RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2026-01-17, 09:34:

There are some DOS games like screamer 2 (in hi-colour, high res mode) and System Shock (at 640 x 480) that would most likely run poorly even on your K6-3. But, I think they are an exceptional case. Most DOS games will run fine, and these will too at lower settings

As promised, I gave system shock a try (the enhanced CD version) and it runs Great!! I had to put the mouse look patch on to make it playable. Man the standard controls are aweful! But the patch also offers other screen modes. Even 800x600 is playable. I am running it at 640x400 as this is perfect for my 16:10 1920x1200 display

I have been experimenting with slowing the system down too with k6init. For those buggy old adventure games, disabling the L1 cache seems to let me play day of the tentacle, monkey island etc using Roland emulation through the AWE64. I had already tried this with the Pentium but was unsure it would still work on the k6, day of the tentacle is notoriously problematic apparently. One game ive been wanting to try is LooM. I’ll try and install that tomorrow.

I finally closed the lid on this system today. I declare it finished.

The question remains. What do I do with the two Athlon builds?

FullYes wrote on 2026-01-30, 22:55:

As promised, I gave system shock a try (the enhanced CD version) and it runs Great!! I had to put the mouse look patch on to make it playable. Man the standard controls are aweful! But the patch also offers other screen modes. Even 800x600 is playable. I am running it at 640x400 as this is perfect for my 16:10 1920x1200 display

I have been experimenting with slowing the system down too with k6init. For those buggy old adventure games, disabling the L1 cache seems to let me play day of the tentacle, monkey island etc using Roland emulation through the AWE64. I had already tried this with the Pentium but was unsure it would still work on the k6, day of the tentacle is notoriously problematic apparently. One game ive been wanting to try is LooM. I’ll try and install that tomorrow.

I finally closed the lid on this system today. I declare it finished.

That's great. I hope it gives you many years of enjoyment

FullYes wrote on 2026-01-30, 22:55:

The question remains. What do I do with the two Athlon builds?

If you are happy with DOS performance on this machine then I guess you don't need DOS compatability on the athlon system. So maybe use the later board and keep it as Win98 only.

I have lost track of that your system configurations are now. Is it K6-3, with Voodoo 2000 and Athlon 3000+ with 5900XT?

You remember correctly!

Got two full Athlon systems effectively, and I’m thinking of doing as you say - build a system around the 3000+ using the DDR board I originally just bought just for the FX5900XT

I’m curious how it will behave in DOS using the Audigy. I don’t remember having much success with PCI sound cards in dos back in the day, but I think it’s down to the motherboard/chipset how well it works (or doesn’t). The Athlon XP setup I had in period was nforce2-based. I saw on here that nvidia chipsets don’t have good legacy support.

I need to revert the KT133A board back to standard so I can (probably) sell it. I have a pile of bits to go with it. Including an FX5200 which I bought as a backup. Doesn’t work in the DDR system but works perfectly in the kt133A 🤷🏼‍♂️

If it were me, I'd keep the parts somewhere as spares. These retro parts are only going to get more rare and expensive and, being old, could die at any time.

I just have too many spares and complete systems and not enough space. If I had to get down to one retro system, I believe I would choose the socket 7. So i will prioritise spares for that. I’ll keep at least one spare video and sound card for each system. I have much more at the moment!

I fired up the Athlon system today. It’s currently still usinf the KT133A motherboard modded to run with the 3000+ in, clocked at 2266MHz (17x133) it posted straight away, but for some reason no video in windows. I’ve changed my monitor since I last ran this machine, and whatever mode mustn’t have been compatible. After much faffing with drivers, it’s now up and running

I decided to do some of (Phil’s) benchmarks to see how the dos performance is on such a machine

Quake320 - 322fps
Quake640 - 37.6fps
Doom -94.9fps (787 ticks)
Chris’3d-320 - 707fps
Chris’3d-640 - 132fps
PCPlayer-320 - 550fps
PCPlayer-640 - 63.3fps

Interesting that there’s such a big drop going up in resolution. Univbe isn’t supported on the 5900 as it’s already vbe3.0 (same as the voodoo3) I was looking for somthig else to try, like a k6init type program for the k7 - i could not find anything in searches, but I realised it’s right there in Phil’s benchmark pack - MTRRLFBE

Enabling this gave me much better results

Quake-640 - 121.4fps
Chris’3d-640 - 452fps
PCPlayer-640 - 246.2 fps

So about a 3-4x improvement

Don’t know why doom is so slow?? It’s slower than the Pentium MMX clocked 10x slower

I’ve been running this system pretty much all day at 2266MHz. Perhaps I was too hasty to abandon the platform?

No, the more dos games I’m playing, the more it feels wrong using this machine for them.

I’m also seeing some random file corruption here and there. Nothing major, but the odd piece of software or dos driver no longer works correctly or performs an illegal operation. Perhaps a side effect of the overclocked state, or something the via 686B South bridge was renowned for?

Time to make a Change. Pulled the 3000+ from the Soltek SL75-KAV kt133A and dropped it into the A7V333 which has been sat on the shelf since I stripped the case it was in

Up and running straight away. The BIOS reports a CPU multiplier of 5x and a clock speed of 1000MHz. Oh dear. Oh wait, it’s just some BIOS bug, the CPU is correctly identified on the POST screen (the first boot, the screen was obscured by a full screen logo) as a 3000+ and is running at its correct stock speed of 2166MHz. time for a couple of benchmarks

Some interesting results. All of the dos benchmarks are faster at 320x200 and slower at 640x480 than they were using the KT133A. MTRRLFBE no longer has any impact on performance on this board it would seem.

Quake320 - 369fps
Quake640 - 123.2fps
Doom -101.34fps (737 ticks)
Chris’3d-320 - 781fps
Chris’3d-640 - 391.5fps
PCPlayer-320 - 581fps
PCPlayer-640 - 200.3fps

Quite a big swing in some results. Quake at 320 is ~15% faster while PCPlayer 640 is ~20% slower. Doom is still weirdly slow.

I had not reported previously but I did have some speedsys results to compare. The KT133A had a memory score of 539MB/s while the A7v333 has a score of 863MB/s - I expected a much higher memory score here. Perhaps the via chipset doesn’t have great DDR performance, it was still fairly new at the time. I need to test more ram configurations and timings. As far as I can tell it’s pushing the ram already on the timings (2-2-2-5). This may be why I was having trouble getting this system to post with most of the DDR RAM sticks I have

I’ve been playing around with the Athlon some more. The 3000+ seems to be working without any stability issues on the A7V333. I did see some higher temperatures with this CPU in this board compared to when it was in the SOLTEK. So I’ve ended up putting a high rpm socket 370 fan on it and put the noctua fan on the socket 7. Doing so dropped the temps about 10 degrees, but at a high cost in terms of noise. The socket 7 is whisper quiet now though! I had bought the socket 370 cooler and fan when I got the k6-3, but the K6-3 barely gets warm.

I think this board doesn’t support high multipliers, but there is a workaround of some sort to allow the 3000+ to run at the correct frequency, 5=13 when the 5th multiplier pin pulled high. 13 being the correct multiplier for this CPU

What I fancied doing is increasing the FSB on a lower multi, just to see what this board is capable of. But I cannot set a multiplier lower than 5x (13x)

Somewhat ironic that I have the opposite problem in this motherboard!

I have some comparisons for you

With the Soltek board running at 17 x 133; 2266MHz (actual speed ~2275MHz)

3dm99: 14608 GPU, 33904 CPU -> the max I could get on this board was around 15000 / 35000 respectively

With the A7V333 board running at 13 x 166; 2166MHz

3dm99: 17690 GPU, 40083 CPU

And tweaked a little to get the same clock as the Soltek; 13 x 175MHz

3dm99: 18400 GPU, 42000 CPU (I forgot to write the CPU result down, but it was over 42000)

So in this benchmark just upping the FSB and swapping to DDR has increased performance by more than 20%

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I also have an XP machine. I am selling a 980 TI, but thought it would be funny to try it in this machine before it goes

I had some trouble fitting it in the case 😇

The two fast SATA Ports are right under the GPU as well. Managed to find some angled ones in my box of wires

Wasn’t sure if the PSU would be up to the job but it didn’t complain

Couple of benchmarks. 3dmark99 took some messing to get it going

This 2600k is stock and a few years older than the GPU. Not sure if these scores are any better than my GTX 460 (I’ll need to re-test!)

Not much happening with the other machines. I did have an issue with the socket 7. After playing unreal for an hour the other day, The screen went black. Took the lid off and both the CPU cooler and GPU voltage regulator felt quite toasty. I decided to wire the noctua cpu fan directly to the PSU rather than from the motherboard to see if that increased the RPMs, as it seemed to be turning quite slowly. I also swapped the PSU out for a more powerful Antec one. Running the machine again for a couple of hours with prime95 and unreal menu screen running didn’t create any more crashes, but I’ll need to keep an eye on it

Too many things to update in this thread. I’ve been having a bit of a clear out. Still not sold the 980 TI or the KT133A. This week I was given an AM3+ setup by my brother containing a Phenom II X6 1075T with some nice 1866MHz DDR3 RAM installed (that the Phenom can’t even make use of unless you overclock it) so I’ve nicked this for the 2600k. A quick test with the new ram, using the GTX460. I also increased the CPU multiplier to 42

A nice 80fps bump there!

Anyway this has become a tangent of a tangent and it’s really time I was back messing with more retro hardware

I wanted to play Mobil 1 rally championship / rally championship 2000. I remember having the demo and playing it over and over to try and get the best time. Me and a friend of mine became a bit obsessed with it. Anyway the PC of choice for this was the Athlon, though the K6-3 would moreorless meet the hardware requirements, I want to run it at 1600 x 1200

Well I still hadn’t gotten around to truly finishing off the final Athlon PC build. Apart from not being able to find a working black fronted floppy drive, I had not gotten around to setting up a sound card on this motherboard. I was planning to use the Audigy because it’s there and it came with this A7V333 that I’m using. So it must work, right?

Nope

The card does not show up in the PCI devices listing during the boot screen, but it is recognised in windows and all drivers install. I just get no sound. The device manager says I need to use the bios to give the device an IRQ. The bios does have an option for this, but no matter which slot I use and which irq I set, I get the same result.

Today i tried the Audigy in a windows XP test bench I have set up at the moment on (yet another) AM3 motherboard ive been using to test old PCI-E GPUs. And it WORKS on that. I need to try it in another win98 machine to see if it’s just a board-specific issue. (Audigy/Live and VIA chipsets don’t always get along, I know) But I don’t get why the card was installed in the original a7v333 machine I bought if it didn’t work. It’s all very strange!

No progress on the Athlon today. I decided to install rally champ on the socket 7 to see how well it would run. It ran…Ok. Not great though. A lot of low FPS situations. Also, a few crashes to desktop. The crashes seem to be related to the overclock. Run at 400MHz and all is well. So it’s back to stock configuration after lots of overclocking. Probably for the best!!

This is definitely a game for the athlon, so I will come back to this one

I then spent a few hours playing system shock on the socket 7 instead. Thanks for the suggestion @RetroPCCupboard I am really enjoying this one!

Yep, System Shock is a great game!

This week I've been messing with the socket AM3+ system with the phenom CPU. I was hoping to sell it on since I don't need another late XP machine, to help fund other projects!

The motherboard is a GA-970A-UDP3. I've installed 12Gb RAM (2 x 2GB + 2 x 4Gb) Corsair XMS DDR3-1600 RAM (6Gb per channel) I've run this configuration in the i7 for a few years (before it went XP), and I think before that it was in another phenom X6 setup. I know the RAM is good.

It started out OK, I installed windows 10 and ran a few benchmarks and stability tests. the GPU I'm using is a quadro 600, this GPU for some reason won't work in my other AM3 motherboard but seems to work fine in this one.

I then took this ram out to test some other ram - a 4 x 4GB corsair 1866MHz kit, it won't fit in the i7 as the heatspreader is too tall and catches the CPU fan in the first memory slot. I had never tried it in another system before.

The machine would not boot, I Assume some of the ram is faulty. Eventually I get it to POST with 2 sticks, but then a horrendous noise starts coming from the PC speaker and the screen displays the dualbios backup utility and flashes the bios from the backup to the main bios. All the while there is this horrendous sound coming from the pc speaker. I end up unplugging the speaker. Around this time the system seems to hang with the flash only 34% complete.

I reboot, leaving the speaker unplugged. The bios backup process restarts, completes and the machine boots. I go into the bios and then turn it off.

I try plugging the speaker back in. It still makes the noise when the machine is powered. Even now the bios is working. I try pulling the battery. This solves the issue.

I try booting into windows, but it hangs during loading. after more restarts. The bios says its corrupted again (And I get the horrendous noise from the PC speaker again)

I try reverting to the 1600MHz kit, but the same issue. Hangs during windows loading process and the bios corrupts after few crashes.**

**What I discovered is the bios isn't corrupted. If I pull the battery at this point, The BIOS seems to be functioning again when power is restored.

I did eventually get the machine to boot into windows, but after a few minutes the computer either completely locks up or resets. I have tried using a different HDD (originally I was using a 120Gb SSD that came with the system, then I switched to a 500Gb Mechanical) and a few different SATA cables, reinstalled windows, no change.

Had the CPU out, all the ram out multiple times, tried different CPU coolers, Bios revisions. Ram configurations, but it keeps misbehaving.

I have seen a few threads online about people having problems with the dualbios backup, one person seemed to believe it was hard drive related, but I think I've ruled this out.

I have tried flashing the bios to the latest version, it was running the latest version when it corrupted the first time, the backup is the initial bios release, so every time it "restores" the bios, I then have to reflash the new version. I am wondering how many flash cycles the bios will tolerate, and if it's previous owner had similar issues with it. Perhaps the bios chip itself is toast.

I plan on trying another flash of the latest bios over the top of the current flash to see if that helps. Or perhaps I need to run a different utility other than the built-in one?

One other thing. If I boot into Memtest 86 - I can test the RAM and it will run for the full test (which takes 7-8hours!) without any errors or crashes, but booting into Windows will almost always fail.

After a few more days messing with it here and there, I think I’m close to figuring it out

The default bios settings for the RAM seem to put the RAM on Command Rate 1T when it seems to be preferable to run 4 sticks with Command Rate 2T

I got the computer back into windows and running some tests. 4 sticks 12Gb and 2T, I rebooted the system after installing some software and then it wouldn’t boot again. After a couple more attempts at booting it went back to “bios is corrupted mode” as described above. I now know to just turn it off when this happens and pull the cmos battery for a bit

I took 2 sticks out - now running just the 2 x 4Gb and after restoring the CMOS settings it booted into windows. It’s been fine since. Run multiple tests and not had any errors, crashes or lockups. Tried a few restarts and power cycles and all seems good

So I guess this setup doesn’t like this RAM config. It is unusual I suppose, but it doesn’t explain how it worked at first.

I think it’s best I leave this alone while it is working, and concentrate on more retro pursuits!!

Weird issues for sure! I have parts to build a Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition system. Hope I don't get similar issues! Not sure what GPU to put in it yet.