What retro things have you done today?

LewisRaz said:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ChainTech-Vintage-PC-Motherboard-CPU-RAM-Athlon-1Ghz-128MB-RAM/392890326311?ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT&_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649

Did a best offer on this at like 1am and accepted the counter offer this morning. I dont even know why... Think the cooler was what got my attention. Perhaps if its better than my p3 866 I could use it for my main rig. Board layout is much better than my current one.
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Not sure why you’d use that over your Asus A7N8X tbh. I’ve always steered clear of boards with AMR/CNR ports. Chaintech can be good boards though, I have no knowledge of that particular board though. I’m not sure you’ll see a massive performance swing either between that and the Coppermine 866.
 
paradigm said:
Not sure why you’d use that over your Asus A7N8X tbh. I’ve always steered clear of boards with AMR/CNR ports. Chaintech can be good boards though, I have no knowledge of that particular board though. I’m not sure you’ll see a massive performance swing either between that and the Coppermine 866.
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The other AMD board is in storage now. When I eventually get back to that I would be targeting XP with it. I am not so sure how well this would cope vs the P3 either. Not expecting fireworks but for £15 posted it was worth it I think for something with ISA and AGP.
It is something I can build into the "MESH" case since its once again empty. Only need to throw in one of my scrappy GF2/4 MX and an old IDE drive and I could even flip it :)

But even after saying that I have some remorse. late night ebay after a day of dealing with a grumpy pregnant mrs is dangerous!
 
LewisRaz said:
But even after saying that I have some remorse. late night ebay after a day of dealing with a grumpy pregnant mrs is dangerous!
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I know that feeling!

In other news, my GTX 295 arrived, a dual-pcb version (which is the type I wanted). Still don’t know if I want to use it in this dual Xeon build or not!
 
cee-S-dee said:
@paradigm i'll try and get some pics tomorrow.
What volts you pushing though the Chip? Give it 1.8 and try 133mhz
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Only stock 1.5v at the moment, will do 112MHz no problem, but as I mentioned, this board only has a 1/3 divider for PCI (and 2/3 for AGP), so 133fsb would need the PCI bus to handle 44MHz!

I might possibly get away with it with the Voodoo 5, assuming that it’s actually identical to its AGP counterpart (as it’s only pseudo AGP it’s actually a PCI 66MHz card using an AGP connector).

I’ll give it a try, it can’t hurt!
 
@cee-S-dee Gave it a try, it won't do more than 112fsb, and neither would my P3-850. I'm pretty sure this board just can't cope.

The Tualeron will POST at 124fsb, but won't make it into Windows, it also hangs after too long in the BIOS, so it's just not going to happen :(

Need to find a better Slot 1 board!
 
@paradigm I'm not to clued up on the Abit slot 1 boards. I thought they were quit good at overclocking? 133fsb has always been one of those "Maybe Possible" features on slot 1 boards. I think most Slot 1 boards struggle with anything over 100fsb. I have had 133fsb going on both my Gigabyte and Asus board, but that was coppermine on a MSI Master Sloket. I've had powerleap and upgradeware slokets and neither would play nice at 133fsb. My Asus P2B was the same, post with 124fsb but would crash.

I have a nice S370 board which does 140fsb easy and will do 150fsb but its not fully stable at 150, problem is it wont accept Tualatins unless modified.

You've spurned me on to give my ECS P6S5AT board a go. Its a SIS 653T chipset which supports Tualatins along with DDR. Any overclocking features in the bios are no existent but you can use a tool to set the FSB and it actually has the correct divider at 166fsb. I meant to re-cap it but there is like 21 caps on it and i was like uhhh. It does work but i don't think the caps help at all.

This week has been a bit manic, not had much chance to do much retro stuff. Been working on some Nutanix clusters from home. I had a Compaq Armada M300 Laptop turn up which i haven't even had chance to look at yet!
 
Spent last 2 hours getting ****** off at the new 486VLB board. Managed to set the cpu to the correct 50mhz. Installed dos 6.22 just fine to a 2gb CF. Next up mouse drivers...
whole pc locks as soon as you press install. Cursor still flashing but no amount of ctrl+alt+del will wake it. Next hour follows a whole bunch of messing around swapping ports and fiddling with bios, removing wait state jumpers etc... My conclusion is that something is wrong with the controller card as on 2 occasions while using a real HDD with a clean DOS install to try and fault find I heard the HDD completely power down.
Now of course I do have a couple of spare controller cards but both are in the loft which cant be accessed when my daughter is asleep.
Bit of a crappy evening :(
 
cee-S-dee said:
@paradigm I'm not to clued up on the Abit slot 1 boards. I thought they were quit good at overclocking? 133fsb has always been one of those "Maybe Possible" features on slot 1 boards. I think most Slot 1 boards struggle with anything over 100fsb. I have had 133fsb going on both my Gigabyte and Asus board, but that was coppermine on a MSI Master Sloket. I've had powerleap and upgradeware slokets and neither would play nice at 133fsb. My Asus P2B was the same, post with 124fsb but would crash.

I have a nice S370 board which does 140fsb easy and will do 150fsb but its not fully stable at 150, problem is it wont accept Tualatins unless modified.

You've spurned me on to give my ECS P6S5AT board a go. Its a SIS 653T chipset which supports Tualatins along with DDR. Any overclocking features in the bios are no existent but you can use a tool to set the FSB and it actually has the correct divider at 166fsb. I meant to re-cap it but there is like 21 caps on it and i was like uhhh. It does work but i don't think the caps help at all.

This week has been a bit manic, not had much chance to do much retro stuff. Been working on some Nutanix clusters from home. I had a Compaq Armada M300 Laptop turn up which i haven't even had chance to look at yet!
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So there were two versions of the Abit BH6, v1.0 (which I have) uses the Cypress W124G PLL (clockgen chip) which only officially supports 100fsb (and gives fsb[PCI] options of 66[33], 75[37.5], 83[41.5], 100[33], 112[37.3], 124[41.3], 133[44.3]), on the 1.0 version board you essentially have 66, 75, 100 and 112 as usable bus speeds as beyond that the PCI bus is too far out of spec to be reliable. Revision v1.1/1.2 use the Cypress W196G PLL and has official support for 133fsb (and gives fsb[PCI] options of 66[33], 75[37.5], 78[39], 81[40.5], 83[41.5], 90[30], 95[31.6], 100[33], 105[35], 110[35], 112[37.3], 115[38.3], 120[40], 122[40.6], 124[31], 126[31.5], 133[33], 135[33.75], 137[34.25], 138[34.5], 140[35], 142[35.5], 144[36], 150[37.5], 155[38.75]) which gives a massively more useful range of fsb options, as anything that stays below around 38MHz on the PCI bus should be fine judging by the fact I can use 37.3MHz right now without issue.

I'm not bothered about sticking with an Abit board (though I do hold a candle for them as that was my go-to brand back in the 90s and 2000s), but finding a board with 1/4 (and possibly even 1/5) dividers is my goal. Not sure if I stick with 440BX or look to go i820 (possibly with RDRAM) for the replacement board. 440BX is just such a compatible chipset and I know that the P3 (even fast Tualatin) can't make use of the RDRAM memory bandwidth, it would just be for the hell of it (and to own some RDRAM).

I want to stick with Slot-1 as I already have decent S370 setups (albeit dual-socket), there was no point in hunting out the iP3/T to then go back to S370!

I've never tried a SIS chipset P3 board, my Socket 7 board is a SIS though. I never found them to be the most reliable of platforms.
 
Armageus said:
Can you not just change the clockgen chip (assuming you can source one?) or is there more to it?
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At the moment, I don't know. It's something I've considered (along with flashing the BIOS to a rev 1.1/1.2 BIOS). I guess I could just try it.

If I could get a high-res picture of a known 1.1/1.2 board then I could be more certain.
 
I thought I'd take a punt at this

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/164026079749

Never used this chipset and I've been after an ATX 775 board for a while so I can have a dual slot GPU and other cards which my MATX board struggles with. My board also won't overclock anything. I'll try x-fire 4890s and 5770s maybe, with an overclocked Q6600 G0 Slacr.

...if the board works. But for £10 I'll risk it.
 
almoststew1990 said:
I thought I'd take a punt at this

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/164026079749

Never used this chipset and I've been after an ATX 775 board for a while so I can have a dual slot GPU and other cards which my MATX board struggles with. My board also won't overclock anything. I'll try x-fire 4890s and 5770s maybe, with an overclocked Q6600 G0 Slacr.

...if the board works. But for £10 I'll risk it.
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I used to have one of those boards. Was a fantastic overclocker. I ran it with dual 5770s as well!

My favorite S775 board was the one I upgraded to the Intel DX38BT!
 
I remember the 5770 was a great value card and in xfire it worked out to be a good price/performance match for the faster cards or next gen cards or something.

I'm going to try out xfire 4890s in GTA V. Terrible idea but just try and stop me! I've won one 4890 for £10 this morning, one to go.
 
Now got the Voodoo 5 run in the 3GHz P4:

3DMark2000

V5/Pentium 3 850: 3846 3DMarks
V5/Tualaron 1400: 4274 3DMarks
V5/Tualaron 1568: 4659 3DMarks
V5/Pentium4 3GHz: 4802 3DMarks

Quake 3 Arena (32-bit textures and colours):

V5/Pentium 3 952/640x480: 76.3fps
V5/Tualaron 1400/640x480: 90.8fps
V5/Tualaron 1568/640x480: 100.7fps
V5/Pentium4 3GHz/640x480: 162.7fps

V5/Pentium 3 952/800x600: 76.3fps
V5/Tualaron 1400/800x600: 90.0fps
V5/Tualaron 1568/800x600: 100.0fps
V5/Pentium4 3GHz/800x600: 138.9fps

V5/Pentium 3 952/1024x768: 73.9fps
V5/Tualaron 1400/1024x768: 88.4fps
V5/Tualaron 1568/1024x768: 97.5fps
V5/Pentium4 3GHz/640x480: 112.7fps

Seems that these Voodoo 5s love to scale with CPU speed. Clearly not CPU constrained any more, but I do wonder where the sweet spot is for one as it's likely to be somewhere between the 1.6GHz Tualeron and the 3GHz Netburst!
 
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