Crystal CS4231 sounds straight-up Windows Sound System, often sold in so many budget variations. So it's 'wrong' and it will 'work' in some bad ways like horrid FM balance despite having a true OPL3 chip.

If you really want headaches, why not get a PCI sound card? xD
I guess at those speeds 3d now! (oO) would be fairly useless. Besides, don't some Cyrix processors identify themselves as 486? This could add some interesting compatibility issues with software that test for Pentium or higher.

Only the Cyrix6x86. 686MX doesn't do that iirc afaik

I have pci cards laying around but i still like to use isa for compatibility.

Cyrix could have a problem when a game doesn't detect an intel cpu but the same goes for the winchip and i don't think it will be giving me any troubles in the games that i use.

If you want things go wrong... Install Windows NT then lots of old hardware will refuse to work 🤣

BTW is the Rush worse than a regular Voodoo paired with some crappy Trident VGA with bad VESA support?
Also, if you have it, you can use the great original Waveblaster (or another atroucious MIDI device) to get extra crappy music.
You could also reconsider your "no-Creative" thing and pair the Waveblaster with some SB16 model that is particularly troublesome regarding the hanging note bug.

use the VSYNTH* driver some WSS cards provide as advertised "wavetable support" 🤣

*don't recall if vsynth works under Windows 95

This is an interesting idea for comparison. How bad is the hardware that we tend to lampoon? Are the reasons we choose creative or Intel more insignificant than discussion lead us to believe? Good idea. That Bigfoot drive is going to be painfully sluggish, I sympathize. I have an 8gb model that came out of an IBM OEM.

I'll go out on a limb and suggest the IDT Winchip and Analog Devices AD1846JP combo. See where that takes you 😀

The PC-Chips M590 uses the SIS 5591 chipset with onboard SIS 6326 video.
I think its the same or almost the same chipset as my PC-Chips baby AT Slot 1 bord uses and I have stability issues even at 75 MHz FSB.
The M590 is supposed to be able to handle 90MHz FSB but I have my doubts.

If you want to use PC-Chips I would look for a M577 baby AT board with VIA MVP3 which is solid at 100 MHz FSB and forget about the PC Chips M590.
But since the point was to use stuff nobody else uses have a blast tinkering with the "TX AGP Pro" chipset 😀

This review of another board with this nice almost 100 MHz FSB capable chipset is a good read.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/45

Guys, he's not looking for a headache, just to build an unconventional low-end vintage system that would run many games well anyways. Considering that many Voodoo 1 games run decently enough on a high clocked 486 system (better than modern games on PCs with Intel GMA graphics), I'd say this goal is not that hard. Trident coupled with a Voodoo 1 card would not be terribly bad as PCI Tridents are generally just as good as any other PCI 2D card (and the crappiness of ISA tridents has been overblown in my opinion as most of them were used in 386s anyways where the bottleneck is the CPU and even the Trident 8900 is about 7x faster than the original IBM VGA, the original VGA gets about 2-3 fps in Doom! We had a Trident 8900 in our 386 and it was OK for what it was, nothing used anything higher than 640x480 in 16 colors anyways on that PC).

PCI Tridents actually pioneered FMV acceleration. This is the famous Video CD video distributed with Trident 9680 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6BAkQKUcQU .

I'd say the best bet would be to use an original K6 or low clocked K6-2 CPU if you want a reliable low-end experience without overheating headaches of some Cyrix CPUs and the 486-like architecture of the Winchip.

m1so wrote:

I'd say the best bet would be to use an original K6 or low clocked K6-2 CPU if you want a reliable low-end experience without overheating headaches of some Cyrix CPUs and the 486-like architecture of the Winchip.

But isn't that kind of making the right choice? I mean, for a lot of games and applications a K6 was just as good as a real Pentium. Back in the days I upgraded from a generic motherboard with Pentium 120MHz (running at stock 60MHz x 2) to an Asus TX97-X with K6 200 (and running it at 225MHz, 75MHz x 2.5) and it was a really noticeable upgrade. Combined with a Matrox Mystique 220, this system even let me play some basic Quake 2, probably thanks to having good mmx implementation.
I'd say that Winchip might be a more interesting choice.

Used the winchip! system is build and now installing windows ME! Why ME? I was going for win95 but i have NO brackets for this board so no mouse, onboard sound and vga.
Easy way out is an OS with good usb support (and all my other systems i use 98se). So, good alternative with usb out of the box: windows ME (and an opti usb pci card)

Still haven't decided about the soundcard but i just started installing with a crystal soundcard.

I am SURPRISED with this board so far. My absolute favorite socket 7 board is the asus p5a (have several) and i have other s7 and ss7 boards. This pcchips board however is the ONLY one i ever used that can change cpu multiplier, voltage and fsb in bios!! No jumpers, simply putting in a cpu and it works...amazing for socket 7 i think!

It booted right away at 180mhz so i set the correct 225mhz (3x 75) in bios and off it went. It seemed that winME was on the bigfoot (that gave me the idea) and after a LOT of rattling and noise from the bigfoot it found most drivers and stuff and the system works just fine. Since i allways opt for a clean install i wiped the disk and am starting fresh now.

With the old OS i quickly ran Everest to see if it could bench stable. Some tests it completed (pretty slow, about k5 166 performance) and some tests returned a score of ''0''. Onboard cache was read as 1024kb but stated ''disabled''. Hopefully after a clean install and all the right drivers performance will be up a bit.

Anyway, winME went very well and rather quick considering the winchip, slow bigfoot and just 32mb edo ram 🤣

Keep you guys posted!

Oh, and to reply to some:

Yes the rush is worse than a voodoo1 with trident. The 2D alliance chip isn't really great and for glide games the voodoo1 is more compatible and faster. (and i allready have a v1 system with 233mmx complete)
The rush is still more than fast enough for the winchip to keep up but there is no slower 3dfx card... and i want glide.

No, a k6-2 is not an option because that would be the ''good'' choice (and i allready have a k6-3+ system complete)

I DON'T want headaches 😐 , i want this to be the ''not knowing your stuff when buying'' or ''cheap-ass'' system but still want a stable and usefull system and compare it to my other builds with the ''right'' hardware.

This pcchips board was given to me in a system with 200mmx cpu. I would never buy this board so another version of the pcchips boards is not an option. This is what i have (but first impressions of it are not that bad!)

I don't have a waveblaster card.... and a sb16 is allready in the mmx system.

well, i had my share of problems with this one.....pffft

After a clean install i allways check everest to see if the benchmarks are where they should be. Memory tests return ''0'' and most cpu tests also. Only fpu tests work and they are up to par.
Cache is stated as ''disabeled''? Cache enabled/disabled in bios does make a small difference in games so it should work?

Searched for chipset drivers (windows does have them) and only found ide and agp on the web which i don't need.

The crystal soundcard did not work so i went for the ALS120 (windows ME found it perfectly and it works)

Both of my Rush cards give graphical errors in windows with different drivers (one much worse then the other) but 3d works flawlessly ??? Alliance 2D chip memory broke?

Went for Diamond s3 virge stealth 2000 4mb and voodoo1 and both worked fine.

Tested need for speed 1 (no 3d game) and it works well but has very low system requirements.

Tested Testdrive 4 3dfx and it was SLOW with the IDT winchip, put in the Cyrix 233 and it was SLOW again. Put in the 200mmx and it is still slow!! Put in 128mb sdram instead of the 32mb EDO and it is still SLOW.
Overclocked the mmx to 250mhz and still way too slow.....

System requirements for this game is min p90 16mb , recommended p166 32mb and it just flies on my 233mmx system with voodoo1 so something is not right.

Could it be windows ME? I have no clue what to do next since i tried every bios setting and different hardware.

Could the cache be defective? How to test this correctly?

3dmark 99 max scores seem to be right for this system compared to what others have.

The system behaves very well in windows and is stable to use. Performance is just not there.... HELP 🤣

I am giving up on this sytem. Tried 32mb, 64mb and 128mb sdram at different speeds. Updated the bios etc.

Cpu-z displays nothing on L2 cache, sisoft sandra 99 does say 1024kb (no matter if it is enabled or disabled in bios 😕 )

Cpu and memory benchmarks on sandra are 10% slower compared to a winchip 266 and k6-2 400 in their database so nothing shocking. Cpu benchmarks (still 200mmx) are on par also.

Tried running nfs III hot pursuit (3dfx) and it is a slideshow as well as Testdrive 4.

I think the cache is toast, and since it took 2 days of my life already i am giving up on this project. When using it it ''feels'' like a p100 system or something.

I don't even NEED this system 🤣

I will keep it assembled for now in case any of you comes with a great idea how to pump up performance of this system 😎

But isn't this kind of a fitting conclusion to the experiment?
If you build a poorly balanced system from random parts, you end up with a system that performs really badly?
I kind of thought that was what you wanted to find out, rather than to see exactly "how fast" you could manage to make it.
And you are totally right... When it becomes more of a headache than it is worth, then it's better to abandon it and come back to it later when you have more energy.

Merry Christmas 😀

I didn't want to make it fast, i just added faster components to see if performance of the board was up to par (as i do have a lot of experience with mmx + v1 systems).

It just doesn't seem to perform as well as it should be with any processor, if it did perform normal with the mmx i would put the IDT winchip back in.

But since it is way slower as it should be i can't use it for even the oldest 3dfx games i use and that was the goal.

I also wanted to compare it to my ''good parts'' 233mmx but since the board doesn't even run normal with a mmx cpu i cannot do a fair comparison. I believe the pcchips board is faulty, or at least the cache. It should perform like an Intel vx board a bit and it doesn't even come close.

I just hope one of the voodoo rush cards is still OK in another system as i really like my 3dfx collection but only want working cards....fingers crossed.

Merry christmas to you too! (and every other vogon members!)

I once saw a PCChips board where the cache SMD chip had bent legs. You could try verifying that... And try not breaking the legs as I did 🙁