Just got the BP6 today, and got it working in what used to be the P2 system.

It seems that the PS/2 performance hit is still present(Intel 440 series chipset problem, perhaps), though mitigated(likely because of the much faster Celerons). The USB mouse still gets the occansional freeze.

Anyway, your comments on UT performance and P3s might just convince me to jump through all those hoops and drop in a couple of P3 FC-PGA Coppermines in that BP6. (Now if they'd figured out a way to make the FC-PGA2 Tualatin P3s work in SMP mode...)

Oh, and will two Celeron 533s be enough to encode a video in real-time as I'm playing on one of my consoles(most likely the Xbox with S-Video and RCA stereo being fed into the AIW Radeon 8500)? That's part of the reason why I got that particular graphics card in the first place.

Yeah don't use USB on those old boards. Big CPU hit. I don't remember a PS2 problem tho, but I do remember I always stuck with PS2 back in those days simply because of what USB did to your CPU cycles.

I don't know about video encoding on a pair of Mendocinos. They don't even have SSE. I don't think real time will be possible at all. But hey, who knows. They may be able to do realtime encoding at a low quality....

I just set up my Abit BF6 yesterday with a 1.4 GHz Pentium III-S (133MHz FSB). 😀 I'm pushing that board as far as possible now. It has run every CPU that can be installed in it. I've had it since 1999 🤣. Started with a Pentium II 300 "SL2W8" @ 504 and a Matrox G400. Now it has a Upgradeware Slot T for the Tualatin and a GeForce FX 5600. I was messing with a old Katmai P3-450 for a while too.

Soon it will have a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. The GeForce cards are the only recent cards that can handle the 88 MHz AGP clock. At least, I hope the 5950 is as capable as the 5600 I have in it now. Only other compatible high end cards are the Radeon 9700 PRO or maybe 9800 PRO. Higher than that and they aren't AGP 1.0 compatible anymore. The Radeon cards do not like high AGP clocks tho.

BTW, I've found that the latest drivers that work with a GFFX 5600 and these boards (and K6 systems) is the final 56.x driver. Anything newer and OpenGL does weird stuff, D3D doesn't work at all, and in 98 you can't even uninstall the drivers (something crashes when I try).

I just noticed something weird about the PS/2 mouse performance hit under Windows 2000.

Namely, IT DOES NOT EXIST! I checked the Task Manager, and moving the mouse doesn't seem to impact the CPU one bit! Maybe it's a Win98SE driver issue. Or maybe Win2000's support for SMP has something to do with it. Either way, I'm pleased.

However, I still need to test things out a bit further under Win2000, and I'll have to wait until tomorrow to do that.

Now I just have to figure out the following:

-how to boot from a CD (nothing I've tried in the BIOS seems to work!)
-whether to go for Celeron 366s and raise them to 550 with a 100 MHz FSB, or mod the heck out of the board and drop some P3 Coppermines in
-whether or not to get a 100 GB-250 GB IDE/PATA HDD to replace the anemic 4 GB and 10 GB HDDs I already have from both legacy systems to use in this dual-Celeron system
-why that one floppy drive from the P2 system has an IDE/PATA interface and a laser warning label on top

There are programs to modify the sample rate of your mouse. I've never noticed a difference using them but you could try.

Responses to your points:

-Smart Boot Manager. a sweet little app you put on a floppy. With it, you can boot a CD on a 486! 😀 A P2 should definitely have a BIOS option to boot from CD though. Make sure the BIOS is recognizing your CDROM on boot. Might have to set autodetect on each channel/device. And don't use cable select jumper setting. Set as master on end of cable and on the secondary channel.
http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/download.html

-I'd at least try to overclock 'em. Installing Coppermines would be tricky. http://www.bp6.com/board/kb.php?mode=article&k=17&page_num=3 now that's some serious modding!

-I use newer hard drives simply because they are so quiet compared to the oldies. I don't have much nostalgia for whiny bearings. I also have a small collection of IDE cards; 2 Promise Ultra66, a Silicon Image ATA133, and a Promise SATA150TX2. It's nice to have the equivalent of like Ultra Wide SCSI on your old comp along with a dead silent drive. The cards are almost free these days and an 80 gig modern drive is nearly too.

-Weird floppy drive may be a floptical. There were some weird attempts at replacing floppies throughout the 90s. I much prefer my multi gigabyte flash sticks to the oddball contraptions of those days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical

That Smart Boot Manager utility is quite useful. Many thanks. (Now if I could make it boot from USB drives...)

The mobo mods for using FC-PGA Coppermine CPUs should also be simplified somewhat with the use of an adapter like the PowerLeap S370, though a few wiring tricks to the mobo itself, as well as some capacitor and voltage regulator replacements will still be needed.

It also turns out that the weird floppy drive IS a floptical. Didn't even know these things existed until now...the main attempt at replacing the floppy drive that I remember from those days were the Iomega ZIP drives. Certainly, you remember those?

Finally, I have got to get a larger hard drive for the sake of video encoding. My Win2000 partition only has 1.5 GB free right now, which isn't very much for video footage. The only thing that worries me is that Win2000 won't boot if I connect a HDD with it installed to one of the HPT366's IDE/PATA connectors, though Win98SE will still boot fine. Sure, I'd be limited to Ultra ATA/33, which could be limiting for constant video encoding, but unless there's some sort of workaround, it's all I've got.

And speaking of video encoding, it can encode footage from my Xbox through S-Video rather well, using VGA resolution. Around 50-60% CPU usage(under Win2000, of course; I need all the CPU power I can get!), and the framerate's not too bad, either. Only issue is that it's in MPEG-2, as the ATI software won't let me use MPEG-4...the only other issue I might run into is that I won't have enough CPU power for MPEG-4. In any case, though, I still have to get that larger HDD first...

Yeah I definitely remember the ZIP drives. I never had one myself, but knew many people who had them. There were the Iomega JAZZ drives too, which were 1 GB and a lot more expensive. I actually was a bit interested in a Syquest EZ135 drive back then, but they had reliability issues. All of these floppy replacements had reliability issues. The EZ135s were a good deal faster than ZIP disks tho and were actually just hard disk platters in a cartridge.

To boot from a IDE card or special chip, you usually need to install its driver first. On Windows 2000 or XP install, you hit the F6 key when it asks if you want to add a driver (right after booting off the CD) and it will copy the driver files off a floppy disk. Usually driver archives for these chips/cards are ready to be put on a floppy for this purpose. If Windows is already installed, just boot up with the drive on the mobo's IDE port and install the HPT's driver. Then it should boot off of it. If you've done that already, the prob could also be some quirk with the HPT366 controller. They were troublesome, if I recall. I had a friend with a Abit BE6-II, which is just my Abit BF6 + HPT366 (my BF6 has blank spots for the chip and its ports). That was a tricky board.

Your video encoding CPU usage sounds like it may only be using one CPU. 50% is what you'll see if one CPU is pegged while the other is idle. The extra 10% is background apps or Windows overhead (like disk access) put on the other CPU. The ATI app is probably not multithreaded.

Well, I did notice that, in the Task Manager, the load was half on both CPUs, rather than one CPU maxed and the other idle. Can't seem to adjust it, though.

For now, I'm using version 7.6 of the ATI multimedia apps that came on the AIW 8500's disc. The 8.x version on my 9600 XT's disc, as well as the 9.x version I downloaded from AMD/ATI's site both give me issues(trying to play the video files I record with ATI's File Player usually results in some sort of weird error, and then I can't see anything fed into the input breakout box until I reboot; maybe I should try just using the recording portion of the software and using an alternate media player like Winamp or VLC, or just avoiding the ATI software entirely by getting some other encoding software as well, hopefully an encoder that uses both CPUs).

Oh, I also tried the F6 trick with the bundled HPT366 driver floppy, but that didn't work for whatever reason. I would try installing the drivers while it's connected to the southbridge's IDE controller, but doing that under Win98SE while nothing's connected to the HPT366 broke the entire OS, needing a complete re-install. I'm not taking that chance with Win2000.

Finally, I'm wondering if it is indeed worth it to get two Celeron 366s to overclock to 550 MHz with a 100 MHz FSB, likely yielding much higher performance than my current 533s at 66 MHz FSB, but also draining funds from things like the components I could use to install Coppermine FC-PGA P3s instead.

...Oh, wait, aren't all those FC-PGA Coppermines without integrated heatspreaders? That means that I could catastrophically damage the CPU core if I push too hard trying to install one of my Thermaltake Golden Orbs on one, right? That's the last thing I want to happen when I spend my hard-earned money on something. I wouldn't have this problem with Tualatins, of course, but the BP6 fans haven't found out the magic formula for surefire FC-PGA2 Tualatin support with SMP enabled yet...

Yeah Windows will spread out a single threaded app across two CPUs in that way. 50% total that looks like 50% on each core. It's a single threaded app if it's doing that. Everything that's not multithreaded and doesn't have specific instructions in its exe to do otherwise will do that. You can force thread affinity to one of the CPUs with Task Manager or designate it within an app's exe with a utility called imagecfg. You sometimes need to do this with some quirky old games.

About CPUs, well obviously Coppermine is lot faster than any Mendocino. SSE and a bigger, much faster L2 cache. So it's up to you. All of those chips are rather cheap these days. The biggest issue is the difficulty of the modding...

Yeah don't use golden orbs with Coppermine CPUs. They are VERY dangerous to those exposed cores. A buddy of mine killed a Celeron II that way once. You can use just about any small Socket A heatsink with Socket 370, btw. Caps get in the way if they are too big tho. Heck you can use Socket A coolers with Socket 7. You should see the Thermalright SLK700 I have on my K6-III+. Heh. A friend was done with it so I decided it needed a new mission.

I had to chop off part of the clip tho cuz the triple notch design was blocked by caps around the socket. But it fits perfect now 🤣. I have a very slow running fan on it because it's such overkill. Very quiet.

But yeah there are lots of coolers you could use. Various places still sell Socket A stuff, and most of it is very cheap and not huge enthusiast stuff so it should fit on your board. The Orb coolers were mediocre performers even in their time, but they were neat-looking for sure.

Looks like I'm going to have a bit of a problem regarding the use of Coppermines.

Most of them are meant to run at a 133 MHz FSB, which a 440BX doesn't support officially. The BP6 can force the 440BX to run at that speed, but it'll require much more than a little green heatsink with no fan to do so properly.

In addition, the 440BX won't have the proper dividers for buses like AGP at 133 MHz FSB. I don't know how well that Radeon 8500 will tolerate a non-standard AGP bus speed.

Nevertheless, I think I'll still spice up that BP6 a bit to accept the P3s. UT really needs the extra CPU power anyway, as while it's still somewhat playable(MUCH better than on the K6-2 system by a long shot), there are still noticeable FPS dips in a few situations. (I wonder if it's making the most of the Radeon 8500's features like HT&L, that one particular feature possibly being absent because the engine was made for 3dfx Glide cards, NONE of which have HT&L support. I also wonder if it can utilize SSE instructions and really speed things up on a P3 1000 running at only 750 MHz due to a 100 MHz FSB rather than 133.)

nah there are definitely coppermines that are 100 MHz chips. If you can get at a photo of the chip, the label on it will say the bus speed it uses. Back in their time, the 550E was popular because it was fairly cheap and had the 100 MHz bus so the 440BX people could overclock them easier. Personally, I went for the Slot-1 based Coppermine 700/100 in hopes of getting to 1 GHz (couldn't quite get there). Right now at home I have a Slot 1 600E that I got free out of a old Dell.

Here's a P3 Coppermine 700/100.

Radeon 8500 will freak out at about 70 MHz AGP. I have no ATI cards that handle much above that. I've tried a 9700, the 8500, a 7500, and a original Radeon DDR. GeForce cards, on the other hand, are often much happier. My "new" FX 5950 will do the 89 Mhz AGP resulting from 133 MHz FSB just fine. So will my FX 5600. And it's not just limited to the FX line. But I'm sure there are GeForces that will be unhappy, too. It is WAY out of spec, after all.

For newer cards, definitely give this a shot. It's an enhanced OpenGL renderer for UT.
http://cwdohnal.home.mindspring.com/utglr/

UT doesn't use hardware T&L at all, btw. It's an engine built around Glide and Epic's software renderer, for the most part, with a Direct3D 6 wrapper on top, basically. UT does use "KNI" (Katmai New Instructions), which is SSE. I'm sure it does help a little. The audio engine, however, uses a lot of MMX so you're already seeing some SIMD boost.

The new OpenGL renderer adds support for some of the newer features on modern DX8+ video cards. Stuff like single-passed fog and detail textures. It also allows you to enable anti-aliasing if your card supports multi-sample AA. And anisotropic filtering. There are some additional SIMD SSE/SSE2 tweaks but they really don't help much and I actually think the old D3D renderer might be faster (but uglier too).

Hmmm...I found out that 1 GHz P3s at 100 MHz FSB could still be faster than the 700s, since:

(1000/133)*100=751.88

That's around 50 MHz faster, which may not be much, but I want all the performance I can get out of this BP6.

Oh, and the 8500s aren't too tolerant of whacked-out AGP speeds? Damn, guess I can throw my hopes of 133 MHz FSB on this thing out the window...unless you know of any other AGP 2x-compliant graphics cards that support video capture.

Finally, your bringing up the sound engine of UT reminds me of my intention to install a PCI sound card in this thing with EAX or A3D support. The question is, do I go the SB Live! route, or should I opt for an Aureal Vortex 2-based card instead? (Or maybe I should lay off the sound cards, since I have plans to install a SB AWE64 Gold ISA, a Gravis Ultrasound with the Interwave chip in the other ISA slot, a Roland MT-32-or-compatible-LA-synth, and a PCI sound card with hardware EAX or A3D in one computer. Too many sound devices, you think?)

Apparently there were faster 100 MHz Coppermines built:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_III
100 MHz FSB: 500, 550, 600, 650, 700, 750, 800, 850, 900, 1000, 1100 MHz (E-Models)

And yeah, multiple sound cards will most likely be a headache. But for UT, you'd probably want a PCI card to save CPU usage. Both Live! and Vortex 2 are good options, and both have decent DOS SB emulation. Live! uses the AudioPCI wavetable sets in DOS too. You can get the fairly decent 8MB patch set and use that. Look up Sound Blaster PCI 64 on Creative's site. Then replace the patch set file that Live! installs (2MB probably) with that file. *.ecw

As for video capture, there are some GeForce FX cards that have capture... What you are looking for is "VIVO" - video in video out. Did a google search:
http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/videoca … cle.php/3104451
http://techreport.com/articles.x/5660/1
http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/gffx/gffx-4.html

A GeForce FX 5950 is the fastest card you can put into a 133 MHz 440BX as far as I know. The fastest ATI card would be a 9800 XT, but I'm sure it won't be happy at 90MHz AGP. That's the end of the line for cards that support these old AGP slots.

Are you sure about those cards? If my 9600 XT supports ONLY 4x and 8x AGP, NOT 2x AGP that's used on 440*X boards, then I highly doubt that the 9800 XT will support 2x AGP. Not sure on the FX 5950, but I'm a bit wary of the GeForce FX line. (Everyone knew how hard nVIDIA blew it with that generation, though the 6x00s, and now the 8x00s more than make up for that.)

The potential issue with the PCI sound cards is that while they may emulate a SB16, I don't want to be stuck with pitiful FM synth. Part of the big draw of having an AWE card is vastly improved MIDI, after all...or maybe I can pluck that Roland CM-64 off eBay and use it to handle the MIDI. (The CM-64 does both MT-32-style LA synth and Sound Canvas-grade General MIDI, right?)

Oh, and how are the MIDI interfaces on the Gravis Ultrasound w/Interwave(PnP, I think), as well as the Aureal SQ2500(highly lauded Vortex 2 card)? I've heard that Creative MPU-401 interfaces only support UART mode, not this "intelligent" mode I hear of on occasion. (Do I need intelligent mode for those "sysex" messages that allow a program to send custom samples to a MT-32-or-compatible LA synth?) Hope that's not the case with either of those...however, if the SQ2500 does have great DOS compatibility, I suppose I can use the ISA slot normally occupied with the AWE64 Gold to house something like a Roland SCC-1, LAPC-I(yeah, like I'll ever find one of those), or other such card with a true MPU-401 interface.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Are you sure about those cards? If my 9600 XT supports ONLY 4x and 8x AGP, NOT 2x AGP that's used on 440*X boards, then I highly doubt that the 9800 XT will support 2x AGP.

You're right.
BTW, it's not really the speed of the AGP port (any card works in AGP 1x mode), but the signalling voltage that matters. As far as I know the ATI 9600/9800 series only support 1.5V and 0.8V (AGP 4x/8x) signalling voltage, so you can't insert them into a board that only provides 3.3V (AGP 1x/2x), prevented by notches in the AGP slot.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

The potential issue with the PCI sound cards is that while they may emulate a SB16, I don't want to be stuck with pitiful FM synth.

Most PCI soundcards don't even have a pitiful FM synth. 😉

NamelessPlayer wrote:

The CM-64 does both MT-32-style LA synth and Sound Canvas-grade General MIDI, right?

Nope, the one with MT-32 and SC-55 in a box is called CM-500.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Do I need intelligent mode for those "sysex" messages that allow a program to send custom samples to a MT-32-or-compatible LA synth?

Not necessarily. Most games use UART mode or can be patched to work without intelligent mode. There are SYSEX utilities that expect a "real" MPU-401 though, but not all of them.

I thought the AGP 2x/4x/8x specs defined a particular signalling voltage, so that any card with AGP 2x should work in an AGP 2x slot, even though it may support AGP 4x or 8x. Are you telling me that just because a card supposedly supports AGP 2x doesn't necessarily mean that it'll have a given signal voltage?

Oh, and are you sure about the CM-64? It's supposedly a CM-32L(LA) AND a CM-32P(PCM) in one package...Wait, PCM isn't exactly GM. Damn it, I guess it's time to hunt down a CM-500...or would a SCC-1 that serves as the MPU-401 for a MT-32 or CM-32L be enough for both LA and GM?

Finally, you've got some Ultrasound cards. Know a good source for them(specifically, one of the Interwave ones with integrated RAM and expansion RAM slots)? eBay didn't have any, last time I checked.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

I thought the AGP 2x/4x/8x specs defined a particular signalling voltage, so that any card with AGP 2x should work in an AGP 2x slot, even though it may support AGP 4x or 8x. Are you telling me that just because a card supposedly supports AGP 2x doesn't necessarily mean that it'll have a given signal voltage?

I just wanted to mention that the AGP mode is not the reason why some card/board combinations won't work, it's because of the signalling voltage.
Of course the AGP specs define the supported voltage for a specified mode, but the transfer speed depends on your driver settings. For example you can run a 8x card in an 8x board in AGP 1x mode. However the signalling voltage will be 0.8V in this case, and not 3.3V as specified for AGP 1x.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Oh, and are you sure about the CM-64? It's supposedly a CM-32L(LA) AND a CM-32P(PCM) in one package...Wait, PCM isn't exactly GM.

You got it. The CM-32P uses PCM synthesis, like the SC-55, but it's not GM compatible, so it won't work correctly with PC games.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Damn it, I guess it's time to hunt down a CM-500...or would a SCC-1 that serves as the MPU-401 for a MT-32 or CM-32L be enough for both LA and GM?

A SCC-1 would be easier to find than a CM-500, and yes, combined with a MT-32 or compatible L/A synth it would be perfect for games.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Finally, you've got some Ultrasound cards. Know a good source for them(specifically, one of the Interwave ones with integrated RAM and expansion RAM slots)? eBay didn't have any, last time I checked.

The classic Ultrasound cards are not that rare, but you'll need luck and patience to stumble upon an Interwave-based one. It took me years to find the one I have.

There are some pretty sweet looking PCI cards at newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp … deon+X1K+series

Those PCI graphics cards would be sheer overkill for my K6-2 setup...which I'm probably going to retire in favor of my dual-Celeron system. The AT case, AT PSU, and that crappy PCChips M598 mobo with its totally half-assed header placements and lack of AGP slot all restrict my options quite a bit(though the BIOS at least lets me overclock and tweak RAM timings).

Also, how would that Intel AL440LX board I initially got with the former Pentium II system perform with a slotket and the fastest Mendocino Celeron it can support? Unfortunately, the BIOS is significantly castrated and won't let me adjust CPU multipliers, FSB speeds, or RAM timings, so forget about overclocking unless you can find a third-party BIOS guaranteed to work. Furthermore, the 440LX chipset can only handle a 66 MHz FSB, and it doesn't even have a heatsink on this board! Still, if I can get a Celeron 533 to work in it should I decide to mod the BP6 to use a couple of P3-1100Es, I might as well keep it around.

Then again, why am I considering blowing so much on old hardware? I still haven't splurged on that 2000 US$ PC yet(those X38 boards are close, but not quite on the market as of now; I wonder which one to get, maybe the Abit IX38-QuadGT or the Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6, perhaps?), which would eat all of my current systems for breakfast, combined, four times over.