CC-Adam wrote on 2025-07-09, 18:30:

Nice! Well done, plus you have given me motivation to dig mine out again soon maybe they're just really fussy with regards to CPU. Hope you get the drive sorted 🤞

What OS are you planning for this build?

Thanks. Fingers crossed for yours also.

This is likely going to be 98Se, though possibly (and sadistically) maybe ME. I’d have used both OSes on my Compaq back in the day.

Thanks I'd pretty much written it off but it was showing similar signs of life as yours! 🤣

Dare I say it I am actually quite a fan of ME now I use it quite regularly on a Tualatin machine (with a similarly basic board with no AGP slot 🤣). It runs really well on there for some reason, blisteringly fast. 95 is my favourite OS but ME is easier sometimes, mainly as USB flash drives behave out of the box I think!

Had to give up on an SSD. Tried three SSDs from 64GB to 128GB, all of them hang on IDE auto detect.

First SATA HDD (160GB) I tried works fine. Would rather avoid spinning rust, but at least it works, though limited to 8GB.

That's a bit odd how these boards would only like 450mHz chips. Maybe the BIOS doesn't support CPUs above 45omHz? Gotta try an 700mHz p3 on my MSI boards and see if they do the same.

kotel wrote on 2025-07-10, 08:01:

That's a bit odd how these boards would only like 450mHz chips. Maybe the BIOS doesn't support CPUs above 45omHz? Gotta try an 700mHz p3 on my MSI boards and see if they do the same.

I don’t see how that would be possible so long as the microcode is the same (i.e. same CPU architecture/stepping).

Unfortunately I only have the three Katmai PIII CPUs. And no Klamath/Deschutes at all, so can’t really test further.

I guess I could try my Coppermines in the board, but I don’t want to build a fast Slot 1 machine, I’ve already got two of those (Tualatin 1.4 in a Powerleap IP3-t in an ASUS P2B-F, and a 1GHz Coppermine in an ABIT BE6-II).

Just for testing you could try the coppermine. Not sure if 440bx even supports Tualatins (not talking about the pinout).

Well, it’s installed and working, but the video performance seems a bit lacklustre.

CPU, memory and disk performance all seem perfectly acceptable for the hardware, but the video performance is terrible.

I’ve installed the GOTY release of Half-Life and whilst it’s too old to support the net_graph command, I don’t need an FPS counter to know that the performance is abysmal.

In direct3d and OpenGL it would appear you are talking in frames per minute rather than frames per second. Software rendering is fine, even up to 1024x768.

I don’t remember the Rage 128 VR being this slow, certainly it was a 3D accelerator not a decelerator like some other cards (cough S3, cough).

I could only find a single driver that actually installed, so I don’t really have any options there, but I seem to recall back in the day that there were ATI minigl drivers? Or am I misremembering that?

Maybe try these for the 128 VR?
https://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid= … 9&menustate=1,0