It would be ok for a Win98 system using a PCIe Geforce FX. I probably wouldn't bother with that though.

I have a Sempron 754 PC with PCI E and a SIS chipset motherboard. The compatibility was horrible, bluescreen everywhere so it just sat there. IMO I wouldn't bother with it too.

Aside from having a peculiar Turion unit, not much. 754 Turions are hard enough to find, and compatible boards are even harder. I already consider myself very lucky that my K8V-X SE officially lists Turion support, as long as you're running the latest BIOS.

There were some interesting s754 PCIe boards ... for example Epox 8NPA SLI or DFI NF4X INFINITY. (I had them both). Epox had all Rubycon caps and nice colors. But I wouldn't count on Win98 compatibility. You need VIA chipset for that.

But with cool s754 cpu and VIA K8T800 chipset you can go all the way to DOS, if you like. Phil has few videos. Just don't use SATA (or use later board with updated SB chipset).

Yes, I know Phil's videos on the S754, but for DOS I have way better systems. My board was great at the time for XP, but unfortunately I don't see much use for this S754 system today. It's either too new (DOS, Win98) or too old (XP). So it seems to be only good for feeding the nostalgia-beast.

DOS is completely out of question because of the missing ISA-slots. For Win98 it's missing the drivers and PCIs is also a problem. For XP the CPU is too weak.
Maybe it would work as a Windows 2000 machine. There seem to be board drivers and I think support for PCIe graphics cards is also better than for 98. It's just that a dedicated Win2000 machine is pretty useless in itself 😁

Hmm, wait a minute, please - what kind of CPU was on the market when WXP was released? Athlon XP and Pentium 4? So from that perspective, I don't see your Sempron64 2600+ as a completely weak CPU, let alone for W98SE/ME. For me is build, based on nForce3, Turion, Audigy and GF6800, dailyrider for W98SE games. Even some DOS games, launched from the W98 environment, are seamlessly playable if you accept the SB16 emulation on Audigy (or Live!) card.
Of course, it's not a "best of" for the W98, let alone the XP, but I wouldn't completely dismiss it - I do have an AGP port for a graphics card, but I could also find something for PCI-E from the ATI series X700/800 or GeForce 6xxx, which have a driver for the W98.
It can be built into a quiet, relatively efficient and powerful enough machine for almost all W98 games, even in high resolution and detail.
It has one minus: it is a bland, uninteresting and thus overlooked and unsought platform.

Yeah, you can pop in a cheapo Radeon X600 in the PCIe slot and then have an overkill W98 rig that runs cool and quiet, and hardly required any money. I tested the PCIE Radeon in Win98, it gave me much better compatibility than the trainwreck Quadro fx1300 (PCIE Geforce FX).

You can even try a Geforce 6 or 7 card or a Radeon X800XL, and try for a combo Win 98/XP build, without searching for the overpriced AGP versions of those cards.

I don't think you can with nf4 chipset. This is not Intel.

Yah there's not even any "family tree" to dig back into in late 90s for drivers, like SiS and Via for nForce. Though they did buy up Ali I heard, so miniscule chance some late Ali stuff might be slightly useful.

I have 3 754 boards and I don't really see much use for them. The use case of avoiding late P4 super hard is stymied a bit by it being hard to find s754 CPU that are over 2ghz clock speed by much. I mean if you get enthused and committed you can do it, but if you've got a ton of other stuff to play with you probably don't want to commit anything more than pocket change out of curiosity. Maybe I'll loop back around to them sometime. I was on socket A at the time, playing at 2.4Ghz with Tbreds and I looked at 754 then and thought something like "Eh? What's the point of that, looks like a dead end." so ignored it, s939 and 940 stayed spendy, I didn't really see a compelling reason to go 64bit either with XP64 being meh, and Vista wasn't gonna tempt me until it made it to a Service pack, screw being a beta tester on your own dime. So I waited until AM2, well a bit longer, sometime into AM2. As far as "seeing what I missed" goes, I'd spend money on a good Barton and time on my s939 X2, so it loses there too for the present. However, for the same speed, they do seem like they might be less cranky than high end socket A, especially now boards are old.

Yes, it was a dead end - dual channel memory was becoming standard at the time and so s.754 was a brief episode with no future (similar to s.423 at Intel). On the other hand, both boards and CPUs are cheap because of this, yet the system built on them is powerful enough for the needs of the W98 games, possibly the XP. The CPU goes over the 2 GHz frequency to get through relatively easily by overclocking the base frequency (at least the Palermo, Lancaster cores).
The problem is with drivers for the W98 - with nVidia are the latest official for the nForce3 series of chipsets, meaning AGP port. According to sources on the net, the W98 can also be installed on the nForce4 series, but it probably won't be the most certain.
I haven't had a chance to test the other chipsets (VIA, ULi), so I don't know.

When I bought it I knew that it was already the end of this platform but performance-wise it was great for the time. My Palermo-Sempron overclocked from 1.6 GHz to nearly 2.2 GHz even if the board did not allow changing the VCore (which I didn't know when I ordered it).

Ydee wrote on 2023-04-04, 10:04:

Yes, it was a dead end - dual channel memory was becoming standard at the time and so s.754 was a brief episode with no future (similar to s.423 at Intel). On the other hand, both boards and CPUs are cheap because of this, yet the system built on them is powerful enough for the needs of the W98 games, possibly the XP. The CPU goes over the 2 GHz frequency to get through relatively easily by overclocking the base frequency (at least the Palermo, Lancaster cores).
The problem is with drivers for the W98 - with nVidia are the latest official for the nForce3 series of chipsets, meaning AGP port. According to sources on the net, the W98 can also be installed on the nForce4 series, but it probably won't be the most certain.
I haven't had a chance to test the other chipsets (VIA, ULi), so I don't know.

The performance benefits from dual channel on these platforms were negligible at the time (I had a s754 A64 3200+ and a s939 A64 3500+, both 2.2GHz and similar systems overall). Using some benchmarking tools the difference was just a few percents and the difference while gaming was unnoticeable. Both were Venices iirc, very similar in performance and in TDP. Both ran on VIA chipsetted boards.

I ran WinXP on both.

Was actually by accident that I ended up with 2 similar machines. I had accidentally bought a motherboard with 1 socket and a CPU with the other socket, so instead of returning it I just got a matching motherboard and CPU and got 2 very similar systems at the same time 😜
They were both really cheap at the time, it was when C2Q Q6600 was what people wanted and with these 2 boards I could recycle the AGP cards and the DDR1 memory.

s754 with PCIe? I'd perhaps see it in a simewhat similar fashion as s3 with PCI instead of VLB. There are probably better options available right now but I do like these 2 platforms a lot 😀

Tetrium wrote on 2023-04-04, 11:30:

The performance benefits from dual channel on these platforms were negligible at the time (I had a s754 A64 3200+ and a s939 A64 […]
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The performance benefits from dual channel on these platforms were negligible at the time (I had a s754 A64 3200+ and a s939 A64 3500+, both 2.2GHz and similar systems overall). Using some benchmarking tools the difference was just a few percents and the difference while gaming was unnoticeable. Both were Venices iirc, very similar in performance and in TDP. Both ran on VIA chipsetted boards.

I ran WinXP on both.

Was actually by accident that I ended up with 2 similar machines. I had accidentally bought a motherboard with 1 socket and a CPU with the other socket, so instead of returning it I just got a matching motherboard and CPU and got 2 very similar systems at the same time 😜
They were both really cheap at the time, it was when C2Q Q6600 was what people wanted and with these 2 boards I could recycle the AGP cards and the DDR1 memory.

s754 with PCIe? I'd perhaps see it in a simewhat similar fashion as s3 with PCI instead of VLB. There are probably better options available right now but I do like these 2 platforms a lot 😀

Yes, but "Dual channel!" on the box sold rather than test results and practical benefits.
I had both versions with.754 - Gigabyte K8NSNXP with AGP (NForce3 250) https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-K8NSNXP-rev-1x#ov and later Epox EP-8NPA7I with PCI-E (nForce4-4x) https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/epox-pronix-ep-8npa7i. Both with Sempron64 2800+, oc´ed up to 2,4 GHz (on Epox) via 300MHz base frequency.

I was an AMD fanboy back then, and s.754 was kind of a 64-bit version of the Durons from s.462 (A) that I started with.

Why not pair the So754 CPU with an nForce3 AGP chipset and use it as a very high-end Windows 98 system? Certainly that would be more versatile than a PCIe system, which would just be a rather slow modern-ish (pre-EFI) system.

In fact, this triggers me. I have an AM2 board with nForce3 chipset (Asrock, of course 😉 ) and a Phenom 2 X4. Win98 couldn't use the quadcore, but in terms of single-core performance, that Phenom 2 might well be the fastest Win98 option that actually runs with all system drivers installed (i.e. not PCIe with chipset drivers ignored). Pretty pointless, but if I ever get bored something to do...

dionb wrote on 2023-04-04, 14:27:

Why not pair the So754 CPU with an nForce3 AGP chipset and use it as a very high-end Windows 98 system? Certainly that would be more versatile than a PCIe system, which would just be a rather slow modern-ish (pre-EFI) system.

My idea was to rebuild my actual system from back then with the exact same boardmodel, CPU, cooler and RAM. So I wanted to know if this combination has any practical use except for nostalgia 😀

Ydee wrote on 2023-04-04, 13:59:

I was an AMD fanboy back then, and s.754 was kind of a 64-bit version of the Durons from s.462 (A) that I started with.

In this time, best 440BX it Athlon ...BX on the motherboard on the VIA with native AGP
Performance, Energy Efficiency, Compatibility, Authenticity

HanSolo wrote on 2023-04-04, 15:14:

My idea was to rebuild my actual system from back then with the exact same boardmodel, CPU, cooler and RAM. So I wanted to know if this combination has any practical use except for nostalgia 😀

As you say, for WXP you have way better build and for W98 there are no drivers for chipset (nForce4)- for PCI-E graphics there are drivers (ATI X-line up to 800/maybe 850?, nVidia GF line up to 6800, modded drivers even for 7xxx line).

Win2k is now my OS of choice for 9x era games. It's so much more stable then any installation of Win98/ME and does allow for slightly newer hardware all while still feeling old.
Game compatibility is also alot better then people remember, so it's not a terrible idea.
But is that going to satisfy the nostalgia beast? Ok so you have the original hardware but it's still not a true representation of the PC in your past.

The computers from my past are still my most used, even though I have better machines. The sentimental overrides the technical advantages with the better machines only been used to fill the gaps in performance.
So it may still be worth it in that sense as well?

Well, actually that would be a representation of my past PC 😀 I switched pretty early from Win98 to Win2K because just as you say: it was so much more stable than Win98 and I had no compatibility problems. This S754 was even my first XP-system. I used Win2K up to this point (on a Tualatin-system)
My statement above about Win2K was a bit mistakable: for me it's not so attractive to have this as a dedicated machine only for one single system. And I'm unsure how compatibility is affected by the PCIe-graphics which requires newer drivers.
However, should I stumble over the board for little money I'll problably get it just to try it out.