they both should be fine on the game you would wanna play with a V2 I would think, but the Celeron is a lot faster in some games

For a single V2 it shouldn't really matter which of those CPUs you use.
Still I would pick the Celeron since the platform is more upgradeable.

What's the motherboard and primary VGA to go with it?

Generally the Celeron 500 will perform better, but not necessarily. If the Celeron in on an i810 shared-mem VGA chipset, it will crawl and a K6-2 with discrete VGA will win hands down. The other way round it's even worse, if that K6-2 is on SiS 530 or VIA MVP4, just avoid.

Doornkaat wrote:

For a single V2 it shouldn't really matter which of those CPUs you use.
Still I would pick the Celeron since the platform is more upgradeable.

Depends. Celeron 500 is the second fastest Mendocino Celeron. If the motherboard doesn't support Coppermine, particularly if it's an i440LX/EX based So370 PPGA board, no sensible upgrades will be available.

dionb wrote:

Depends. Celeron 500 is the second fastest Mendocino Celeron. If the motherboard doesn't support Coppermine, particularly if it's an i440LX/EX based So370 PPGA board, no sensible upgrades will be available.

You're right. I meant the 440BX and the Apollo Pro[X] platform.

I would go with K6-2 500 unless you can apply some serious overclock to the celeron! 😀

winuser_pl wrote:

I would go with K6-2 500 unless you can apply some serious overclock to the celeron! 😀

Celeron 500? Unlikely. Mendocino pretty much tops out below 600MHz, if you're very lucky you can do 7.5x75MHz=562MHz, but that's about it unless you want to massively overvolt and invest in heavy cooling.

FWIW, 3dfx's 1999-2000 Voodoo2 drivers have 3dnow! optimizations.

hint hint hint.

dionb wrote:

What's the motherboard and primary VGA to go with it?

Generally the Celeron 500 will perform better, but not necessarily. If the Celeron in on an i810 shared-mem VGA chipset, it will crawl and a K6-2 with discrete VGA will win hands down. The other way round it's even worse, if that K6-2 is on SiS 530 or VIA MVP4, just avoid.

The boards are:

1. VIA MVP3 ATX board, that means only discrete graphics...
2. intel 440 LX micro-ATX board, no AGP port, but it has a Rage128 AGP with discete 8Mb onboard.

Doornkaat wrote:

Still I would pick the Celeron since the platform is more upgradeable.

dionb wrote:

Depends. Celeron 500 is the second fastest Mendocino Celeron. If the motherboard doesn't support Coppermine, particularly if it's an i440LX/EX based So370 PPGA board, no sensible upgrades will be available.

Correct, there is no upgrade possible. A Celeron 533 is the maximum, but no option for me because too expensive and bad price/performance ratio, i have already the Celeron 500.

Also overclocking, i don't really want since you will not get much improvement but much more higher "stress" on the old cpu.
Also i have the approach to have the K6-2 as an "time-machine" which the Celeron does not offers, so the voodoo2 is kind of useless when using it at rage of 386, 486 to early pentiums.

Because these constraints are kind of given for me, i have these options:

1. Voodoo2 with Platform 1.) K6-2 500, VIA MVP3, with Riva128 or RivaTNT2 + V2
2. Voodoo2 with Platform 2.) Celeron 500 (i440 LX), onboard Rage128 AGP, or may a Geforce 2 MX (speed of an Geforce 256) + V2

I would just go with the K6-2/500.

melbar wrote:

Because these constraints are kind of given for me, i have these options: […]
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Because these constraints are kind of given for me, i have these options:

1. Voodoo2 with Platform 1.) K6-2 500, VIA MVP3, with Riva128 or RivaTNT2 + V2
2. Voodoo2 with Platform 2.) Celeron 500 (i440 LX), onboard Rage128 AGP, or may a Geforce 2 MX (speed of an Geforce 256) + V2

AGP can cause issues with SS7 chipsets but with latest BIOS and new drivers the MVP3 seems to have most of those ironed out and tweaking a few settings is likely to solve whatever problems may be left.
Given the new information on motherboards avaliable I swing towards the SS7 platform.

leileilol wrote:

FWIW, 3dfx's 1999-2000 Voodoo2 drivers have 3dnow! optimizations.

hint hint hint.

Yeah, I forgot that fact. Then go with K6-2 500 unless you have PIII where even no 3DNow! can help.

OK, the majority here on Vogons would go for the K6-2.

As soon as i have time to prepare the build's, i will run some benchmarks to check which platform performs better with the V2... 😎

melbar wrote:

The boards are: […]
Show full quote

dionb wrote:

What's the motherboard and primary VGA to go with it?

Generally the Celeron 500 will perform better, but not necessarily. If the Celeron in on an i810 shared-mem VGA chipset, it will crawl and a K6-2 with discrete VGA will win hands down. The other way round it's even worse, if that K6-2 is on SiS 530 or VIA MVP4, just avoid.

The boards are:

1. VIA MVP3 ATX board, that means only discrete graphics...
2. intel 440 LX micro-ATX board, no AGP port, but it has a Rage128 AGP with discete 8Mb onboard.

Exactly which LX board? If that thing supports Coppermine (unusual, but not impossible) you could go up to Celeron 766 on it. Combo of LX and Rage onboard (sure it's a 128, not a Rage Pro Turbo?) sounds like MSI MS-6159, in which case there's no Coppermine support.

Assuming no Coppermine support, this is almost worst-case for Celeron (only integrated VGA SiS620 or i810 with PPGA would be worse), in which case you're definitely better off with the K6-2, as you can choose your own primary VGA (Rage is not bad, but not great either) and there are nice 3DNow optimizations for Voodoo2 drivers.

[...]

Also i have the approach to have the K6-2 as an "time-machine" which the Celeron does not offers, so the voodoo2 is kind of useless when using it at rage of 386, 486 to early pentiums.

That's a very relevant requirement - you have lots of options to slow down the K6-2, both in hw (lower bus speeds, lower multiplier) and sw, that you don't have on the Celeron. IMHO clear-cut choice for the K6-2 then.

[...] […]
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[...]

1. Voodoo2 with Platform 1.) K6-2 500, VIA MVP3, with Riva128 or RivaTNT2 + V2
2. Voodoo2 with Platform 2.) Celeron 500 (i440 LX), onboard Rage128 AGP, or may a Geforce 2 MX (speed of an Geforce 256) + V2

Why not use the Gf2MX on the K6-2? That gives you the best of both worlds - VGA fast enough never to bottleneck your CPU for DirectX and excellend DOS VESA compatibility. Yes, PCI bus loses some performance vs AGP, but a Gf2MX should soundly beat a TNT2, even if the TNT2 is an AGP card (and particularly if it's an '-M64' low-end version).

Sorry, it's my mistake.

Yes, it's the MSI MS6159 with the ATI 3D RAGE PRO Turbo only. Because this board has this low end VGA onboard, i had bought long ago the geforce2MX-PCI. This is the only possibility to upgrade.

Right, on the SS7 platform, i have more possibilities to upgrade.
From that point of view, i could upgade to these i have in storage:

1. Matrox Millenium + V2
2. Matrox Millenium 2 + V2
3. Riva128 + V2
4. RivaTNT2 + V2
5. RivaTNT2 Pro + V2
6. Geforce2MX-PCI + V2
7. Geforce2MX400-AGP + V2
8. Geforce2 GTS + V2

Higher to the GF2GTS, i would not go, even with the GTS the K6-2 is a huge bottleneck.

The Celeron should be much faster than a plain K6-2 500, especially in 3D games. A single Voodoo2 may not be that fast, but if you hit a CPU bottleneck it will make difference and it's not really hard to hit one with these old processors, something like Unreal will bring the K6-2 to its knees.

May I also say my controversial opinion? I don't consider a single Voodoo2 ideal for 800x600 nor two of them ideal for 1024x768. Instead, 640x480 suits a single card great and 800x600 suits the SLI combo very well. The reason I'm saying this is because performance is much better and more consistent at these slightly lower resolutions. I realize the novelty of 1024x768 on SLI cards, but through the years I've come to appreciate high (and consistent) framerates that much more. On top of that, at that resolution, V2 introduces a lot of stuttering thanks to its VRAM setup AFAIK, something which the V3 and onwards don't suffer from.

I'd go with the Celeron. It should be faster in most games, but, more important, Intel LX440 is much more stable than VIA MVP3.

Although I love all things AMD. A Celeron 500 should be a lot faster than K6-2/500 in games.

Yes.

Havli has already benched a lot of CPU's:
CPU benchmark project (1995 - 2001)

He has used a V3-3000. And his VIA MVP3 platform has even double the L2 cache (1024kb). My board has only 512kb cache.

From this conclusion, a Celeron 433 is around 30% to 40% faster than the K6-2 450. With the 500Mhz versions it should be a similar difference.

I'd go with the K6-2 500 and a S3 Virge GX2 to pair with the Voodoo2, simply because with setmul and cache shenanigans you can easily use it to play great DOS games too.
That should easily cover almost every Glide game released until about 2001 or 2002.
You also get access to S3D API games, whatever that's worth to you.

After 2002, games start requiring 16+MB of VRAM, and the poor V2 and even V3 stop being able to keep up.