First post, by tonychen
Hi guys, recently I have fnished my P4 478 build. The specs is listed as follows.
CPU: Northwood 2.8G (FSB-533)
RAM: DDR400 1GB
MOBO: Industry MOBO with ISA slot
Video: FX5900 AGP(128M) + S3 Virge PCI(4M) + On board 845(64M)
Sound: ASL007 + On board Realtek
Network: On board Realtek8169
HDD: Seagate 1TB with 3114 Sata Controller
OS: DOS 7.1 + Windows 3.11 + Windows 98 + Windows XP
For DOS / Windows 3.11:
The main purpose for this machine is for playing dos games. Most of the dos games can run from the beginning to the end. For some games, I just disable L1 & L2 cache tp avoid the runtime error 200 issue. For some games, it needs BIN/CUE ISO format to load, however, under DOS, only the standard ISO format can be loaded, so I leave these games to DOSBOX under Windows 98. One remaining issue is that when I disable L1&L2 cache, I find the speed is down to 33MHZ. So terrible, not too fast and too slow. Maybe a P133 is a good frequency for running dos games.
For Windows 98:
S3 virge's vmem only has 4MB, which seems a little small for running some Windows 98 games. The drvier for FX5900 does not work properly, which maybe results from the video card itself issue. This is not a problem, I can switch to i845 video card when entrying Windows 98. Just do some chores. However, it takes two minutes to entry into the desktop, not knowing why.
For Windows XP:
FX5900 cannot meet the demands for some big games such as DOOM3, which requires Geforce6 if the high quality is desired. For CPU, a single core also seems too limited for some big software such Eclipse, Visual Studio 2008, and the likes. In my opinion, a duo core and PCI-E video card is more suitable for Windows XP, because Windows XP has a long life span and walks through many platfrtom, even the some 775 / 1150 can support it.
Next steps:
I am planning to build my 2nd retro PC with Pen3 on 810 platform or Pen 133 on Socket 7 platform. 810 chip has no ISA slot and some later socket 7 MOBO has AGP slot. But it is difficult to find Windows 3.11 driver for AGP card... Too hard to choose. 🤣