zuldan wrote on 2026-04-04, 21:30:

I still remember walking into the computer store to purchase my Savage 2000 in December 1999. Couldn’t wait to get home to insta […]
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MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-04, 19:00:

That's a very cool desktop.

Today I flicked through old magazine CDs looking for Savage 2000 drivers that activate its fabled T&L and I found in the readme.txt of version 4.12.01.9007-9.51.03, "This driver enables Transformation and Lighting. Using this feature may result in visual anomalies."

I am preparing to record actual A/B test of S3 vs Nvidia: Texture compression vs texture compression, T&L vs T&L ... but I don't have any T&L games and my GeForce 256 doesn't work.

I still remember walking into the computer store to purchase my Savage 2000 in December 1999. Couldn’t wait to get home to install it on my Abit BP6. I thought I had built a beast of a machine. I soon realised I had made a mistake. Only CPU 1 was being used in Windows 98 and the Savage 2000 couldn’t keep up with the GeForce 256. Back then information wasn’t readily available like it is today on hardware. You had to rely on magazines being honest. Things improved slightly when Windows 2000 was released 2 months later but only with Quake 3 🤣

Kicking myself for not keep the Savage and BP6, doh!

The Savage 2000 box looked similar to this Savage 4 box.

The attachment 7304DCC8-BC42-4BF8-A4C6-D4AA3E8A6BCD.jpeg is no longer available

My Super Socket 7 system lived through generations of GPUs: Matrox G200, Banshee, Voodoo3, Savage4Pro, GeForce2MX, GeForce4MX, GeForce3, and a mystery Radeon.

Of those, the Savage4Pro had demonstrated the highest image quality by pasting massively more detailed textures with zero CPU impact - but it was not the fastest. Magazines discouraged me from spending any money on a Savage2000. I later discovered the SS7 FPS ceiling. Due to SS7 architectural constraints, the GeForce3 was slower than earlier cards - my SS7 system was choking under heavier DX8 assumptions, various DX7 cards were returning roughly the same FPS, and the DX6 Savage4Pro was clearly behind the pack.

Had magazines focussed too much on marketing new builds and neglected readers upgrading old machines? Maybe. That is when I wanted to try a Savage2000 - I wanted to see if it could deliver the best of both worlds on the older PCs that it was probably designed for. Trouble was, the Savage2000 was short lived and impossibly rare so no answer was found..

.. I'll finish the story shortly, and not at market rates:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-04, 23:25:

My Super Socket 7 system lived through generations of GPUs: Matrox G200, Banshee, Voodoo3, Savage4Pro, GeForce2MX, GeForce4MX, GeForce3, and a mystery Radeon.

Socket 7 paired with gf3 is not a reasonable expectation for someone playing computer games. Fastest overclocked to its limit K6-3+ barely matches 1998 Celeron 300@450/stock January 2000 Celeron 533 performance.
https://hw-museum.cz/article/5/cpu-history-to … 1995---1999-/12

Budged minded people were overclocking cheap Celerons like 366 or 566 and playing maxed out games in 2000. https://alt.3dcenter.org/artikel/celeron2-566/
https://web.archive.org/web/20020913090324/ht … tml?i=1227&p=11
By February 2001 (gf3) an absolute bottom end was $100 Celeron/Duron ~800MHz delivering ~twice the 300@450 performance.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-04, 23:25:

Had magazines focussed too much on marketing new builds and neglected readers upgrading old machines?

ss7 was dead in 2001. Nobody expected anyone to try playing modern 3d games on a Ford Pinto of computers. At that point you cant really blame computer magazines for socket 7 Stockholm syndrome 😀

rasz_pl wrote on 2026-04-05, 14:26:

Socket 7 paired with gf3 is not a reasonable expectation for someone playing computer games. Fastest overclocked to its limit K6 […]
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MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-04, 23:25:

My Super Socket 7 system lived through generations of GPUs: Matrox G200, Banshee, Voodoo3, Savage4Pro, GeForce2MX, GeForce4MX, GeForce3, and a mystery Radeon.

Socket 7 paired with gf3 is not a reasonable expectation for someone playing computer games. Fastest overclocked to its limit K6-3+ barely matches 1998 Celeron 300@450/stock January 2000 Celeron 533 performance.
https://hw-museum.cz/article/5/cpu-history-to … 1995---1999-/12

Budged minded people were overclocking cheap Celerons like 366 or 566 and playing maxed out games in 2000. https://alt.3dcenter.org/artikel/celeron2-566/
https://web.archive.org/web/20020913090324/ht … tml?i=1227&p=11
By February 2001 (gf3) an absolute bottom end was $100 Celeron/Duron ~800MHz delivering ~twice the 300@450 performance.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-04, 23:25:

Had magazines focussed too much on marketing new builds and neglected readers upgrading old machines?

ss7 was dead in 2001. Nobody expected anyone to try playing modern 3d games on a Ford Pinto of computers. At that point you cant really blame computer magazines for socket 7 Stockholm syndrome 😀

Fair - and I built a Socket A tower after accepting that my SS7 was obsolete. I just squeezed every drop out of it first and the most demanding game I remember playing on that SS7 was Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001) on a 3Dfx @25fps and that was when I tried many alternative graphics cards to get the FPS back up hence the GF3 failed experiment.

I also remember chasing FPS against my brother's i440BX slocket running a Celeron @1GHz, but memory is fuzzy and maybe the real chase was with my "new" Duron - the machine I miss most because it was unfinished business. It might have been days or weeks old when I left..

Spent the weekend benchmarking my Pentium 4 with OttoPS's newly released "P4Tool": [b]p4tool - performance control utility for Pentium 4 / NetBurst[/b]

This tool enables more throttling options for Pentium 4 (Netburst) systems. Just based on my initial testing it can throttle the system between mid-range Pentium and 386 levels of performance.

Since a lot of speed sensitive titles of the early to mid 90s fall into this range, this makes the Pentium 4 even more versatile at hitting these performance levels.

rasz_pl wrote on 2026-04-05, 14:26:

ss7 was dead in 2001. Nobody expected anyone to try playing modern 3d games on a Ford Pinto of computers. At that point you cant really blame computer magazines for socket 7 Stockholm syndrome 😀

Spare a thought for me having a regular Socket 7 PC until 2006. Although in 2001 there was turning point where I went to the shops with my dad on my birthday to buy some PC games, but ended up walking out with a PSone instead - that started my switch to being mostly a console gamer. In retrospect I wish I used that money to put into a graphics upgrade over what I believe was still a Virge DX in the family PC, and CPU upgrade to 233 MMX if it wasn't already maxed out. My friend's dad was a massive computer nerd and could have helped out on that. Ah well, I was only a young lad back then.

giantenemycat wrote on 2026-04-05, 15:33:

rasz_pl wrote on 2026-04-05, 14:26:

ss7 was dead in 2001. Nobody expected anyone to try playing modern 3d games on a Ford Pinto of computers. At that point you cant really blame computer magazines for socket 7 Stockholm syndrome 😀

Spare a thought for me having a regular Socket 7 PC until 2006. Although in 2001 there was turning point where I went to the shops with my dad on my birthday to buy some PC games, but ended up walking out with a PSone instead - that started my switch to being mostly a console gamer. In retrospect I wish I used that money to put into a graphics upgrade over what I believe was still a Virge DX in the family PC, and CPU upgrade to 233 MMX if it wasn't already maxed out. My friend's dad was a massive computer nerd and could have helped out on that. Ah well, I was only a young lad back then.

Holy smokes, so are you saying you were using a Virge DX and a Pentium 233 MMX still in 2005-2006?

(BTW, since you mentioned consoles, I have to ask... is your username a reference to the "Giant enemy crab" line from Sony's E3 2006 press conference?)

Ozzuneoj wrote on Yesterday, 06:07:

Holy smokes, so are you saying you were using a Virge DX and a Pentium 233 MMX still in 2005-2006?

(BTW, since you mentioned consoles, I have to ask... is your username a reference to the "Giant enemy crab" line from Sony's E3 2006 press conference?)

Maybe not even 233 MMX. All I can definitively say is at the time my dad bought the PC from his friend (some point between Aug '98 - Feb '99), it had a Pentium ranging from 166 -233 MMX. At least 32MB SDR. Virge DX/GX. ALS120. HDD was probably between 1.x - 2 GB. Whatever the config was, I don't think it was upgraded at all over its life. Sometime in the early 2000s my dad tried to upgrade the RAM, but he said it didn't work or didn't fit. A different family friend also came to fix it in 2000-2001, although I think it was just a Windows problem. He's the only one who would have known how to upgrade it, but I don't think he did.

There's a whole story I could tell about my quest to identify that PC, I will probably make a thread about it with all the twists and turns at some point.

(And yes, my username is a reference to that 😉)