First post, by st31276a
I remembered Intel’s ridiculous marketing campaign about the SSE instructions of the P3 making your internet faster. Of course this was an absurd claim in the days of 56k modems, but I just experienced some late arriving truth to that statement.
I have this Mendocino 400 system on a GA-6VA with 128 ram and windows 98. I happened to come upon a Katmai 550 out of a Dell GX1, which I promptly tried to install.
Although its funny proprietary heatsink is a little bit too wide and bends the retention clips outwards by about 5 mm at the top, it plugged into the slot and fired right up. I added another 128 ram for good measure, although I doubt this made a huge difference since it was not swapping excessively. However, unreal and ut99 now run very smooth on the voodoo2, where they were rather choppy before. What surprised me the most though, is how much faster browsing has become in firefox 2.0.0.20. When I loaded vogons threads in the past, I could see it rendering the tables on the page, taking about two seconds to complete. Now the threads just snap open as I click on them. Pages witb lots of images can scroll quickly without sticking and stuttering. I was expecting an incremental increase, this is huge! Subjectively this is about a 500% improvement.
The system speed increasing from 66 to 100 MHz plus the extra cache and SSE really plays its part.
The win98 ip stack unfortunately did not hurry up much. I now download at 440 kilobytes per second instead of 420. 3c905B, fast internet, fast site, https with aes256.
I wanted to post this on the system, but the old firefox does not want to connect to Vogons with ssl, so I am tapping this out on my phone.
I’ll figure something out to mount the cpu properly.