mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-06-24, 06:05:

For a pentium MMX there really isn't any reason to go faster than a single voodoo 2. From what I remember the Voodoo 2 is fully featured for DirectX 6 and compatible with directx 7, which is well beyond anything you would want to play on a socket 7 PC anyway. I would pair it with a S3 virge DX or something similar and focus on DOS.

My only concern with a S3 Virge DX is that I recall them being blurrier than modern graphics cards for 2D stuff.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-06-24, 06:09:

speeddemon wrote on 2021-06-24, 06:04:

I think Phil was saying in this video that you can actually use the 45.23 drivers with the FX 5500. Does that change your opinion?

No. The 45.23 drivers came out in July of 2003 and are optimized for CPUs that were common at that time. The Pentium MMX was heavily outdated by then.

I also have a TNT2 PCI card. Better?

speeddemon wrote on 2021-06-24, 18:39:

I also have a TNT2 PCI card. Better?

Yup.

Just be sure to use period-correct drivers i.e. something below version 8. A good rule of thumb for choosing old Nvidia drivers is, pick the newest game that you want to play on your system, and then get drivers that were released 6-12 months after that game was published.

speeddemon wrote on 2021-06-24, 18:39:

My only concern with a S3 Virge DX is that I recall them being blurrier than modern graphics cards for 2D stuff.

It depends. I have a power9 S3 Savage4 and the IQ on it is quite good.

I know you ruled it out, but the voodoo 3 really excels at that. The Nvidia FX series is also reliably good.

I'd agree TNT2 is a good match. It'll be the CPU holding back performance now but every system has to have a bottleneck somewhere and for me I like it to be the CPU that defines what game can/can't be played on a system.
The Virge and TNT suffer the same image quality problems. It's not the chips form S3 or Nvidia at fault, rather some companies focused on cost rather then quality.
As long as you get a good brand of either card you should be ok.

I finished putting together the P4 build this weekend and it's running great so far. I had a few issues fitting everything in such a tiny case, but it all worked out in the end.

Here's what I ended up assembling:
- Asus P5P800 (LGA775 Intel 865PE)
- Pentium 4 HT 670 3.8GHz (LGA775 Prescott 2M)
- Nvidia GeForce FX 5950 Ultra (Zalman FS-V7 cooler)
- 2x 3dfx Voodoo2 12MB SLI
- Aureal Vortex 2 8830 (Diamond Monster Sound MX300)
- Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
- Yamaha PCI YMF724F (swapping with a Voodoo2 when I want to play an OPL3 game)
- 512MB DDR400 CL2 Dual-channel RAM
- Cooler Master Elite 361 case
- Seasonic GX-650 power supply
- 3x Noctua 80mm front/back case fans (NF-A8 FLX)
- 1x Noctua 120mm x 15mm slim top case fan (NF-A12x15 FLX)
- 1x ‎Cooler Master 80mm x 10mm slim side case fan (R4-SPS-20AK-GP)
- Zalman CNPS7700-CU CPU cooler
- Roland SC-88 synth
- LaCie Electron 22blue IV CRT
- SATA SSD for storage
- IDE Plextor PX-760A DVD±RW drive
- Gotek SFR1M44-U100 floppy emulator

I wish I had another one of these same CM Elite 361 cases for my Socket 7 build since they're the perfect small size for a computer that you often need to store.

yep thas is one full case!
Will be interesting to see how you find 9x gaming on this vs the MMX once it's up and running.
Do make sure you turn on anti aliasing, and all the other options in the graphics card drivers, it's one of the big benefits of going with this overkill hardware

chinny22 wrote on 2021-06-28, 10:20:

yep thas is one full case!
Will be interesting to see how you find 9x gaming on this vs the MMX once it's up and running.
Do make sure you turn on anti aliasing, and all the other options in the graphics card drivers, it's one of the big benefits of going with this overkill hardware

It was easy to talk me into building a Socket 7 computer since that's what I grew up PC gaming on, but I have a feeling I'll end up using the Pentium 4 box as my primary Windows 98 machine given the majority of games I plan on playing aren't speed sensitive. I'm looking forward to having both computers though!

Looking good! I particularly like the Noctua case fans. Been a happy user of those since 2009 or so. Quiet, but very efficient.

BTW, the soft synth on the YMF724 card sounds exceptional, and a few games such as Final Fantasy VII even support its XG functionality. Be sure to try it out when you get the chance. If you're curious, you can listen to some of my Yamaha XG recordings here and also here. Funny thing is, I actually prefer Yamaha's soft synth to my SC-155 in certain games, such as Descent.

I ended up making a separate post dedicated to this build: P4 HT 670 / Asus P5P800 / FX5950U + V2 SLI / Audigy 2ZS + Vortex2 + X2GS / Win98

The Socket 7 machine is coming together...

For video, I ended up using my PCI Voodoo3 3000 for the sake of simplicity.

For audio, I picked up an Orpheus w/ PCMIDI.

I also switched gears and decided to swap the Pentium MMX out for a K6-III+ running at 500MHz (6x83) and 256MB of PC133 (with L3 cache disabled on the motherboard which I think allows me to now cache the entire 256MB via the K6-III+'s 256KB L2 cache).

I'm now trying to figure out what to do for a case... I was going to install everything in an extra Fractal Define R5 case, but it's kind of a massive case for a computer that's mostly going to sit in storage. Any suggestions for a small Full ATX case? It would be amazing if anyone knows of something as small as my Cooler Master Elite 361 case that I put the Pentium 4 computer in.

Here's my Socket 7 build so far: