https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/com … cal_midend_90s/

As mentioned on Reddit depending on the lottery same case could house from LM386 and pcspeaker quality transducers to TDA-2020 with proper heavy internal shielding and actual 10W of RMS audio. My friend lucked out in 1996 and got the good kind. Which kind are yours? Hard to tell from the picture. Can you open them up and take a picture of the pcb just for fun? 😀

Second that re the G100 vs V550. If it had been a poor quality TNT card, the better output of the G100 would matter, but the V550 is excellent as it is. Aside from Direct3D and 32b colour support, it also has far better DOS VESA SVGA support than the G100, in case you happen to do DOS stuff.