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New guy find "Pentium 3 Slot 1 733"

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First post, by idan182

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I've got this Pentium 3 for 50$.
Next to my 233MMX baby AT machine.

It is a Slot 1 Pentium 3 with 733MHZ
Inter I820 Motherboard (RDRAM?) with 256MB RAM
It has a Voodoo 3 2000 AGP and without a sound card.

In 1999 I had a similar setup, P3 Slot 1 but 500MHZ and also a Voodoo 3 3000 instead of 2000.
I had a PC Partner VIA Apollo 133 motherboard.
How is this motherboard compared to it?

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Now for the questions,
I already have the MMX for DOS and W95 games.
I want this P3 to play 98-2002 games like "Hitman 47, Unreal, Return to castle wolfstein, Half life, Sims, Midtown Madness 2, SOF, GTA SA.
I belive it won't play Far Cry 1 and games after 2002 as I played it when it came out on a 2.6GHZ Athlon + 9600XT graphic card.

I currently have a Voodoo 3 2000 on it.
I have this Geforce 4 MX440 64MB AGP

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Would it suit better for these type of games instead of the Voodoo?

And I need a recommendation for a cheap sound card. I have a generic 2 speakers so I don't need something special.
Should I go for some cheap LIVE/Audigy?

Last edited by idan182 on 2022-05-10, 11:04. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 22, by H3nrik V!

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As far as I can see, there is no Intel 830 chipset, unless it's a mobile chipset. So it would be either i820 or i840 - single/dual channel RD RAM respectively.

If it's dual it's kind of cool ... 😎

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Reply 2 of 22, by idan182

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H3nrik V! wrote on 2022-05-10, 10:29:

As far as I can see, there is no Intel 830 chipset, unless it's a mobile chipset. So it would be either i820 or i840 - single/dual channel RD RAM respectively.

Yes it's i820

Reply 3 of 22, by Con 2 botones

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Nice system!
I would keep the Voodoo3 inside it , feels right/period correct to pair it with that CPU.

Hitman 47, Unreal, Return to Castle wolfstein, Half life, Midtown Madness 2 and SOF will play fine with that configuration.
For GTA SA neither the Voodoo3 nor the MX440 will give you a pleasant experience. You need an Ati 9000 series or at least upper class FX 5000 series for that (besides a more powerful CPU, like Athlon XP or Pentium 4).
Not sure about Sims.

We cannot see a full motherboard picture, looks like a quality Gateway or Compaq board. Is that a slotket what we see there?

Reply 4 of 22, by chinny22

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I guess the Apollo 133 is the better. Intel never really succeeded with pushing RD RAM. Real world performance SD RAM could keep up or even outperform RD Ram based systems so the extra cost was never justified.
These days though where cost/performance isn't rally an issue (just get a faster PC if needed) a RD based system is much more interesting.

I think this system is the next logical step from a MMX Dos/early Win9x PC. Games that suffer on a P3 700 will be coming into WinXP era anyway (GTA SA been one of them)

I would try the Voodoo first as this gives you Glide, still important in Win9x era however all the games you listed a D3D card is more important, in which case the GF4 would be the stronger card.
I think your spot on with the Live/Audigy. Most Win98 games only support EAX3 with is the SBLive! GTA SA being the only exception with EAX4 which would need an Audigy. They also have better snr ratings.

I'll add the original Sims should be fine, We ran that on a P2 400 just fine

Reply 5 of 22, by Cuttoon

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How genuinely "late 90s" would you like that case to look? Turquois power button: YES!
The MMX obviously is an AT system, those towers are so neat in comparison...

50 bucks seems a really good price because of that Voodoo card. The Gf4 could beat the crap out of it in many way, but would be a shame not to use the Voodoo if you own it. Of course, you could also sell it and get pretty much any sound card for that money.

Assuming the Audigy cards are slightly more expensive, don't think they'd make any real difference, so a Live should be fine. Try getting a mainstream retail model, not some obscure OEM one.

Btw., I know it's a matter of practicality, but if you want that hifi speaker to sound any good, you shouldn't box it in like that. 😉

I like jumpers.

Reply 6 of 22, by AlexZ

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Sell Voodoo 3 2000 as it's too slow and get a good GeForce 4 or 5 (5900, 5800 or 5600). Swap CPU for a 1Ghz PIII. With that should should be able to play games released in 2001 and some from 2002.

I tested Unreal, Return to castle wolfstein on my PIII 900 and it runs like a breeze. I believe it should have no trouble handling SIMS.

It can also handle all DOS games and a separate Pentium 233 MMX is unnecessary.

Pentium III 900E, ECS P6BXT-A+, 384MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 128MB, Voodoo 2 12MB, 80GB HDD, Yamaha SM718 ISA, 19" AOC 9GlrA
Athlon 64 3400+, MSI K8T Neo V, 1GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7600GT 512MB, 250GB HDD, Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS

Reply 7 of 22, by Cuttoon

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AlexZ wrote on 2022-05-10, 16:55:

It can also handle all DOS games and a separate Pentium 233 MMX is unnecessary.

Then again, it does not have an ISA slot, and the MMX is a nifty, small AT tower - essential to any household.

I like jumpers.

Reply 8 of 22, by Socket3

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idan182 wrote on 2022-05-10, 07:38:

Now for the questions,
I already have the MMX for DOS and W95 games.
I want this P3 to play 98-2002 games like "Hitman 47, Unreal, Return to castle wolfstein, Half life, Sims, Midtown Madness 2, SOF, GTA SA.

Return to castle wolfstein, Midtown Madness 2, GTA SA require a faster system. A p3 won't really cut it for those games regardless of what video card you put in it - unless you like stuttering and very low FPS. For those games you'll want a late socket A or 478 PC with a radeon 9600 / FX 5700 for Midtown Madness 2 / RTCW and a 6600GT or 9800XT for GTA SA. GTA SA in particullar is either a poor port or has high system requirements for the time. So did Vice city, as I remember I wasn't happy how it ran on my 1700+ / Radeon 7500 64MB back in the day.

idan182 wrote on 2022-05-10, 07:38:

I currently have a Voodoo 3 2000 on it.
I have this Geforce 4 MX440 64MB AGP

Would it suit better for these type of games instead of the Voodoo?

I'd stick with the Voodoo 3. Yeah, the MX440 is faster, about the same speed as a Geforce 2 GTS, but the Voodoo 3 has Glide support and will let you run games that you won't be able to run on your pentium MMX. You could go with the MX440, but the only incentive to do so would be playing at slightly higher resolutions.

A 733MHz P3 targets the 1996-early 1999 era of 3D games, witch includes all glide games apart from those that require a voodoo 1 specifically (pandemonium, uprising - although there are patches for these to get them to work with vooodoo 2 / voodoo 3). Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2, Homeworld, Homeworld Cataclysm, Half Life, Quake 2, Kingpin, MDK2, Uprising 2, Ureal, Shogo, Unreal Tournament, Blood 2, Hexen 2, Heretic 2, Tomb Raider II, Carmageddon 2 - these are a few games that will not run or run poorly on a pentium MMX but will run great on a pentium 3 + voodoo 3 (or geforce 4MX) - and it also happens to be my favorite period for video games. If you wanna play any of these the PC is good as it is.

If you want to play the ones you listed buy a fast socket A / 478 or even a LGA 775 with intel i865 chipset (important for win98) / socket 754/939 with a VIA chipset.

Reply 9 of 22, by AlexZ

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Socket3 wrote on 2022-05-12, 14:09:

Return to castle wolfstein, Midtown Madness 2, GTA SA require a faster system. A p3 won't really cut it for those games regardless of what video card you put in it - unless you like stuttering and very low FPS. For those games you'll want a late socket A or 478 PC with a radeon 9600 / FX 5700 for Midtown Madness 2 / RTCW and a 6600GT or 9800XT for GTA SA. GTA SA in particullar is either a poor port or has high system requirements for the time. So did Vice city, as I remember I wasn't happy how it ran on my 1700+ / Radeon 7500 64MB back in the day.

I have Return to Castle Wolfstein installed on my PIII 900 and it runs great. No stuttering at all. I also tested Soldier of Fortune and Midtown Madness 2. Soldier of Fortune runs smooth as well while Midtown Madness 2 requires very minor decrease of details due to poor game engine. Midtown Madness 2 is such a poor game it isn't worth the time anyway. A fast PIII is definitely sufficient for year 2000 games and some games released in 2001. At the same time I'm able to play DOS games as my rig has an ISA sound card.

Pentium III 900E, ECS P6BXT-A+, 384MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 128MB, Voodoo 2 12MB, 80GB HDD, Yamaha SM718 ISA, 19" AOC 9GlrA
Athlon 64 3400+, MSI K8T Neo V, 1GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7600GT 512MB, 250GB HDD, Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS

Reply 10 of 22, by Socket3

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AlexZ wrote on 2022-05-12, 16:36:
Socket3 wrote on 2022-05-12, 14:09:

Return to castle wolfstein, Midtown Madness 2, GTA SA require a faster system. A p3 won't really cut it for those games regardless of what video card you put in it - unless you like stuttering and very low FPS. For those games you'll want a late socket A or 478 PC with a radeon 9600 / FX 5700 for Midtown Madness 2 / RTCW and a 6600GT or 9800XT for GTA SA. GTA SA in particullar is either a poor port or has high system requirements for the time. So did Vice city, as I remember I wasn't happy how it ran on my 1700+ / Radeon 7500 64MB back in the day.

I have Return to Castle Wolfstein installed on my PIII 900 and it runs great. No stuttering at all. I also tested Soldier of Fortune and Midtown Madness 2. Soldier of Fortune runs smooth as well while Midtown Madness 2 requires very minor decrease of details due to poor game engine. Midtown Madness 2 is such a poor game it isn't worth the time anyway. A fast PIII is definitely sufficient for year 2000 games and some games released in 2001. At the same time I'm able to play DOS games as my rig has an ISA sound card.

I tried all the above except for SOF on my tualatin build (1.4Ghz P3-S / Abit ST6 / Asus GF4 Ti 4600) and while they were indeed quite playable, I didn't find the experienced enjoyable - then again I want butter smooth constant 60fps and like to max out resolution and details. Even at 1280x1024 RTCW sometimes stutters during combat with several enemies, either when firing a weapon, usually before muzzle flash is displayed or when entering some rooms or playing sound clips. On my 4000+ (single core) / 6800GT AGP the game is perfectly smooth even at 1600x1200....

In essence RTCW should run fine on a P3 since it runs on the Id Tech 3 engine same as Quake 3 but I'm not happy with the performance on socket 370 and early socket A machines - then again don't mind me, I can get really snobby about these things... RTCW should in theory run quite well on a P3 PC, provided it has enough graphics muscle.

As for SoF, I played that on an earlier build, a 1GHz P3 (fsb 133 socket 370) with a GeForce 3 Ti 500 and it ran great even maxed out.

Reply 11 of 22, by AlexZ

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Anything above 30fps is enjoyable to me. Less than 20fps is unplayable. I checked out Sims and it also runs fine on my PIII.

I find my Voodoo 2 utterly useless as I don't play games that support 3Dfx only. Game graphics of that era is poor anyway and there is usually a later installment of the game with better graphics from 1999-2001 which runs fine using Direct 3D (e.g Moto Racer 1/2 vs Moto Racer 3).

Pentium III 900E, ECS P6BXT-A+, 384MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 128MB, Voodoo 2 12MB, 80GB HDD, Yamaha SM718 ISA, 19" AOC 9GlrA
Athlon 64 3400+, MSI K8T Neo V, 1GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7600GT 512MB, 250GB HDD, Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS

Reply 12 of 22, by idan182

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I have switched the voodoo 3 with Geforce 4 MX 440 64mb
System runs great on W98,
Return to Castle Wolfstein runs awesome and fast, hitman 47 plays fast too. Midtown Madness 2 is also very fast.
I even put Counter strike 1.6 + Half life on it and it runs great too.

What are the game limits for this P3 733?
Back in 2004 I had, AMD 2600+ with a 9600XT ATI. it played doom, far cry, half life 2, need for speed underground1/2
Can I install any of those games on this machine? do they support W98 or should I dual boot to XP?
What happens if I upgrade the graphic card to something like Geforce 4 TI 4200?

Reply 13 of 22, by dionb

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chinny22 wrote on 2022-05-10, 12:54:

I guess the Apollo 133 is the better. Intel never really succeeded with pushing RD RAM. Real world performance SD RAM could keep up or even outperform RD Ram based systems so the extra cost was never justified.
These days though where cost/performance isn't rally an issue (just get a faster PC if needed) a RD based system is much more interesting.

The ApolloPro133 was a slug of a performer, with features more reminiscent of the old i440BX, like AGP 2x. i820 (and indeed the i440BX) would run rings around it. If you mean the ApolloPro133A, performance is much better and feature-comparable to i820, but still slower in terms of memory access. In fact the i820 was competitive with i440BX in terms of performance, it just didn't actually beat it - and back in the day the price delta was eye-watering.

But... take a look at that paper diagram in the second pic of the motherboard. There's a big square between the CPU slot and the RAM slots - and then another smaller one.

That smaller square is almost certainly the 82805AA Memory Translator Hub (MTH), that let you use cheap SDRAM memory in a modern i820 motherboard. Just two problems:

1) even conceptually, the MTH gave you the lower bandwith of PC100 SDRAM combined with the higher latency of the RDRAM interface, with a bit of extra translation latency added. Memory performance with it was awful.
2) regardless of memory performance, it was unstable as hell. Intel had to do an incredibly expensive recall of i820 boards with MTH and SDRAM, replacing them with i820 boards without MTH and with same amount of RDRAM.

This is an Intel CC820 Cape Cod board that slipped through the net in May 2000. Here's an article about the board - and the pictures match:
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-cape-cod-disaster/

So this board is a curiosity and an abomination, one that Intel tried to make us all forget 22 years ago. And yes, an old Via ApolloPro133 board *would* have been faster than this one, and more stable.

Bottom line: extremely interesting find, but very, very unsuitable for an inexperienced "New guy". It's unstable by design, unsupported since recall and at best it would be outperformed by pretty much anything else you could put the same components on.

Tbh, I'd find someone with more experience who is curious about this oddity and would happily swap it for a more mainstream, reliable option.

Reply 14 of 22, by flupke11

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dionb wrote on 2022-05-18, 14:37:
The ApolloPro133 was a slug of a performer, with features more reminiscent of the old i440BX, like AGP 2x. i820 (and indeed the […]
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chinny22 wrote on 2022-05-10, 12:54:

I guess the Apollo 133 is the better. Intel never really succeeded with pushing RD RAM. Real world performance SD RAM could keep up or even outperform RD Ram based systems so the extra cost was never justified.
These days though where cost/performance isn't rally an issue (just get a faster PC if needed) a RD based system is much more interesting.

The ApolloPro133 was a slug of a performer, with features more reminiscent of the old i440BX, like AGP 2x. i820 (and indeed the i440BX) would run rings around it. If you mean the ApolloPro133A, performance is much better and feature-comparable to i820, but still slower in terms of memory access. In fact the i820 was competitive with i440BX in terms of performance, it just didn't actually beat it - and back in the day the price delta was eye-watering.

But... take a look at that paper diagram in the second pic of the motherboard. There's a big square between the CPU slot and the RAM slots - and then another smaller one.

That smaller square is almost certainly the 82805AA Memory Translator Hub (MTH), that let you use cheap SDRAM memory in a modern i820 motherboard. Just two problems:

1) even conceptually, the MTH gave you the lower bandwith of PC100 SDRAM combined with the higher latency of the RDRAM interface, with a bit of extra translation latency added. Memory performance with it was awful.
2) regardless of memory performance, it was unstable as hell. Intel had to do an incredibly expensive recall of i820 boards with MTH and SDRAM, replacing them with i820 boards without MTH and with same amount of RDRAM.

This is an Intel CC820 Cape Cod board that slipped through the net in May 2000. Here's an article about the board - and the pictures match:
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-cape-cod-disaster/

So this board is a curiosity and an abomination, one that Intel tried to make us all forget 22 years ago. And yes, an old Via ApolloPro133 board *would* have been faster than this one, and more stable.

Bottom line: extremely interesting find, but very, very unsuitable for an inexperienced "New guy". It's unstable by design, unsupported since recall and at best it would be outperformed by pretty much anything else you could put the same components on.

Tbh, I'd find someone with more experience who is curious about this oddity and would happily swap it for a more mainstream, reliable option.

Well spotted! Intel withdrew the CC820 (and asked other manufacturers to do the same with the i820+MTH boards, like the Asus P3C-2000) back in May 2000. I recently purchased a few items, including the cardboard box for the CC820, but it had the VC820 in it (revised board, 2 RDRam slots and no buggy MTH). Not too sure whether I had to be happy for not having that buggy board, or sad, for not having that quirky board 😀.
Intel included a letter in the box (which was clearly sent to Intel and they swapped out the CC820 by a VC820) dated May 17, 2000 :

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At least you got a super stable board, onboard sound and a 128 MB stick of RDRAM + continuity rimm. Sadly, no Tualatin support...

Reply 15 of 22, by idan182

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I have just found out that I have a Socket 370 733MHZ CPU in a Slot 1 adapter.

Does that perform originally like slot 1? I remember having these adapters on celerons.
Does that matter if I find an original slot 1 733mhz and not 370?

Reply 16 of 22, by Tetrium

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idan182 wrote on 2022-06-05, 04:43:

I have just found out that I have a Socket 370 733MHZ CPU in a Slot 1 adapter.

Does that perform originally like slot 1? I remember having these adapters on celerons.
Does that matter if I find an original slot 1 733mhz and not 370?

It should perform exactly like a Slot 1 733MHz Pentium 3 Coppermine.
The slotket can be a useful item btw.

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Reply 17 of 22, by idan182

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Hi all
I managed to get MSI MS-6119 1.1 BX motherboard with Intel 440BX chipset.
is this board better than the Intel CC820 I have now?

I have read that the MSI board is mainly for Pentium 2.
Can I fit the slotket P3 on it?

Reply 18 of 22, by chinny22

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It'll depend on the VRM, below link gives more info
MSI MS 6119 440BX board and coppermine Pentium 3?

BX motherboard is the defacto Slot 1 board, good performance, reliable, great driver support.
but as this is a early revision which looks like you'll need to either spend money to reach 733 or downgrade the CPU I'd stick with your currant setup.

Reply 19 of 22, by idan182

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I have 733CPU on mine with slotket.

This is the chip:

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Will it work?

I see that the 733MHZ P3 is supposed to work on 133FSB 5.5X
The MSI board only supports 66FSB or 100FSB

How do I set it up?