What retro things have you done today?

LewisRaz · 14 May 2020 at 18:03

That could be a good investment if you can fix it!

Im picking this up tomorrow morning for £20, can you see why?

Oh and the AWE32 works perfectly

paradigm · 14 May 2020 at 18:06

@LewisRaz I can see the Voodoo 3 3000, yes!

LewisRaz · 14 May 2020 at 18:11

paradigm said:
@LewisRaz I can see the Voodoo 3 3000, yes!

I thought it was a 2000 but still

Seller is throwing in a case too.

hohum · 14 May 2020 at 18:19

Looks like a good deal if all working! Guessing it's a case of the owner doesn't really know what they've got there if so.

paradigm · 14 May 2020 at 18:21

LewisRaz said:
I thought it was a 2000 but still
Seller is throwing in a case too.

Silver heatsink & TV out = 3000.

It’ll likely be good for 3500 speeds (183/183MHz), so should net you around 3500 points on 3dmark99 with your K6-3, but you need an AGP board!

LewisRaz · 14 May 2020 at 18:56

Perhaps I need to dial back my socket7 to something more sensible and then use that slot1 motherboard with a fastp2/slow p3 and the voodoo

I have not seen the case yet. Hoping for beige

Ive never had a mobo with slot and socket, is there any advantage of either?

paradigm · 14 May 2020 at 19:03

LewisRaz said:
Ive never had a mobo with slot and socket, is there any advantage of either?

It depends on what the socket can take. If it’s an early s370 designed for FPGA celerons then no there’s no point in using the socket, might as well use a slot 1 P3 (or a slocket with a s370 p3 in it). If it’s a later FCPGA socket 370 then a socket 370 p3 has faster on-die (rather then on SECC) cache.

GeX · 14 May 2020 at 19:20

LewisRaz said:
That could be a good investment if you can fix it!

Im picking this up tomorrow morning for £20, can you see why?

Oh and the AWE32 works perfectly

Whaaaaat. How does everyone find these

almoststew1990 · 14 May 2020 at 19:20

Blimey you lot must be on first name terms with postie! I have enough trouble talking myself into buying a £20 motherboard once every few months!

LewisRaz · 14 May 2020 at 20:01

almoststew1990 said:
Blimey you lot must be on first name terms with postie! I have enough trouble talking myself into buying a £20 motherboard once every few months!

If we had the same postie one day to another I probably would be

Just glad things are starting to turn up.

also @hohum I think in all my excitement I didnt properly say thankyou for the card... so thankyou

hohum · 14 May 2020 at 20:17

No worries! Did you find using XP got you any further? If not, perhaps post an image or two of your bios settings at some point?

LewisRaz · 14 May 2020 at 21:48

hohum said:
No worries! Did you find using XP got you any further? If not, perhaps post an image or two of your bios settings at some point?

Sortof... It Got further. It would at crash at the same point but then recover and say the device or driver has failed and then be stuck in 4 colour mode. It did the same with all 3 of the cards I tried!
Someone over at vogons suggested it could be a power issue. could make sense as these are much newer GPU than were about when the motherboard was made!

hohum · 14 May 2020 at 23:51

I guess that's a possibility, but it's not like displaying the desktop should be that demanding the moment a driver is installed! Do you have much in the way of PCI-related settings in the BIOS? Specifically you should be enabling stuff like passive release and delayed transaction (some ISA cards don't like this apparently, but it's part of the PCI 2.1 spec). You might also have an option for IRQ routing table which should probably be enabled also.

LewisRaz · 15 May 2020 at 01:12

hohum said:
I guess that's a possibility, but it's not like displaying the desktop should be that demanding the moment a driver is installed! Do you have much in the way of PCI-related settings in the BIOS? Specifically you should be enabling stuff like passive release and delayed transaction (some ISA cards don't like this apparently, but it's part of the PCI 2.1 spec). You might also have an option for IRQ routing table which should probably be enabled also.

I have fiddled around with whats there but to no avail so far!

Here is a screenshot of the bios options so you can see what is there. Not too many options for messing with PCI

paradigm · 15 May 2020 at 06:53

Have you tried disabling “VGA Frame Buffer” as I know this can affect both performance and stability on some systems with some video cards.

Edit: I’d also try running without “Video BIOS Shadow” as well. This puts the video bios in L2 Cache, which may be pointless on a more modern card (and will waste some cache).

LewisRaz · 15 May 2020 at 07:53

Still no luck

Thx for the advice tho.

I keep trying random combinations of all the settings being pointed out.

Such an odd problem!

almoststew1990 · 15 May 2020 at 08:38

Could it be a voltage issue? I think there are two types of PCI voltage depending on the "key" on the card, maybe it isn't getting teh voltage it wants?

almoststew1990 · 15 May 2020 at 08:46

My retro activity has been using my XP PC alongside my work laptop whilst I work at home. For a 2.4GHz Athlon 64 3200+ (overclocked to 3800+) it's surprisingly adequate on XP for Spotify, browsing (not youtube!), watching DVDs, and using it as a second screen (viewing PDFs). I also hooked up my PS2 to my capture card so I can go on the PS2 on the same screen (my main TV uses a stupid "SCART to 3.5mm" adapter which adds literally half a second of lag so I can't really use it). The lag through the capture card fine, much better than the TV, and even the image quality is alright over SVideo.

It's also got a 7950 GT in it and I am playing through No One Lives Forever 2.

hohum · 15 May 2020 at 09:16

@LewisRaz There are a couple of options there that I'd change:

SDRAM Speculative Read - I'd probably change this to enabled as it's likely to improve RAM performance a little

PCI IRQ Actived By - Set this to 'Level' instead of 'Edge'. This sounds like a good culprit based on reading this: https://archive.techarp.com/showFreeBOGc0fb.html?lang=0&bogno=137

paradigm · 15 May 2020 at 10:56

Well, kinda disappointed, but happy at the same time.

My faulty £25 Voodoo 3 3000 arrived, it's a Dell OEM version so no TV-OUT (not that I'd be using it anyway), but it works just fine, or at least appears to. I'll get stress-testing it I guess.

EDIT: I should clarify, I'm not disappointed because it's a Dell OEM, I'm disappointed because I have nothing new to attempt to fix!

EDIT2: 3DMark99 MAX run complete at V3 3500 speeds (183/183MHz) and no graphical glitches at all. Might try some none official drivers and see if there's any performance benefit.