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VIA MVP4 and Voodoo2 SLI stuttering issues..

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First post, by appiah4

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I upgraded my K6-2 from a 430FX to a VIA MVP4 motherboard. K6-2/400 @4.0x100, 128MB RAM, mismatched 12MB Voodoo2s with FastVoodoo drivers. Everything ran fine at first, GLQuake and Quake 2 worked but later I figured benchmarks were off by around 20%. Then I ran 3DMark99 and there was SEVERE stuttering..

It looks to be either a PCI bus BIOS setting issue or a driver issue. I used VIA 4in1 4.35. Is there another version that would be better? Are there any BIOS settings I should check?

Voodoo2s in PCI Slots 1 and 2, maybe I should change slots?

I did not do a clean Win98 reinstall after replacing the Intel board with VIA, maybe a clean install is due?

Reply 1 of 6, by chrismeyer6

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I would definitely do a clean install after a motherboard swap so that all the old drivers will be cleared out

Reply 2 of 6, by appiah4

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The problem here was memory bandwidth, using the onboard VGA caused a severe crippling of the memory bandwidth for the system, installing a discrete video card fixed the issue. I no longer have enough PCI slots for an SLI configuration though, so the system runs on a single Voodoo 2 now

K6-2-MVP4-01.jpg K6-2-MVP4-02.jpg

Reply 3 of 6, by SPBHM

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interesting, I didn't think the IGP would cause such a visible problem in 3dmark, but yes in memory benchmarks and superpi I noticed a large performance drop on the MVp4 when the IGP is enabled, with it off the chipset performs well as expected
a shame about the lack of PCI slots.

Reply 4 of 6, by appiah4

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SPBHM wrote:

interesting, I didn't think the IGP would cause such a visible problem in 3dmark, but yes in memory benchmarks and superpi I noticed a large performance drop on the MVp4 when the IGP is enabled, with it off the chipset performs well as expected
a shame about the lack of PCI slots.

I could replace the NIC with a second Voodoo 2 but then I lose network connectivity which also sucks. This was the best compromise I could think of. Maybe one day I will come across a Voodoo Banshee PCI or Voodoo 3 PCI that will be a better fit for the system and free some PCI slots.

Reply 5 of 6, by SPBHM

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appiah4 wrote:
SPBHM wrote:

interesting, I didn't think the IGP would cause such a visible problem in 3dmark, but yes in memory benchmarks and superpi I noticed a large performance drop on the MVp4 when the IGP is enabled, with it off the chipset performs well as expected
a shame about the lack of PCI slots.

I could replace the NIC with a second Voodoo 2 but then I lose network connectivity which also sucks. This was the best compromise I could think of. Maybe one day I will come across a Voodoo Banshee PCI or Voodoo 3 PCI that will be a better fit for the system and free some PCI slots.

since you are running windows 98 you could probably run a USB ethernet adapter, but it will be slow (1.1 speed) and I'm not sure if it's a good choice in terms of performance overall, but it's an alternative I think

Reply 6 of 6, by appiah4

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It would have too much cpu overhead and knowing Win98’s usb support it would probably be very flaky as well..

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