Building my ultimate 1999 Voodoo3 PC! Part 1

[@TheVanillatech]

I got a number of Dell Optiplex servers, well ... workstations really, many years ago at the end of 1999. Each had dual P3 550Mhz Slot CPU's, Viper 770 TNT2 ultra cards and 3 internal SCSI fireball drives. The PC's had onboard SCSI and also adapter cards. They opened up from the center of the case, design and build quality was amazing. Absolutely gorgeous, heavy beasts. Ooozed quality. Lasted as gaming PC's in a mini 4-man-LAN setup in my friends attic bedroom for years. We played Total Annihilation, Quake III, Warcraft II, Unreal Tournament etc for many years, stoned out of our heads, and not ONE of them ever crashed! Great build by the way! And great video. You really captured the Elite Bastard PC Scene of late 1999!

[@saimoncerise4870]

I loved so much Motorhead ! Playing it on an DELL Optiplex with Pentium 166 without 3DFx in the 90's... When I rebuilt my retro rig, my first goal was playing this same game with an ultimate setup, so a Pentium III 1Ghz with FSB@133, a couple of CREATIVE Voodoo 2 in SLI mode, and then... Maaan, what an awesome game ?! :)

[@fluffypinkpandas]

Due to supply chain issues, the recent electronics (mostly GPU) market crash, and inflation Every single component you listed in this video just went up in price by a factor of 10

[@BadManiac]

Because of how remarkably fast technology was advancing for a few years there, this "Ultimate" 1999 PC is basically an Ultimate 1998 PC and is hopelessly out of date for most games from 1999 and 2000 (as you mention in your next part of the series). We, Swedish Retro Computer Association, host a 1999 themed LAN party yearly, or try to when Corona doesn't eat it, we allow all hardware that was available in 1999, so a P3 or Athlon 800Mhz and a Geforce 256 DDR or Matrox G400 Maxx is about the fastest you can get. This PC would struggle with a lot of the games people play at the LAN parties. Between 1997 and 2000, 4 years, we had effectively SIX generations of graphics hardware, each one basically making the previous ones obsolete. This build showcases that perfectly. Don't get me wrong, it's an awesome build, really well done, and all you'd have to do is plop a faster P3 in there and it would do much better. A P2/P3 450 can barely max out a single Voodoo 2, you want at least a 750Mhz for SLI or your V3 3000. I've benchmarked Voodoo 2 SLI and my Voodoo 3 3500 AGP extensively, as has Phil from Philscomputerlab, faster CPU will make a HUGE difference to this build :)

[@ohsoretro5612]

Thanks for the kind words and the advice! That is kinda what I wanted to show for this video - how something top end from the beginning of the year would have been almost obsolete by the end, as you say. I mostly just wanted to do a voodoo3 build actually, although there were obviously much faster cards later in the year.. but I dont actually have any of them! :p I think in the future I will throw in a faster processor for sure, just to make it a bit more usable.. Anyway, thanks for the comment and the view!

[@TechThatYT]

Wow! What an amazing video for such a small channel! So much effort went into this and it was very engaging! Hope you blow up some day. Keep up the good work :)

[@ohsoretro5612]

Thank you! I hope so too.. one day.. :)

[@realbadtech9318]

Love this build, I’m doing something similar now which started with a Gateway 500 I got for free. It’s turning out completely gutted, putting a Pentium III 800E in it which came out Dec 20th 1999! Paired with a GeForce 256, an IBM Model M and a pretty decent 18” Diamondtron monitor. The Quake crusher! Those surround sound speakers you borrowed are dope. I was looking into speakers of the era and a company called Monsoon made the MM-1000 which are actually planar magnetic desktop speakers. Audiophiles still swear by them, would love to hear them myself!

[@hxbfilm]

Dude i love this video. It is edited and filmed as it was KZbin 2007. I mean this as a compliment! You come to the point while being informative. I am going to check your other videos now.

[@ohsoretro5612]

Thanks for the kind words, and glad you enjoyed it!

[@shawn57187]

Those holes are definitely for overclocking. I remember cutting case holes like that during the 3dmark 2000 days. I had a neighbor with a drill press and used a giant hole saw drill bit.

[@l337pwnage]

Next time make friends with a commercial electrician and ask to borrow his large hydraulic knockout tool. ;)

[@geekonometry]

Nice to see such a high quality and great edited video from a fellow south african. Love the video and will look out for more

[@Edmundostudios]

I do find the early 3D era quite interesting as I was way too young to experience this properly on the PC at least with a voodoo card. Such a huge amount of progress within that decade compared how things are now.

[@soylentgreenb]

Dennard scaling and TDP increases combined in the 90's to make the whole decade pretty magical. Things are still getting denser (Moore's law), but denser no longer means faster unless you can use more parallelism (graphics cards mainly). You have to extrapolate the 90's trend out to see just how mad the 90's really was. We went from ~5W 25 MHz CPUs to 70 W ~1 GHz CPUs in 10 years. And these CPUs even had a bit better IPC. If you use extrapolate that out until today you get a 4100 GHz CPU consuming 23 kW of power and still using a single core running at a vcore of ~0.14 V (implies 164 000 amperes of current!). That trajectory couldn't last and obviously didn't. Leakage became too big, operating below the threshold voltage of silicon wasn't really practical. The reason pentium 4 (netburst architecture) was so terrible was that intel made the same bet they had made a dozen times before: Dennard scaling would for at least one more generation; pentium 4 would be able to clock at 8 GHz by 2003 (16 GHz double pumped ALU!) as they predicted in the late 90's when they were designing it; leakage would be suppressed somehow and the excessive pipelining would pay off. AMD made small evolutionary changes and if Dennard scaling actually had continued, the athlon XP and athlon 64 would have been a joke of a product. AMD was about a process node behind and Athlon XP and Athlon 64 was still performance competitive at a cheaper price; they got that bet right and intel didn't. Intel made another terrible bet; they were going to abandon X86 so there was no point to make a 64 bit X86 standard. They were just going to emulate those older X86 instructions to run legacy software. Their IA64 itanium processor was going to become the new desktop architecture for 64 bit. These were *monstrously* large chips bumping up against the reticle limit and they turned out to be very inefficient. The whole idea was that the compiler was going to be able to detect parallelism and make extremely wide instructions that explicitly encoded what the CPU should do in parallel; turned out compilers are not good at this and never became good at this no matter how much money you throw at the problem. Intel had signed deals in the late 90's to support these things just until recently so they had this huge albatross around their neck for 20 years. This is why X64 was developed by AMD and used to be called AMD64.

[@lactobacillusprime]

OMG even the speakers. I have the matted grey variant. 5.1 sound is quite something!

[@1kvolt1978]

The presentation in the end. Everything looks so great, and expensive, and fancy, and stylish! And then... this small plastic -squeakers- speakers. "My dissapointment is immesurable. And my day is ruined". :)

[@lactobacillusprime]

The PC turned our amazing. Using a harddrive from back in the day does add to the soundscape you get from the machine, but I have also installed a compact flash adapter in mine to avoid unnecessary wear on the old drive.

[@l337pwnage]

Those are some pretty serious fans. When I built my PII 400 w/ one, then later a 2nd Voodoo 2, I thought I was rocking the house. However, I was not really "in tune" with latest greatest and I knew what ever I had certainly wasn't "the best" because my budget was limited. I tried buying from local places, just cuz I prefer to do that, and I had chose a TNT 1 for my 2D card and when I went to pick it up the tech guy was running benchmarks on it and, at least to me, he said he thought the card was fast. Some might take offense, but I didn't since I'd be bringing it back to him if I had any problems. ;) I took it as a compliment that he found my choice interesting. Being a new card, it didn't have good game support, hence the addition of Voodoo 2's, which were well established. I usually had CTX monitors, often 15", but I did get up to 17", and eventually got a KDS with a Sony Trinitron tube, which became another pride and joy. :) I always had to run at least 70 htz or screen flicker would drive me nutz. So I paid more attention to that than resolution. I remember paying a lot for a sound card, which I think had surround, but I never got to really push it. I didn't have space for big or surround speakers. Later I had a Microsoft Digital Sound 80, but that could have been a later PC. Kinda sad that modern gaming is mostly done on headsets, it seems. I loved rocking the MS system, and later got the Klipsch surround system(still got both, but the MS subs rotted away, haven't sourced replacements, Klipsch is still going strong, but I replaced the subs once). The PC I built after that was a 900Mhtz(IIRC) AMD w/ a GeForce 2. Another fun rig. The card claimed to have software, if you had a high enough refresh monitor (I think at least 120) it could take any game and make it 3D to work with the old 3D glasses, but that's another story. Oh, and I remember being told back in the day that many would go the Celeron route because some could be crazy overclocked. I was told because they didn't have onboard cache that they could be made stable at very high clock speeds. Never tried it, had too many other hobbies in those days, but that's what I heard through the grapevine.

[@alaricjeard269]

I've build almost the same config, a P!!! 450Mhz and a V3 2000. But most of the time, my daily retro pc is an Athlon 750 Slot A and a GF2 Ti.

[@malcolmcampbell1968]

i had those speakers they were amazing i thought i was so cool with that little amp

[@wettuga2762]

The better path would have been the TNT2 Ultra AGP + 3dfx Voodoo 3 PCI. I also only have the AGP version which limits the games I can run with my machine. The best part of retro building today is being able to combine several pieces of expensive hardware (at the time) in one single machine.

[@andrew1977au]

I had one of those viewsonic monitors, ended up giving it to my dad and now wish I had kept it

[@zedovski]

This video was simply lovely

[@ohsoretro5612]

Thank you!

[@stevenc22]

Nice. In 1999 I got an AMD 450 with a DVD and a Voodoo 3. I only owned 1 DVD (Blade) but man I thought I had a pimp system.

[@bjorksbanjoplayer]

Loving the channel. Really good commentary. Well done

[@ohsoretro5612]

Thanks so much! Glad you are enjoying it!

[@Mini-z1994]

I'd go with anything available Q4 1999, like a 800 mhz pentium III on slot 1 there. The 80526PY800256 800 mhz penium III released December 1999, maybe a larger cpu cooler added onto this as well + 120mm fan spinning at like 800 rpm silently. Dell 7472D Heatsink + 120 mm fan pointed at it id imagine would cool it down nicely. GPU The geforce 256 as that released 1999. sdr version released October 1999 (ddr version released December 1999.) Adding on some larger cooler from a later gpu for less fan noise & heat. Or making a custom mounting solution for a larger cooler for some overclocking headroom, swapping out the capacitors on the gpu itself as well as they are probably dried up & out of spec or just about so. Then a voodoo 2,3 or similar as secondary gpu for voodoo graphics compatibility using the geforce 256 as 2d gpu. At worst you'll just need too restart the pc when you switch between the two for drivers too not fight each other too badly. Maybe just for getting less noise additionally I'd consider making a larger set of holes for 120mm fans along with using those generic fan filters that layers up between the case & the fan pretty much for a cleaner look. SSD or more modern sata harddrive or late gen ide harddrive ca 2006 manufacturing before they quit making them. I don't like the obnoxious harddrive bearing noise whine with my hearing damage for more then an hour or two, it gets exhausting too hear for long. Unless i got music or something that takes up a lot of that noise.

[@ohsoretro5612]

That would be an amazing build! It also pretty insane how fast technology was moving at that time - this pc of mine would have been pretty much obsolete at the end of 1999 even though it was top notch in early 1999!

[@RetroTinkerer]

@@ohsoretro5612 Why would anyone would had chosen to go with Intel by the time the 800MHz Slot-A Athlon was out? 😅 I understand that before that it was kind of a gamble but by that time, really, why?

[@jay1185]

Before Mr.Pibb was my gaming handle, I was Scuzzy, simply because of the interface :) Great video!

[@paulp9270]

Wow, this is one beastly retro PC setup! Awesome parts and video :)

[@hypergl6974]

More than the build i am interested in the quad creative cdrom in the acer machine that you sgow... Had one of those when i upgraded my 386dx 40 machine with sb16 and cdrom... 😍

[@lactobacillusprime]

My retro pentium III system is very similar to yours. Apart from the scsi harddrive. Very nice to build the system you could only dream of back in the day. ✅

[@BeerAndWarcraft]

Awesome build! These are the types of videos I like...

[@lactobacillusprime]

I recently acquired a slot one converter to be able to use socket 370 chips, but there’s a caveat that only certain CPUs can be used.

[@Tatarus31]

Very nice build, thanks!

[@TheLevitatingChin]

There's a reason abit aren't in business anymore. I had a couple back in the late 90's early 2000s and they both had infuriating stability/compatibility issues.

[@SharkBait_ZA]

Subscribed because you are from Joburg and because I want to come over and play some games on this beast. :-P

[@gumbi79]

cool build , on my retro systems i have to have ssd to boot 64 gig Samsung 830 modern corsair v350 psu and quiet fans and i usually pop in usb2 card and gigabit nic

[@prozacgodretro]

This case screams like it came from an early hard ocp forum post... I swear if you looked on hard ocp long enough you'd probably find this exact case as some kind of science project someone made.

[@driftyprince]

loved it and editing was really cool, looking forward for more videos like this :)

[@RaPtOr9600]

Always nice to hear that Windows 98 intro song :) Great build, hope that BX motherobard will work, without issues

[@RaPtOr9600]

Thanks for pinup and great video

[@UncleMikeRetro]

Nice video! I have been keeping my collection of retro hardware limited to what I can scrap at yards locally. Still waiting for a Voodoo 3 card to appear 😥 I have soooo many crap TnT Vantas now! Ah yes! an Abit motherboard. So cool back then... Abit I mean!

[@mxthunder2]

slot 1 vs socket 370 had nothing to do with the "real" pentium 3 vs the pentium 2.5 as you cited. The "real Pentium 3" Coppermine could also be had on slot 1.... both were available concurrently

[@little_fluffy_clouds]

Absolutely. I have an Asus 440BX board with dual slot 1 P-III Coppermine processors running at 800 MHz each, with 100 FSB. They are fully-fledged P3 chips with SSE and MMX support.

[@lactobacillusprime]

I gave the same SB card, but for MS DOS gaming PCI cards I discovered are not the best… :(

[@corty1980]

Sorry but SCSI wasn't just a standard used on high end and server PC's. The commodore Amiga used SCSI on some of it's machines as standard and then went to IDE with the latter machines. I think the switch to IDE on the latter Amiga's was to save cost and the fact that IDE was becoming the standard.

[@AsurmenHandOfAsur]

That was AWESOME!

[@ohsoretro5612]

Thanks so much! Glad you enjoyed it!

[@TheLionAndTheLamb777]

The Pentium III was identical to the Pentium II other than the addition of the SMID instructions. Then again the Pentium II is actually a Pentium Pro II since it's not based on the original Pentium.

[@dodolurker]

I also had a quite patchy result during retrobrighting, when wrapping the item inside clingfilm. It's actually better to put the item inside a clear plastic box 🙂. You can cover the box with clingfilm instead. I've done it several times (also using hydrogen peroxide paste) and I've had no issues.

[@ohsoretro5612]

Thanks! I will try that. I think getting a big enough box for a case like this would be a bit of a mission though!

[@dodolurker]

@@ohsoretro5612 Yeah, that's true 😀. The front panels I have retrobrigted this way were all either minitowers or miditowers... It would definitely be a challenge with a full tower like yours 😁. Another tip I got from watching several videos about retrobrighting - when there's no sunlight available or it's too cold outside, an alternative is to use a lamp with at least a 60W halogen bulb in it. I have used this method more than once and yup - it works 🙂 Also thanks for a very cool video, I really enjoyed it and looking forward to part 2 🙂

[@C4nn15]

You a saffer? If so are you still in South Africa? If so where did you get the retro parts? Yes that Viewsonic was great, a friend had the 14" and even that was amazing.

[@ohsoretro5612]

Yes I am indeed a Saffer and yes still here.. For parts I mostly just watch places like Gumtree and facebook marketplace and try buy stuff that looks interesting.. Some of my best finds have been in whole systems that I bought for very little.. The viewsonic monitors were very cool for sure.. I could never afford them back in the day but glad I finally got one after only 20 years! Thanks for the view btw!

[@C4nn15]

@@ohsoretro5612 I used to have retro builds and more modern systems, but after moving a few times I stopped using the older ones, post of me misses having both. Those old CRTs are great but they take up a lot of space, I had a 21"one back in the day but now my 32" takes up less space and looks better :)

[@Ralph-yn3gr]

Is there somewhere I can get that UFOGear badge? It's pretty cool and I'd like to stick one on a PC I'm building. Also, I'd have gone with that TNT card for direct3d and paired it with two Voodoo IIs in SLI for Glide games. Definitely the way to go if you're trying to break the bank I think.

[@ohsoretro5612]

I just made the badge myself by printing the image out on photopaper at the correct size (25mm x 25mm in this case) and then coating it with clear quickset epoxy. It took about 5 attempts to get a good one, but it came out nicely in the end. I can send you the image if you would like to try yourself..

[@fenixlolnope361]

There was a coppermine pentium 3 slot 1 and they’re amazing. Katmai pentium iii do deserve the pentium iii name because the actual micro arch is already different.. it’s limited by being compatible with the pentium ii cache. Really the pentium II and pentium iii slot 2 Xeons are the best performance example I can think of, that’s what both of the raw architectures look like when not limited by cache speed or capacity. I’m really looking for a board with slot 2 and agp.. or maybe one of the wierd later radeons that worked on PCIx? I wanna build a win Xp/98 machine that’s unconventional lmao

[@donbrowne343]

Early P3s were basically just the P2 + SSE instructions... Intel introduced the new branding in order to compete with AMD who launched the Athlon around the same time.

[@primus711]

I run voodoo3 in my amiga 4000 with fastest powerpc cpu 1.7ghz i was dev for the sonnet ppc cards others run g4@450mhz others g3@up to 1ghz

[@NightSprinter]

I'll never stop chuckling from the anime girl "WWWOOOOOWWW!!!" sound. XD

[@NiPPonD3nZ0]

Wanna swap that P2-99 for a P2B-F?? I want a good LX motherboard and cannot find one!

[@ohsoretro5612]

I actually need to make a correction here: the p2-99 is a 440ZX, not LX. When I looked it up a few months ago I could have sworn it was LX, but rechecking the other day I see its a ZX. Sorry about that!

[@crazycraig6]

The Alienware ad you show has a Voodoo3 PCI and a TNT2 AGP in the same system! How would that work?

[@ohsoretro5612]

I wish I knew as well! They mentioned custom software so maybe it has something to do with disabling the other card and its drivers when windows loads so that only one card is seen by windows at a time maybe...? Couldn't find anything about it though when making the video so I would be keen to find out more..

[@crazycraig6]

@@ohsoretro5612 someone send it to Linus Tech Tips. Maybe he can put out a bounty on one of these systems.

[@msthalamus2172]

Modems don't make a lot of sense anymore, even in retro builds, unless you're dealing with some business segments that still rely on FAXes, like my wife's line of work. We still have to wipe the cobwebs off our 56K FAX modern every once in a while even to this day!

[@TheLionAndTheLamb777]

Abit suffered badly from the capacitor plague.

[@StudioF]

great video.

[@Caleb-fv5fp]

1440p is ultra HD 1080p is full HD

[@ted-b]

Awesome, love it! :)

[@ohsoretro5612]

Thanks! Glad you liked it!

[@retromobs6018]

Hahaha you killed me with the music at the end

[@catvaska1627]

ahaha! cool retro pc!

[@TalleyLewis]

The 440LX was the low-cost version.

[@lordwiadro83]

No, the 440LX was a predecessor to the 440BX, and by early 1998 it was still a top of the line chipset.

[@jonsmith5087]

that voodoo 3 probably cost as much a the original 3k system now ha ha

[@3dfxvoodoocards6]

The V3 3000 was 179$ and the TNT2 Ultra around 250$ where released in early 1999

[@framebuffer.10]

This a nice 1999 build but not exactly "ultimate". The best possible configuration (so, "ultimate") in 1999 was a Pentium III 800MHz and a GeForce 256 SDR (although these came out in late 1999 so it's more a "Ultimate Christmas 1999 Build", but still) Also, you sure you used your CRT at 60-75Hz? I remember very well not being able to resist more than 20min at 75Hz and I never tried at 60, probably would make your eyes bleed after 2 min 😅 P.S. I think it makes no sense to call the Pentium 3 450 a Pentium "2.5" and for 2 good reasons at least. 1. If the P3 450 is an half-Pentium III then any Katmai P3 is. 2. The P3-450 has the same specs of the P2-450 plus a better L1 Cache and SSE instructions, so there is no rational reason to think that can be slower.

[@ohsoretro5612]

Yes, I should have said ultimate early 1999/voodoo3 build rather. The 450 was the top of the line at the start of the year and by the end there were 800mhz as you say, so this machine of mine would have been top notch in early 1999 and pretty much obsolete by the end of the year! Re the p3 450, I think the later Katmai's were much more of an evolution over the p2 because of thier much higher clock speeds, but the 450 is just not enough of an improvement IMO over the p2 it replaced to justify a new name. There is a video by phils computer lab about it that I found interesting: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eXbTiWOEaJWZaM0

[@framebuffer.10]

@@ohsoretro5612 I disagree 🙂 A Pentium III is a Pentium III. Even if intel decided to start from 400MHz it would have been a full, legit, Pentium III. *The belonging to a specific generation can not be judged by performance or upgrade value.* Same thing happened few years later with the first Pentium 4 generation, Willamette 1.30GHz-1.70GHz were from slower to slightly faster than latest Pentium III Tualatin 1.40GHz, does this makes them Pentium 3.5s? I don't think so

[@bradsmith8977]

Hey how come your not using sd scsi adapter and the reason why is you don't how much life is left in that hard drive!!!!

[@Stermy57HW]

You prefer ASUS over Abit? God save your build. Please put off that awful Power supply. If I were you, I would choose a little better CPU. Why? Because you will have problem with some games if you will use EAX API.

[@Psidawg]

gay