NOLF is definitely a very demanding game. This ran pretty poorly on my Pentium III back in the day even with a good graphics card. For a 2000 game, this was quite silly but the game runs on the Lithtech 2 engine and that engine was pretty demanding.

Tonight I'll test the game for you on my P3 1Ghz (133) with GeForce 4 Ti 4200 and report back - since this is the system you want to build, it will give you an idea whether it's worth buying a better CPU for this game.

After obtaining and installing a 1GHz PIII (SL52R), I can happily report that the performance has noticeably improved!

NOLF went from 23 to 33 FPS, 3Dmark2000 from 5106 to 7433 and 3Dmark CPU from 349 to 507. Not bad at all, a 45% speed increase. Still, NOLF seems to be extremely CPU hungry for a 2000 game.

I had one more issue with the motherboard running at 110MHz FSB instead of 133, but a BIOS update thankfully fixed this. Oddly enough, the board completely ignores frequency jumpers and uses CMOS settings. Hunting down the correct BIOS and a flash tool for this obscure board was tricky, but I'm happy to have a much better retro gaming PC with just a 5€ upgrade. 😉

One more question - what's a safe temperature range for a Coppermine PIII? I'm getting 56°C maximum temp from the CPU sensor.