And that's why I only use intel or 3com network cards whenever possible.

I'm happy to see another SMP system being used.

It's unfortunate that you went with XP, I also would of suggested that you should of went with windows 2000. I don't know why people on here seem to think the dual PIII 1ghz is better suited for XP. When a P3 with sse is like the minumum system requirements for XP. You cannot even install XP on a system without SSE. For example just becasue a game lists the minimum system requirements and you can run it on that its not very fun to run it on ultra low settings and still have less than 30 FPS and its like a slide show. That maybe like a bit of a stretch for comparison. 2000 is much more suited to run anything with a P3 dual or not.

I tend to feel anything less than a core duo on XP is total trash and at the time XP was launched P4s were mainsteam not P3s and they still ran XP like a dog. At this time AMD X64 CPUs were launched and they were the 1st cpus to really run XP porperly in my opinion aside from higher end Dual CPU XEON setups.

Warlord wrote:

It's unfortunate that you went with XP, I also would of suggested that you should of went with windows 2000. I don't know why people on here seem to think the dual PIII 1ghz is better suited for XP. When a P3 with sse is like the minumum system requirements for XP. You cannot even install XP on a system without SSE. For example just becasue a game lists the minimum system requirements and you can run it on that its not very fun to run it on ultra low settings and still have less than 30 FPS and its like a slide show. That maybe like a bit of a stretch for comparison. 2000 is much more suited to run anything with a P3 dual or not.

I tend to feel anything less than a core duo on XP is total trash and at the time XP was launched P4s were mainsteam not P3s and they still ran XP like a dog. At this time AMD X64 CPUs were launched and they were the 1st cpus to really run XP porperly in my opinion aside from higher end Dual CPU XEON setups.

I'm going to have to stop you there and say you are literally wrong about EVERYTHING you just said. To wit:

1- XP requires a 233mhz pentium ONE with a minimum of 64mb of ram. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3148 … erating-systems Personal experience has taught me pentium 1-2 are for 98, pentium 2-3 is for 98/2k (with ram), and any late P3 is perfectly adaquite for XP. (again plenty of ram)

2- I dare say I'm the high ranking dual-cpu fanatic here. I would have had a hard time between 2K and XP for this rig, but ONLY for the Voodoo 2 parts. V2's like 98. Alot. If OP wasn't going to use V2's, then XP would be my choice, easily. I would honestly dual boot 98 for them. 2k is better for V2's than XP but only just.

3- XP likes ram. Your feelings that you need something as extreme as c2d for XP is ludacris. I get the feeling you might not have grown up with old computers. 98 was amazing compared to 95 and 3.1, 2000 was also good, but nobody used it outside of schools and large businesses. Xp was amazing for its time.

4- I forgot what I was going to put here, but I think I've made my point clear.

luckybob wrote:

And that's why I only use intel or 3com network cards whenever possible.

I'm happy to see another SMP system being used.

Yep the Intel and 3Com based PCI Lan cards are the best you can get, i have one intel and one 3Com on my 462 and they both are working great. One downside on intel Lan is they are really big heaters and stoves, even if i use the 3Com card the intel ones are heating up, and even with a heatsink they are really toasty....

Also that (seems IBM) Lan seems pretty descent. Also it have small AMD chip....
Too bad AMD did make Lan chips only on the ISA era...

luckybob wrote:

I'm going to have to stop you there and say you are literally wrong about EVERYTHING you just said. To wit: […]
Show full quote

Warlord wrote:

It's unfortunate that you went with XP, I also would of suggested that you should of went with windows 2000. I don't know why people on here seem to think the dual PIII 1ghz is better suited for XP. When a P3 with sse is like the minumum system requirements for XP. You cannot even install XP on a system without SSE. For example just becasue a game lists the minimum system requirements and you can run it on that its not very fun to run it on ultra low settings and still have less than 30 FPS and its like a slide show. That maybe like a bit of a stretch for comparison. 2000 is much more suited to run anything with a P3 dual or not.

I tend to feel anything less than a core duo on XP is total trash and at the time XP was launched P4s were mainsteam not P3s and they still ran XP like a dog. At this time AMD X64 CPUs were launched and they were the 1st cpus to really run XP porperly in my opinion aside from higher end Dual CPU XEON setups.

I'm going to have to stop you there and say you are literally wrong about EVERYTHING you just said. To wit:

1- XP requires a 233mhz pentium ONE with a minimum of 64mb of ram. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3148 … erating-systems Personal experience has taught me pentium 1-2 are for 98, pentium 2-3 is for 98/2k (with ram), and any late P3 is perfectly adaquite for XP. (again plenty of ram)

2- I dare say I'm the high ranking dual-cpu fanatic here. I would have had a hard time between 2K and XP for this rig, but ONLY for the Voodoo 2 parts. V2's like 98. Alot. If OP wasn't going to use V2's, then XP would be my choice, easily. I would honestly dual boot 98 for them. 2k is better for V2's than XP but only just.

3- XP likes ram. Your feelings that you need something as extreme as c2d for XP is ludacris. I get the feeling you might not have grown up with old computers. 98 was amazing compared to 95 and 3.1, 2000 was also good, but nobody used it outside of schools and large businesses. Xp was amazing for its time.

4- I forgot what I was going to put here, but I think I've made my point clear.

The only thing you proved me wrong about was XP only needing a pentium class CPU and not SSE. I think I knew that but must of confused individual programs not running without SSE and the OS itself. None of that matters if you are not using those programs. But litterally everything else you said was just your opinion and opinions don't prove right and wrong only facts do. I don't know about you but I am almost 40 and was working in IT at the age of 19 for a GSA contractor and I ran the computer shop part of the business that, built all of the white boxes and did all of the repairs. This was around 1999.

Using straw man arguments like oh you must not of grew up with computers. Doesn't help prove any points you litterally just make these things up without knowing anything about me. In fact I have a Dual 1ghz P3 that I don't use anymore its a OR840 workstation board in a IBM Mpro and I have had this machine since 2004 . Id be willing to wager I have way more experience with this particular set up than you do having actually owned this. So I can tell you without a 100% doubt having ran 200pro/2000 server, XP, and 2003 server on this computer as well as a couple linux distros that 2000 pro runs the best on the computer. In fact the Computer shipped with NT4.0 and still has the License on it. So actually a dual Piii is more in the realm of NT4.0 if you want to be specific about it. And I guarantee this is a lot faster PIII than the OPs computer. Look up OR840.

So yeah I grew up with old computers, and the idea is always to use the lightest, or even stripped down OS to run them. If I was going to run XP on OPs computer I would have to Nlite the OS and rip everything out of the install CD that wasn't nessecary. Turn all of the bells and wistles off. Disable Themes, Disable almost all of the services. Use classic shell. yada yada yadya. So will XP run on it? Yes is it optimal without having to do all of that to make it snappy and responisve, and to reduce the most amount of overhead on the old CPU and consume the least amount of ram NO! If you want to do all of that its fine. But if you ran windows 2000 you wouldn't have to do all of that, and if you Nlited 2000 it would be even less overhead than a Nlited XP.

As far as your C2D comment. Back in the day like I was saying I was building white box servers and workstations on a daily basis for years. From the early 2000s up until 2008. I experienced all of the technological changes how we went through PIIIs to northwoods, to Cedarmill CPus to Coreduos as well as experienced all of the XEON chips that were based on those various architectures. P4 was garbage and everyone without the wool pulled over their eyes knew it. When AMD 1st launced their Athalon x64s theyy were killing intel in every benchmark. Dual PIII setups like this one here would often kill P4s in certain tasks. We had Pentum M cpus that were the true succesor to Piii but they were not mainstream and were only in laptops and very rarely in servers at the time. It wasn't tell C2D was launched that I feel like we had a true successor to the PIII for the general public. Can you run XP on a low end CPU yes? Does it run like crap? yes.

Radical Vision wrote:

Yep the Intel and 3Com based PCI Lan cards are the best you can get, i have one intel and one 3Com on my 462 and they both are w […]
Show full quote

luckybob wrote:

And that's why I only use intel or 3com network cards whenever possible.

I'm happy to see another SMP system being used.

Yep the Intel and 3Com based PCI Lan cards are the best you can get, i have one intel and one 3Com on my 462 and they both are working great. One downside on intel Lan is they are really big heaters and stoves, even if i use the 3Com card the intel ones are heating up, and even with a heatsink they are really toasty....

Also that (seems IBM) Lan seems pretty descent. Also it have small AMD chip....
Too bad AMD did make Lan chips only on the ISA era...

Untitled5546454.jpg

IMG_20170912_18343176765.jpg

Syskonnect/Marvel cards are fine.

Broadcom cards are great too. In fact Broadcom fabed 3com chips and bought out that part of 3coms business in the early 2000s. The last pure 3com chip with the etherlink II, after that they were rebranded broadcom chips.

To address the original of question of 2k vs xp.

To me XP is just 2k with more bloat and support. On older systems I almost always go 2k for its simplicity.
If all you do is play old games on the system I would defiantly give 2k a try. From a gaming stand point the only thing you lose is capability with a few 9x games. The compatibility mode XP has addresses that wile 2K's compatibility mode is rather lacking.

I want to love 2k, but it seems every system I try it on, it takes so long to boot up compared to XP. Has anyone else had that experience? Typically 2k Pro SP4 compared to XP SP2 or SP3. Maybe it just feels longer because of the multiple loading screens...

I love Win2k. It was my favorite version of Windows, and disregarding the realities of newer software support, it still is.

However, WinXP isn't much different and has much more support. For that reason alone I prefer XP for most systems nowadays. If I run Win2k then I will inevitably run into random things that I'd like to run, but can't.

You can disable most of the bloat that WinXP has over 2000. In that configuration XP still uses more RAM, but the difference isn't a big deal for most systems with the amounts of RAM we can easily get nowadays, and that definitely includes the system in this thread. In terms of CPU usage, I don't see a difference. *Maybe* de-bloated XP still has more background activity (not sure), but if it does, that won't be significant with a system like this one.

I have still preferred Win2k for builds that are more focused in their application, and which are limited to 512MB or less, but that's not the case here. You have plenty of RAM and it's not unlikely you'll want to run something that requires XP at some point.

The only reason I question the choice of XP is if Win2k has advantages for the 3dfx cards. I have almost no experience with those so I don't know.
Unless 3dfx is a reason, then I wouldn't bother dual booting 2000 and XP. Win98 and XP would be more useful.

CapnCrunch53 wrote:

I want to love 2k, but it seems every system I try it on, it takes so long to boot up compared to XP. Has anyone else had that experience? Typically 2k Pro SP4 compared to XP SP2 or SP3. Maybe it just feels longer because of the multiple loading screens...

2000 does take longer to boot. It never really bothered me though. Okay, maybe a little on my laptop.

The PC I used the most with Win2k was an obscure HP dual slot-2 workstation which has the slowest POST process in the history of (desktop) computers. It took at least 5 minutes for that computer to boot. Even with something that bad, it was only occasionally annoying. In general it would either boot on a timer or while I was leaving the room to do something else.
Since that OS was so reliable and that computer was built to survive a war, it only needed to boot once. 😀

@Radical Vision
I feel it necessary to point out, that card in the image is NOT ETHERNET. It is Token ring. Please don't plug that into a ethernet hub or things might break. Also that amd chip is just a eprom, It holds the network boot code for that card. People seem to have a hard time with amd being a general chip manufacturer before they got into video cards.

Now to get back to warlord...

Warlord wrote:

The only thing you proved me wrong about was XP only needing a pentium class CPU and not SSE. I think I knew that but must of confused individual programs not running without SSE and the OS itself. None of that matters if you are not using those programs. But literally everything else you said was just your opinion and opinions don't prove right and wrong only facts do. I don't know about you but I am almost 40 and was working in IT at the age of 19 for a GSA contractor and I ran the computer shop part of the business that, built all of the white boxes and did all of the repairs. This was around 1999.

Reminds me of this: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/navy-seal-copypasta

Warlord wrote:

Using straw man arguments like oh you must not of grew up with computers. Doesn't help prove any points you literally just make these things up without knowing anything about me. In fact I have a Dual 1ghz P3 that I don't use anymore its a OR840 workstation board in a IBM Mpro and I have had this machine since 2004 . Id be willing to wager I have way more experience with this particular set up than you do having actually owned this. So I can tell you without a 100% doubt having ran 200pro/2000 server, XP, and 2003 server on this computer as well as a couple linux distros that 2000 pro runs the best on the computer. In fact the Computer shipped with NT4.0 and still has the License on it. So actually a dual Piii is more in the realm of NT4.0 if you want to be specific about it. And I guarantee this is a lot faster PIII than the OPs computer. Look up OR840.

Actually I was using to illustrate how people who did not grow up with old systems have incorrect judgments regarding "speed". There is no way for me to know if the new guy is 16 or 40 nor how much actual experience they have. I usually just assume new people are inexperienced and typically young. Speaking of inexperience, you don't yet have experience with me. I was not being facetious when I said, "I'm the high ranking dual-cpu fanatic here". You tout having used an OR840 and I should "look it up". Well thats just great. I own three. I used a dual slot-2 (XG-DLS) as a home built router for years. It will be replaced by a dual tualatin.(TRL-DLS) The system I'm typing this on is a dual 771 (X7DCA-L). My home nas box was a dual 604 xeon (X8DA8-G2), but was replaced by a dual 1366 (X8DTL-iF). I have dual everything from socket 5 to 2011.

Warlord wrote:

So yeah I grew up with old computers, and the idea is always to use the lightest, or even stripped down OS to run them. If I was going to run XP on OPs computer I would have to Nlite the OS and rip everything out of the install CD that wasn't necessary. Turn all of the bells and whistles off. Disable Themes, Disable almost all of the services. Use classic shell. yada yada yadya. So will XP run on it? Yes is it optimal without having to do all of that to make it snappy and responsive, and to reduce the most amount of overhead on the old CPU and consume the least amount of ram NO! If you want to do all of that its fine. But if you ran windows 2000 you wouldn't have to do all of that, and if you Nlited 2000 it would be even less overhead than a Nlited XP.

I can agree with that to an extent. But compared to 2k, xp is just better in most cases. Drivers are more mature (usually), USB is better supported, the UI is easier to work with. I could go on. But honestly, how much effort do you put into a system to pare it down, rather than just using it? Sake of argument, if XP is 10% slower to boot than 2k, Is it really worth the effort to optimize this? Back when these systems were new, the answer is hell yes! but now? hell no.

Warlord wrote:

As far as your C2D comment. Back in the day like I was saying I was building white box servers and workstations on a daily basis for years. From the early 2000s up until 2008. I experienced all of the technological changes how we went through PIIIs to northwoods, to Cedarmill CPus to Coreduos as well as experienced all of the XEON chips that were based on those various architectures. P4 was garbage and everyone without the wool pulled over their eyes knew it. When AMD 1st launched their Athalon x64s they were killing intel in every benchmark. Dual PIII setups like this one here would often kill P4s in certain tasks. We had Pentum M cpus that were the true successor to Piii but they were not mainstream and were only in laptops and very rarely in servers at the time. It wasn't until C2D was launched that I feel like we had a true successor to the PIII for the general public. Can you run XP on a low end CPU yes? Does it run like crap? yes.

As someone who owned 2 P4 systems when they were new, your statements have a grain of truth, but are misguided to say the least. I also had AMD prior to that and I can confirm, AMD certainly were better VALUE. 423 P4's were horrible value, and the bad decision to use rd-ram compounded this. The first generation Opties were amazing and trounced P4, no contest. The EE chips were an expensive stopgap to this and failed. Amd was crushed by C2D and has yet to recover. When I read what you type, it sounds like jealous fanboy whining. I get the impression you wish you had the money for a P4 but couldn't afford to keep up with your friends, and it just comes across as petty cynicism.

As for XP running like crap, get bent. XP just needs a quick hard drive and plenty of ram. Something that is easy to remedy today. Fill the motherboard with ram, drop in a quick sata drive and xp will fly, and will be less hassle than 2000.

luckybob wrote:

@Radical Vision
I feel it necessary to point out, that card in the image is NOT ETHERNET. It is Token ring. Please don't plug that into a ethernet hub or things might break. Also that amd chip is just a eprom, It holds the network boot code for that card. People seem to have a hard time with amd being a general chip manufacturer before they got into video cards.

To me it looks like Lan card but whatever..
I don`t have hard time with AMD, after all is known fact AMD before CPU manufacturer was of all other stuff, and small components from there is the name Advanced Micro Devices. I have also AMD ISA Lan card, too bad there is not AMD PCI lan card. back on the ISA card days, AMD did have chips on video cards, audio cards, lan cards..

well my point was, people seem to point it out like its some sort of magical thing.

luckybob wrote:

As someone who owned 2 P4 systems when they were new, your statements have a grain of truth, but are misguided to say the least. I also had AMD prior to that and I can confirm, AMD certainly were better VALUE. 423 P4's were horrible value, and the bad decision to use rd-ram compounded this. The first generation Opties were amazing and trounced P4, no contest. The EE chips were an expensive stopgap to this and failed. Amd was crushed by C2D and has yet to recover. When I read what you type, it sounds like jealous fanboy whining. I get the impression you wish you had the money for a P4 but couldn't afford to keep up with your friends, and it just comes across as petty cynicism.

wow you owned 2 P4 systems? I builded average ten P4 systems a week and somtimes 20 a day during its heyday. What do you know about netburst architecture, bad branch prediction compounded with long stage pipelines that got longer every chip refresh until finally settling at 31 stanges. What do you know about moores law and severe heat problems caused by ramping up clock speeds to sell poorly designed CPUs to idiots who only look at clock speeds as a performance indicator. I am glad that you kept your P4s it was something that I toss in the dumpster whenever i find them.

Before core duo there was dual Pentium M do you won one of these? You said you own every kind of dual CPU set up? Dual socket 479...

Xp is better than windows 2k and more mature that's true, but on a old P3 maturity doesn't matter. For the sake of argument all of the driver compatibility and maturity XP has really does nothing for a dual socket P3 running on old hardware like V2s. Especially on a system you have no plan of doing anything except running old games. as far as application compatibility mode that XP has windows 2000 Sp2 has that also just run the command "regsvr32 %systemroot%\apppatch\slayerui.dll " and it will enable it. Now you can right click and run in 98 compatibility.

IMO XP really needs more ram yes around 2GB is the sweet spot for XP, but guess what you are not adding 2GB to a lot of P3 motherboards. Windows 2k 1GB of ram runs very well.

such anger! If I cared, I'd offer you a doll so you can tell us where Intel touched you to cause all this misdirected rage. To answer your question, quite a bit. I actually used the systems for gaming on a daily basis. I was deep in world of warcraft then and I would record footage of us on raids (12 hour days). My computer was really the only one capable of recording and playing at the same time (well 3 people out of a roster of 50). Not to mention rendering said video. Having a P4 system was a godsend. My next system incidentally was a dual 604 xeon, still have it too.

So yes, I have quite a lot real world experience actually using these systems, instead of just 'builded' them in a back room for others.

You played WOW 12 hours a day, what IT certs do you have besides playing videos games in your mums basement or real world IT experience for that matter. I don't see this discussion going much further you disguise your onion as facts and you try to disguise the facts I list as my opinion, you have offered nothing to this thread besides come to a set of conclusions that do not apply to the question. Here is an example of your conclusions. XP has better hardware compatibility so it is better than 2k but you disregard the fact the hardware compatibility is not needed yet somhow use that as a justification for a opinion. It's pointless. I know who to avoid here now. its like saying a bottled water is better than tap water and thats why you should water your plants with it. whatever bye.

mcse and A+ but I set my sights higher than that when i got my degree in electrical engineering.

Also, I really dont like onions. Disguised or otherwise.

Ok please take it easy guys, no need to go overboard because of a matter of opinions or experiences. What keeps me coming back here at vogons is the gathering of opinions and experiences, not clashing them.

shamino wrote:

However, WinXP isn't much different and has much more support. For that reason alone I prefer XP for most systems nowadays. If I run Win2k then I will inevitably run into random things that I'd like to run, but can't.

In all honesty you're right, sometimes i like to run somewhat modern software on older hardware just for kicks and XP seems like the best bridge between the old world and modern world of software for a machine like this.

I've ran a few numbers (quick stuff) just to understand a few things about smp and Win98 along with 3dfx cards. Here i'll be showing the results of the Unreal FlyBy in glide at 1024x768 under a few different scenarios:

Win98 : 52,41fps
Win98 with SuperPi also running in the background: 30,25fps

WinXP Single Core: 45,42fps
WinXP Single Core with SuperPi also running in the background: 24,77fps

WinXP SMP: 46,45fps
WinXP SMP with SuperPi also running in the background: 38,87fps

Also a few results on 3Dmark2001:

Win98: 6755
WinXP Single Core: 6576
WinXP SMP: 6776

To be honest i was expecting more from a Geforce 6800 on a dual Pentium 3 system. Maybe this is the limit of the Coppermine architecture under 3Dmark 2001?

Oh, and for Win98 i had to remove 1GB of ram for it to work properly as expected.
Don't forget i said a while ago that i'm using an SSD for the OS, so as far as opening stuff under windows, it feels pretty snappy for now!

AMD offering at that time wile efficient were far slower.