Build: K6-III+ and FX 5500 PCI

[@renatodalmo]

In Brazil a k6-3 machine like this would cost a fortune. But I managed to build a K6-2 550Mhz/256MB/Riva TNT2 it was very good at the time, I played a lot of Starcraft and Unreal 2. Your video is very nostalgic for me, congratulations!

[@ravengaming4143]

Did you know the PCI format outlived the AGP format? The last PCI cards were Zotac GT 610 and GT 520 while the last AGP ones were HIS Radeon 4670 and XFX 7950 GT. This means there were DX11 cards made for PCI while AGP was abandoned with DX10 cards like the 3850 and 4670. Admittedly, those PCI cards lack the power to run modern games well and the PCI bus is rather slow too but it's a interesting fact nonetheless.

[@9800xt256mb]

No drivers for win98 and any K6 too slow to run XP smooth.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yes it's all about the balance. You might enjoy today's video looking at a slower card and what difference the driver can make.

[@antkoos]

If only there were PCI cards on used market. The only one I could get my hands on is s3 trio64v2/dx

[@christopherjackson2157]

@@antkoos I got one of the Chinese ati rage 128 pci cards for 15$ it works fine if you don't need 3d acceleration. I wouldn't recommend it for Windows 10, tho it does work i tried it for a laugh. All the used pci cards were so much more money than I wanted to spend to run dos

[@MrGoneja]

@@9800xt256mb k6 3 run xp fine disable all the visual bs

[@supercomputing942]

I picked up an FX5500 AGP for about $6 (converted from my currency), it may not be the best card but it's still a great upgrade from my 32mb Nvidia TNT. The FX5500 was the first AGP card I have ever seen being sold in my area, couldn't miss it.

[@miguelque9102]

I have a GeForce 8500GT PCI for my Pentium 4 machine with a low profile case. There's an AGP slot, but the choice of videocards is limited due to the height, so I installed a PCI videocard instead. The performance took a serious hit, but it still runs NFS Most Wanted in 800x600 with most of the eye candies.

[@phreapersoonlijk]

Great video Phil, thanks for giving the K6-III some love it so desperately needs ! :D

[@philscomputerlab]

Thanks :)

[@QuadTubeChannel]

I agree, this video really brings back some great memories :))

[@bvbxiong5791]

i made my first real money on eBay by selling K6-ii+ and k6-iii+ cpus that i found on a website. i had like 10 of each. i was able to nearly double my money on each one. if i would have waited another couple of years, i coulda sold them for even more. my favorite chips of all time.

[@stevenbasnett881]

I truly love your videos. I built 100s of socket 7 computers when that was the tech of the day. I had problems with higher end agp cards on the 5ax but it was and is one of my favorite say boards. I always got as much or more enjoyment out or building as I did playing. I found some boards did better than 5ax with high end agp but 5ax is very versatile and I keep 1 around. Thank you for working out problems tour us. God Bless

[@dabombinablemi6188]

I'll also add that issues with Windows 98SE and ME not recognising the FX 5500's capabilities is due to the chipset drivers not functioning with properly with DirectX 9 installed. My Abit VP6 had the same problem initially, but in its case the Via Hyperion Pro drivers (V524A) fixed it and it works well in all games now. The chipset drivers from Gigabyte's website are dated 2002, and are apparently for Windows NT, ME and 2000 but they should still work.

[@kryskarr23]

I really dig classic Amd builds.Interesting choice with the fx 5500.

[@thelasthallow]

i agree considering the FX series aligned more with the Athlon XP series of AMD cpus, i feel like the FX5500 is being very cpu limited here.

[@3800S1]

Yes it could be. I have a the exact same card as in the video for my first retro PC with 500 Mhz P3 and it was completely useless. Couldn't play anything from 2000. So I upped to a server based dual CPU Athlon MPs with DDR ram and a 6800Ultra. I still feel the CPUs are holding it back. Considering something based on the Althon FX or Opteron 940 pin dual CPU boards. I found a Fujitsu dual opteron board with DDR and AGP support. Find the Fujitsu still support the board to this day.

[@heyyitsultima]

I have the FX 5600 in my rig, AGP model, and it definitely isn't able to push out the maximum performance of the card. But, if all you're seeking is the highest FPS you can get with a specific processor, then the performance to dollar ratio really isn't bad given I got the card less than $20.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Oh I totally want a FX 5800 Ultra. Just because of THE FAN™

[@ChozoSR388]

I miss my FX 5500...that was a FANTASTIC little graphics card.

[@UpLateGeek]

Top stuff! I had an AGP FX 5500 back in the day (no idea what happened to it; might still be in a junk drawer somewhere). I'm glad you get to play around with this stuff though; I'd love to put together retro machines to play around with, but after building a 486, I ran out of space for any more PCs! Looking forward to seeing ME and XP, and whether your driver issues go away!

[@philscomputerlab]

Thanks!

[@MattyStoked]

Fantastic video Phil. The framerate in Screamer 2 looks out of this world! Great stuff.

[@philscomputerlab]

Screamer 2 looks arguably nicer in software mode vs 3dfx version. The 3dfx version has these flashing lines which I find quite distracting.

[@MattyStoked]

In the earliest titles, I always prefer software more to accelerated. Resampled low-res textures look awful; nice clean boxy pixels look better (to my eye).

[@gravitone]

I don't remember having these flashing lines in the past using a 3dfx card. I've played it on both a voodoo1 and voodoo2 back in the day. I'll try to fire these up again sometime to see if the same issues pop up.

[@DeadlyGamingLV]

I love these PC builds videos. They are my favorite. Apparently the Gigabyte GA-5AX is not easy to find. I started building PCs in 2004 and have been building them ever since but this summer I am planning to build some retro PCs for the first time. These videos have gotten me very excited to do some of these projects. I definitely want to build the 4 in 1 machine and a super socket 7 windows 98 machine. Thank you for all you do Phil. :)

[@philscomputerlab]

Thanks. Yes a lot of parts that I got many years ago are now hard to find. But that's also why I do these videos, so others can experience it without having to buy stuff.

[@MrKillswitch88]

Hoarding when the prices are dirt cheap or the goods are for free does a lot to save money in the end, 3DFX prices for everything will do a lot to keep future people from getting into this hobby at least for the 9X and some XP era builds.

[@Cyberdeamon]

I had an AGP FX5200 on a P3 600 back when Hitman II was relatively new. Never had any problems with games.

[@8bitbubsy]

Just a note to people that want to use legacy IRQ7 for Sound Blaster: This IRQ slot is often used for the printer port (LPT), so you might want to change the LPT IRQ to 5 in the BIOS first.

[@philscomputerlab]

Good point. I usually disable all the COM and LPT resources in the BIOS.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Yeah, I noticed. Gave the sound card IRQ 5 so my DexDrive can use IRQ7.

[@aceofhearts573]

Great video. Remember playing a lot of those games in high school and then in college....but you forgot to play MechWarrior

[@tahustvedt]

My X58 workstation is running at over 4 GHz now with a Xeon and GTX 1080. When i upgrade the system and replace it I'm going to try my FX5500 PCI in it and see what works and what it does with a 4+ GHz CPU.

[@dallesamllhals9161]

OH DEAR! CPU Bottlenecks for sure...

[@Environ47]

Interesting choice. I went with the Voodoo series for that build. I would realy like to see that 5500 on a more modern system and compared to others. Right now i`m messing arround with the 5500 on a P4.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Sounds interesting. I'm guessing a Northwood on socket 478 with 2.2-2.8 GHz... But how about "the 3x5.5k build" with a Geforce FX 5500 and a Voodoo 5 5500, running with a Pentium 4 HT on 2.75 GHz (2750 MHz * 2 = 5500 MHz)

[@Loadedzerk]

HappyBeezerStudios - by Lord_Mogul I actually built a socket 478 retro rig last month lol. Has the 2.8ghz p4, 1gb ram and a Fx5200 256mb pci fanless model by PNY. Half life 2 is actually playable on it and Unreal tournament 2004 looks and runs great on medium settings. Also runs halo 1 great. I love it.

[@rasz]

hl2 playable? UT2004 great? dude cmon. You get what, 8 fps in HL2 DX9? ~20 fps in DX8? :( 30fps in UT2004? Geforce 4 MX440 gets same performance in that game :(

[@jhesski]

At the end, you talk about other OS's. I remember back in the day reading the Windows NT 3dfx drivers were faster. I'd be interested to see if it was really that big of an improvement. I also remember there were no native USB drivers for Windows NT so it can be a pain to use. I have a 3rd party USB driver someplace if you are interested I could see if I can find it.

[@ciplogic]

There are IDT CPUs which are not yet tested by you, especially Cyrix III, Via C3, Ezra, and so on. These CPUs are "basically" a 486 with very high frequency and instruction extensions (most importantly they would support AMD's 3DNow!). Take care that Cyrix III has no L2 cache (like original Celeron) and Via C3 starts with 64K L2 cache. They also have integrated graphics with the same technology as S3.

[@ciplogic]

Yes, I agree. Make sure that though we talk with a weaker than Cyrix. Via when they bought Cyrix, they used just the name Cyrix, but the actual core was an IDT core from Cyrix-III. The "original" Cyrix architecture was still alive for at least another decade as AMD's Geode CPUs (which are mostly used in embedded).

[@hitachiricefucker7813]

Nothing.

[@ciplogic]

Let's be clear about historical facts at least: - Nexgen was bought by AMD and their next "Nx686" was becoming K6, not K7 - Rise MP6 was similar with a modern architecture (and closer to Cyrix 6x86, or Cyrix M2) but I don't know any reason why it was the base of borrowing of K7 - the CPU which was though used as a base to K7 and the AMD engineers did use even the same design in their bus EV6, was the DEC's Alpha, a server 64 bit CPU. Many Alpha engineers joined AMD after. www.tomshardware.com/reviews/athlon-processor,121-12.html

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

THe chips that came after the C7 they highly improved the FPU performance. And they can beat certain models of Intels Atom CPUs.

[@hitachiricefucker7813]

Ciprian Khlud My bad, I mixed up the facts. Yet I didn't said the Rise mp6 was the base of K7, I thought it was the the Nexgen Nx586. And I'm using the name "Nx586" because the Nx686 was just an enhanced Nx586, keeping the very efficient internal superscalar RISC architecture, that AMD then borrowed to make their own next generation of CPU. The Rise mp6 design was bought by SiS to make low-power low-cost x86 solutions for set top boxes and thin client computers. Sorry for skipping one AMD gen!

[@csedron]

que juego espectacular el Gods (1991) me costo muchisimo terminarlo en esa epoca. Genial el equipo !!

[@ilcilc2910]

The FX series of cards were abysmal for when they were made. One of the biggest issues was with shader performance. Compared to other cards of the time shader performance was subpar. I personally had an FX 5600 and I cursed that expensive heater every day.

[@mattafaak]

The heat situation with the GeForce 5/FX series was a major issue, especially on the top end cards. It was a tough time for Nvidia, as they were toying around with some recently-acquired 3DFX technologies at the time.

[@IvanBoskovic808]

Not a single solution from 3Dfx is present in Nvidia FX cards....Nvidia only used trademarks from acquired 3Dfx such as SLI ...

[@Soonjai]

I had a FX 5600, the 256MB flavour, and it was the worst experience I ever had with a GPU. It´s performance was all over the place, FarCry, outside areas ran fine for the most part with fairly high-ish details, however those indoor levels like that shipwreck at the beginning of the game had to be dialed down to the lowest settings to get playable framerates. I replaced it with a GeForce 6600GT as soon as I was able to get my hands on one.

[@GreatGodSajuuk]

Oh boy the FX5500, I had this cursed thing it turned out UT2004 and half-life 2 actually ran BETTER on a Geforce 2 MX 64Mb than on the FX, same happened when I tried Dawn of War.

[@9800xt256mb]

It was FX series, and that is why it called FX.

[@icalexander]

The K6-III with 128MB ram will run XP just fine. I had a machine with a K6 II that did it for a few years for me

[@sersoft_corp]

No thermal paste? Madness!

[@tamasvarga4867]

Absolutely barbaric.

[@fss1704]

jizz, i'd put at least a little drop of vegetal oil, that doesn't cost a cent and works as well as thermic paste. i've used vegetal oil for 10 years now, especially on dry thermal paste.

[@phreapersoonlijk]

I was very surprised by that to be honest. A 150MHz overclock on a 400MHz CPU, especially the K6-III, really needs not only good paste but a good cooler. I used the Alpha PAL6035 heatsink with a VERY loud fan on my K6-III 450. It did a great job, but jeez, that thing was so very loud.

[@philscomputerlab]

1.6 V ultra low voltage embedded version. The + chips are mobile CPUs.

[@michalm2528]

Long time ago i have AMD K-2 processor with 350 MHz clock speed and i overclock to 400 MHz without thermal paste. I used this computer for almost 2 years with no issue :)

[@Laykun9000]

The reason people hate the FX 5000 series is because of their poor architectural design that lead to either abysmal performance of terrible quality. In DX9 you're only required to have 24bit precision in your floating point math to be considered full precision, which the radeon 9000 series did really well at, they have good native 24bit precision, an excellent architectural trade off to get more performance and decent quality out of less transistors. The GeForce FX 5000 did either 16bit or 32bit precision and it was dog slow at 32bit precision, this meant that nvidia often had app specific driver hacks to force shader precision to 16bits on FP calculations causing awful banding/artifacts in some of the shader effects. When I say precision I'm not talking about colour format, I'm talking about the precision of the internal floating point calculations for the pixel shaders that each card runs to compute the final colour. Both FX 5000 and Radeon 9000 have no problem outputting 32bit colour to the screen. Here's a good example of what I mean in Far Cry 1 img.tomshardware.com/uk/2004/11/10/thg_graphics_card_buyers_guide/example-image-quality.jpg

[@Laykun9000]

In this build obviously none of these factors matter as the CPU is holding everything back. Seems like it makes a perfect DOS gaming box card.

[@rasz]

S3 Trio also makes a great DOS gaming card, this is a weak argument to defend crappy FX :)

[@EgoShredder]

I liked my Leadtek WinFast A350XT TDH FX5900XT AGP card bought in 2004, and used it a lot up until April 2012. I used this first in a ASUS TUSL2-C + Celeron 1200 based system, but the CPU and RAM etc were a bottleneck for the card. In 2005 I moved the card to an ABIT AS8 + Pentium 4 640 system and that was a good combination. I also for a short time had a few FX5200 cards but they were a bit underpowered even upon release.

[@antwanarmstrong5987]

I have the fx 5900ultra version of that card it runs Well and is quiet compered to reference fx cards.

[@tyttuut]

I've got an FX5500 in my Pentium III machine, and it's worked pretty well for me. The card I bought was brand new and unopened, which was cool.

[@philscomputerlab]

Nice, yea it's a good little card with DX9 support, VGA, DVI and decent enough performance.

[@PhAyzoN]

Hey Phil, looking at your 3DMark results (12:06), how on earth did you score 2944 in 2000? I have a setup with a K6-2+ @ 560 (5x112MHz), 128MB PC133, and an AGP FX5500 and I'm only scoring around 1950. I suspected a weird 112MHz FSB issue, but my score is even worse (around 1750) at 5.5x100MHz. My 99 scores are similar to yours, and my 2001 score is much higher. I can't imagine the K6-III's additional L2 makes THAT much of a difference.

[@philscomputerlab]

The III+ has double CPU Cache compared to II+ and quite a bit faster! bet this accounts for the difference. Also make sure you have fastest RAM timings, a PC133 CL2 module should do the fastest BIOS timings at 100 MHz. 128 MB is the way to go...

[@ViperBenchmarks]

you could try NFS porsche

[@9800xt256mb]

Works well back in time on K6-2-416@83fsb and Radeon SDR PCI. Up to 1600x1200 as i remember.

[@carreragt339]

yeah please try it with the fx5500 and the voodoo 3

[@m9078jk3]

Screamer 2 looks great here.I don't see low frames (near freezes) in this video which is something I've seen in past videos of yours.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yes this CPU is strong enough to run it smoothly, even at 640x480 and 16 bit colours.

[@BCProgramming]

What do you mean when you say the "Drivers are too new for my liking"? Is that just a preference for older software or were you referring to the issues you mention regarding DX? I used a 5500FX for several years and don't remember any problems with older DX Software, however I was also running Windows XP.

[@philscomputerlab]

With that I mean that using drivers from like a year after a game got released, you usually have the least issues. The more time passes, the more potential issues can arise. So if you're running a 1998 game and your driver is from 2008, then you will likely run into more issues.

[@LuisMorales-xv7yy]

oh, the fx5500... my dream gpu on those times when i had a fx 5200.

[@RuruFIN]

FX 5500 is just a FX 5200 with higher clocks.

[@talonfluff]

What do you think about my retro/modern gaming pc. Fx-8320 oc to 4.8 GHZ 16 GB of ram so 2x AMD R9 270x in crossfire 3 1TB segate HDD in RAID 0 for win 10 and an older WD 160 GB for XP Windows xp and windows 10

[@Spolupyo]

Wouldn't a PCI sound card be better suited for that system? using the ISA slot may be slowing your Windows games (albeit just a little bit) maybe?

[@philscomputerlab]

No and I've tested a massive sound card roundup on SS7 last year. Surprising outcomes :)

[@philscomputerlab]

Check it out: kzbin.info/www/bejne/inSTYqifrtp9rqs

[@camjohnson2004]

Like to see you use a AGP video card instead of the PCI one as AGP offers greater bandwidth than PCI

[@pokey4200]

wow! this the same setup I built after watching your 4 in 1 retro build. only difference I couldn't find that motherboard so I went with a ga-5smm...

[@pokey4200]

my 5500 came with a driver cd and so far no issues. it's a multi card driver disc if you'd like an image of it...

[@Jerkwad152]

I never had much in the way of trouble getting AGP cards to work with VIA chipset boards. Bad things could sometimes happen on ALI chipset boards though.

[@AdmiralDentash]

Great Video I had the same Mother board back in the day and the fx5500 brings back so many memory's

[@javiertw89]

Ohh nice PC! I remember the FX 5500 was a dream for me when I was younger!

[@RuruFIN]

For me, it was a nightmare.

[@valparaisosting]

@@RuruFIN Jaj would like to run the 45.23 driver instead of the 56.64 to see if improves performance. The 45.23 seems not to be supported but Phil could use it

[@simbin.]

+PhilsComputerLab you convinced me a while back to get the same CPU and motherboard (just needs recapped). Will you please share your jumper settings for 550MHz - any more tips, tricks or special drivers for ultimate stability? Now I just need a Voodoo 3500 but I may give up and use a different card like you did in this video.

[@philscomputerlab]

The jumper settings are written on the board. You just set the clock speed, voltage and multiplier.

[@simbin.]

+PhilsComputerLab I'm a little rusty but I think 5.5x @ 1.6v XXO XOOXO sound right? thanks

[@philscomputerlab]

Yes start with that. If you do run into stability issues, try 1,7V and more if you need. These CPUs are just binned, so they run fine with higher voltages.

[@simbin.]

+PhilsComputerLab Cool thanks. What's funny, I was just rewatching the video and verified same jumper settings. Why didn't I think of that earlier lol :-)

[@betamax80]

Have you covered an early Aztech Sound Galaxy card in any reviews Phil? I didn't know about their secret ability to hardware-emulate Covox Speech Thing / Disney Sound Source, as well as AdLib and SB Pro 2.0 - you have to check the cards carefully before buying but there's a good list on Vogons. I'm debating between one of these (used, bare) or an Audician 32 Plus - both are similarly priced.

[@philscomputerlab]

Haven't got a single Aztech I'm afraid. The Audician 32 is a no brainer IMO.

[@MrJmannik]

The reason the FX series of cards is so disliked is due to its inability to properly support certain directx features, using driver tricks to improve performance at the expense of image quality. I remember getting ATi cards (9000, 9600pro, 9600xt and finally a 9800pro) due to these issues.

[@philscomputerlab]

Ah I see. Hopefully we can change the perception for retro gaming :)

[@MrJmannik]

it wasn't perception... it was just the way the chip was optimized. the refresh chips (5600, 5900, 5900 ultra) were improved but still didnt have the image quality of the ATi cards. A quick google of 9800pro vs 5900 ultra will net you the information showing this. I remember it clearly because that era was when I started buying my own higher end cards. Interestingly the next generation I swapped to nvidia (6600gt for 3 weeks while I waited for my 6800gt to show up)

[@QuadTubeChannel]

If I recall, you could also turn some of those Radeon 9800 Pro cards into the faster 9800 XT.

[@georgez8859]

Thank you Phil, Is Thermal Paste Necessary on the CPU`s

[@alucardhellsing9640]

Love your test bench

[@JarrodCoombes]

Fun fact, Nvidia bought 3dFX and used their engineers and the R&D from 3dFX to actually work on and create the FX series of cards. So the FX5500 is basically a 3dFX card since it was made by the same people who made the Voodoo3.

[@philscomputerlab]

In some parallel universe these cards support the Glide API. How cool would that have been.

[@MrKillswitch88]

In a few ways that lived on to be the much loved GF6 and 7 that is now slowly becoming expensive on eBay.

[@andrewglass1721]

i would look for the tnt2 pci with 32 gbs with the nv 30 drivers , it should stop the driver issues

[@philscomputerlab]

They are hard to find and quite expensive it seems.

[@Dep_SurgNo2]

Why do you play games that would go on the pentium 233 MMX in 640x480, and some even on the IBM 80386?

[@Martin-sk5df]

I wonder how much impact different sound solutions have on the performance.

[@philscomputerlab]

I've tested this last year!

[@philscomputerlab]

Check it out: Check it out: kzbin.info/www/bejne/inSTYqifrtp9rqs

[@Soonjai]

Would a coparsion to the AGP Version be possible? Considering you hit a CPU limit in some of the Test that should be done on a faster System (P4 or AthlonXP), I´m really interested to see how much the PCI Interface holds these cards back.

[@philscomputerlab]

I don't have one, but I doubt there will be any difference as the CPU is really limiting the performance.

[@JoshSonic]

Ahh... the FX 5500. I remember using that on my old crappy Compaq Presario machine back in 2009. That thing had a 2.4ghz Celeron (socket 478) and no AGP or PCIE slot. BTW, Intel's integrated graphics were completely worthless back then.

[@playtech7165]

I love screamer 2 and Screamer Rally

[@ph1losopher]

I have a matrix g450 pci on a p200mmx, I wonder how it compares... also, Phil, how do you run glquake on non-cooperation hardware?

[@philscomputerlab]

I've tested Matrox cards on Socket 7 a while ago here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/inqzpYeDaZppmbM If GLQuake causes issues I would use a source port to run it!

[@mikehays0070]

I have 3 Super Socket7 boards and none of them support 1.6 volts. 2.0 volts is the lowest setting I can get. Are there many boards that would support 1.6 volts?

[@philscomputerlab]

I don't think there are many, but the GA-5AX goes as low as 1.3 V!

[@dave4shmups]

So what’s a good ATI card to use in place of the FX 5500?

[@SuzanneKowalski]

Is there any advantage at this point of using a 3dfx card instead of something like the FX 5500?

[@philscomputerlab]

Hopefully I can talk about this in a future video.

[@SuzanneKowalski]

Great, thanks! :)

[@aceoyame2619]

You may be able to get 600 mhz. On a lot of mobos a 2x multiplier jumper is changed to 6x with k6-2's and I think 3''s as well

[@philscomputerlab]

I recommend not to go for 600 MHz. AMD stopped at ~ 570 for a reason, there is some sort of wall and I always needed a lot more voltage. If you really want to OC, play around with higher FSB options.

[@gravitone]

K6-III+ here running at stock voltage @600mhz 100mhz fsb on GA-5AX It would be great to see if these FX cards were limited by pci bandwidth and maybe even just suffer from low performance due to the low graphics card memory bandwidth or lack of rasterizing power. A comparison with a agp fx5200, agp fx5600 and fx5950 would clear up the questions nicely. There are lots of talks about agp issues with the ali aladdin V chipset, but I can confirm that at least the geforce 2 ultra runs without any issues with all agp features enabled (sideband adressing, agp 4x speed) Will try with some fx agp versions if I have some time.

[@aceoyame2619]

I ran mine with at that with a chomper core k6-2. Didn't take much too extra voltage from what I remember although I did need a slightly better heatsink than what I was using which was a tiny little nothing. These days I have a xeon E5450 pushed to 4.2 ghz and massive overvolts. Guess I got my overclocking start early lol. I agree with gravitone. It'd be really interesting to see those sorts of results.

[@aceoyame2619]

I remember trying to drop my Radeon 9550 and Geforce 4 mx 440se in my ss7 board back in the day but alas none of them wanted to play ball with the board I had. Instead I got stuck using a Rage 128 Pro in that thing which was ok.... but no show stopper thats for sure.

[@gravitone]

I think a lot of issues were fixed with later revision boards, chipset revisions, and chipset driver revisions. Im running a GA-5AX rev 4.1, and the last Ali AGP GART driver versions that was available, not sure about the exact version nr. though.

[@pedrof324]

A pentium 4 2.8ghz and a Fx-5500 is a good spec to a gaming PC?

[@AncapDude]

Tried to OC my K6-3+ 450 but 450 is already the stable limit. 🙈

[@betamax80]

How about testing for CPU-bottlenecking in GFX card on the SS7 platform Phil? For example that FX card, a Voodoo3, and maybe a Banshee:? I defent my Banshee choice as I reckon it's the correct match for SS7 and is also the "unloved stepchild" still available at realistic prices. Perhaps compared to a late Pentium 3 system? Thank you for covering the Audician 32 Plus in more detail.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

I think he did something similar with Voodoo 2 cards. and also the difference between different chips of the K6 family. But not in the way you discribed. And even though it has a 2D part, the Banshee still performs under Voodoo 2 performance. (Only one of the two texture units are enabled) A late Pentium 3 can easily eat a Voodoo 3 or 4. i guess a Banshee would be fine around the 400-500 MHz K6 lineup.

[@Microang]

These FX 5500 PCI cards WILL NOT work with a socket 7 board without AGP, I am speaking from experience as these cards come from Chinese vendors and use some AGP protocols not present in non AGP boards as PCI variants I don't belive existed when they were current chips. I have one and it will not even POST in a non AGP motherboard, I have 3 different socket 7 boards and a socket 5 and they're all a no go however the Geforce 6200 works as does the FX 5200. I will also say that the FX 5500 does work in AGP boards, like the one shown or in Athlon boards, etc.

[@philscomputerlab]

Thank your bringing this to my attention Angelito! My viewers are the best, nothing gets past you. I just tested the card with an Asus Socket 7 board and SIS chipset, and like you said, it isn't working. Glad I found out now, I can change the next video still. Still, it is a good option for SS7 boards with AGP issues and maybe regular Socket 7 is too slow anyway.

[@Microang]

Some socket 7 boards go to 83 and 100mhz FSB and can run k6-2/3s, like the PC Chips board I have in my baby AT build, and yes the card is overpowered however I had a PowerVR kyro 2 in a 486 100mhz (maybe it had an overdrive I can't remember) when my Pentium 4 PC died for a while and was able to run GTA Vice CIty relatively well which you couldn't otherwise do. We did many crazy things back in the day when this hardware was expensive and you needed something to get you by... :D

[@gravitone]

Have you tried any fx or later era AGP cards on this board phill? The ones using external molex for extra power should be fine. I'm going to have to verify to be sure, but a lot of ss7 boads probably used the 5V power rail to supply the AGP slot. I think a lot of the issues could have stemmed from the lack of weak power supplies with too much voltage droop or too much noise.

[@philscomputerlab]

GPU-Z does report the second revision on my card!

[@chanakasat1]

I also experienced this on a socket 370 gigabyte board with no AGP slot... And I tried 6200 and it works perfectly!

[@ML2011ML]

Does FX5500 official driver support AMD 3Dnow instruction set?

[@philscomputerlab]

Hmm not sure.

[@Obie327]

Hey PhilsComputerLab... Just found my FX 5500 pci 128 mb version. Since you are using an older K3 chip i might try this on 1.4ghz p4 (Gateway, 768mb Rdram) Curious to see this work.. I was wondering if i should use Windows 98se or XP? I'm thinking about XP (service pack 2 or higher) My thoughts are if I do go older retro i could use a Voodoo 3 2000 for legacy DOS and earlier system. Thanks for the video!

[@philscomputerlab]

It works better with Windows 98, for XP it's a bit slow.

[@Obie327]

@@philscomputerlab I'm seeing this problem with service pack 3 installed... How about Windows 2000 sp4? The older OS might not support a 40 gig hard drive? Thanks for your help.

[@ranukehshiga6328]

Where can i buy this ? (a good super socket 7 and the K6-III+ ) Also use RamDisk, using the ram memory as a hard drive, 'insane loadings speed' could make an interesting video :P

[@RetroTinkerer]

humm so what are the best options for win98 (value) for pIII 833 a pci only system so I can run this time period games?

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Voodoo 3 2000/3000 PCI. (Maybe even a V4 4500 PCI) Or maybe V2 SLI, but they need an additional 2D card for the desktop. With that you should scale well into the 700-1000 MHz range and reach into DX7 territory. Besides that, I'm not sure of other good PCI bound cards from that time period, but there are Geforce FX 5200 manufactured with PCI. But in terms of value clearly such a PCI FX 5200. Voodoo cards are sought after, and the geforce lacks support for glide, so pick your poison.

[@rasz]

pci only P3???

[@RetroTinkerer]

rasz yep a free system with igp and PCI I also have an Athlon but that one is not for DOS

[@OLDROBOT]

Hi Phil ! Where you get this awesome open case ?

[@philscomputerlab]

Tech Station from the USA.

[@OLDROBOT]

Thanks

[@WaybackTECH]

You know, one of the things I have done with a couple heatsinks is to stick on a thermal pad to the heatsink so that I can use them for testing and not have to waste thermal compound and keeps things cleaner. Slightly longer-term testing I have some cheap "gold" thermal compound in a huge tube that works quite well for most tasks. The reason ( as far as I can remember from "yesteryear" ) the FX series was a power hungry, hot running, and not any faster in most cases than the Geforce 4 series. Being the first Directx9 GPU from nVidia, and not surprisingly due to nVidia marketing, was expected to be quite the upgrade from the GF4. I think a lot of the problems was nvidia rushed the FX to market, and never got it working right. I remember the FX series was not as fast as the Geforce 4, and the FX5800 was the only version that somewhat ok for DX9 games. The FX5900 and FX5950 were sort of the last gasp push from nvidia to keep the FX series relevant to the ATI 9800 GPU. There were some other issues with the FX series as well, and was just generally considered nvidia's worst GPU ever. Licking their wounds, nvidia got their shit together and made a very good GPU in the Geforce 6 series and the later GPU's to follow.

[@Andrzej_Szpadel]

FX series was hated because of very slow DX9 performance, basically every game that was using any pixel shaders (bump mapping, bloom etc.) was tanking its performance, i remember when i launched FarCry 1 with shader settings more than low (bump mapping/normal mapping started to appear on textures) i got

[@Just_a_Lad]

Actually FX series had good DX8 performance. I played FarCry with an old FX5200 on medium settings at about 30fps. Whenever FX series used DX8 there was no probs and it wasn't dx7. I'm not defending Nvidia but there was not many DX9 titles out there, nor there was such a big of a difference between shaders 1.3 and 2.0 to be honest.

[@FairPlay137]

Hi, I'm stuck on my Windows 98 PC build: My AMD K6-2/350AFR has a core voltage of 2.2 volts, while my motherboard can only go down to 2.8V (FIC PA-2011). I'm a newbie at this, so apologies if this is a dumb question, but if I keep the jumpers configured so it runs at 2.8 V, would a good fan be enough? (I bet yes, but I need to make sure)

[@philscomputerlab]

I would not recommend such a high voltage. Are you sure that boards supports that processor? I would stick with a MMX 233 to be honest.

[@FairPlay137]

Looked it up; it doesn't support it. :(

[@FairPlay137]

Guess I'm gonna have to stick with my Cyrix 6x86 (which it DOES support) until I can get something better. (Tested; works, but it refuses to detect any video cards, which I'm not sure whether it's linked to my mobo, my graphics card (unlikely, as it worked on another non-FIC mobo), or my CPU, as it refused to detect video cards on THREE boards, two of them being AT (both have the same model number, but different revisions))

[@FairPlay137]

Dunno why they shipped a K6-2 with the mobo; likely a mistake or the seller didn't know it wasn't supported by this motherboard.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea that happpens. The MMX 233 is what I would go for, it's hands down the best option.

[@TheSynrgy1987]

great thing about the Audician 32 plus is you can still get them new in box for relatively cheap on ebay, although No thermal paste is perhaps a bad example to set :(, i dont think these older AMD CPUs have thermal cut offs, they can and will cook themselves.

[@philscomputerlab]

Remember, it's a 1.6 ultra low voltage version :) That Audician 32 Plus is a no brainer. I think I have 4 of these now :)

[@TheSynrgy1987]

True, guess even with it being a low voltage part, i wouldn't trust it without some thermal paste to even things out for any extended period, Still need to get my hands on a K6-III part to play with.

[@Deltaforcemember]

Also could we get a look at your Capture PC

[@philscomputerlab]

Done a build video on it.

[@philscomputerlab]

Check it out: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eGGogIODqr9_h68

[@GamuzaMF]

Nice vid. Makes me wonder how much more energy would a normal K6-III 550 Mhz would consume and if there would be any difference in performance.

[@philscomputerlab]

Greatly depends on the voltage. Running the chip at 1.6V compared to 2.0V should yield a nice power saving.

[@sjogosPT]

The biggest bootleneck on your system is the pci bus. Agp 2x version would give you almost 2x the score. Remember: agp 1x is two times faster than pci. Agp2x is at least 4 times faster than pci

[@philscomputerlab]

It's the CPU actually. And you don't want to use AGP,, I'm sure I mentioned this in the video. If not it's because of unstable AGP chipset.

[@SpecialAgentOso]

ah the bad ass k6-3+, overclocked to 600mhz to compete with the Pentium 3. I had an awesome gemini series motherboard.

[@QuadTubeChannel]

I had the 400MHz version and straight out the box it did 450..500..then 550 MHz. All this using a cheap Athlon XP cooler and budget white paste. I did try for 600 MHz and I can't remember what stopped me but it wouldn't go that far. I also read stories about people getting the K6-III+ to 700 MHz and beyond. I think it's amazing what AMD did with the Super Socket 7 technology.

[@af235]

keep up the great work! this really takes me back!

[@philscomputerlab]

Thank you!

[@ibm5155]

Tomb Raider 2 works? Also nice driver, I don't see any server overhead over the gpu like the radeon 7200 did for me

[@philscomputerlab]

I don't see why TR 2 wouldn't work. AFAIK it uses Direct3D.

[@magisterxmilitum]

I wonder how well a low end DX11 card like the GT520/610 PCI would run on such a build with Windows 7.

[@kargaroc386]

What would be a good cheap PCI soundcard for a retro late 1990s PC?

[@philscomputerlab]

Good and cheap? Tricky. Good are Vortex 2 and Audigy 2 ZS. Cheap is the Audio PCI and Live!

[@kargaroc386]

I don't really need any fancy stuff, just a card that sounds good and can drive headphones without an amplifier, for use in Windows 98 and Win2K. Currently, said PC has no sound card at all.

[@gravitone]

Don't forget a lot of these "fancy" cards have great features for headphones. Vortex2 has great positional 3d audio for example. These cards also support hardware acceleration for directsound and directsound 3d, which a lot of games relied on. Depending on the game this can give quite a large fps boost compared to all software audio path of cheaper cards.

[@aurimasbruzas6632]

I like your open PC case it could be with your channel logo or something

[@nicholaswilliams1197]

I imagine that, down the road, you are going to play around with some Athlon Slot A's, correct?

[@Kyle1444]

fantastic, looks like one of the chinese made fx5500 brand new. I wonder how they will hold up with time, anyway its nice for retro builds, to be able to buy such a card with the perfect legacy support

[@Up8Y]

This build is weird. I like it

[@fundude53]

where do u get them testbed cases from

[@RickKoretoff]

What kind of open bench is that? Is it custom or a kit?

[@philscomputerlab]

Tech Station. I bought it from the US.

[@nix123ism]

I used a PCI ATI 9250 in a super socket 7 build, the motherboard had an AGP slot and tried a multitude of 3dfx and Nvidia/ATI cards of the correct era for the build and could never get it to run stable, I ended up putting the build on hold, thinking the motherboard, cpu was flaky, until one day I came across the PCI ATI 9250 card in a pile of my junk, plugged it in and , hey presto, all crashes and problems I was having disappeared, performance was ok as well!

[@philscomputerlab]

Nice, this sums up my experiences also. Although I never had huge issues with the Voodoo cards I must say. But Nvidia AGP cards, especially the early ones always game me issues.

[@nix123ism]

Voodoo 3 card I tried was ok but I could never get my banshee card to work with most games without crashing

[@philscomputerlab]

Both Voodoos can draw quite some juice. I haven't gotten power draw results yet, hopefully a clear picture emerges. But many boards had issues with Voodoo AGP cards because they couldn't handle the power draw.

[@xan1242]

Could you recommend me a video card for my Pentium MMX 133 machine with 64 megs of ram? Currently the S3 Trio64UV+ inside it really stinks in Windows, it's rockin in DOS mighty fine tho so I was wondering if I could put something that will cover 3D rendering and Windows a bit better.

[@philscomputerlab]

S3 gets my vote also.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Or look for C cirrus Logic card. They were pretty widely used under DOS. Some of the fastest cards for running DOS would be the often used Tseng ET4000 and the rather rare ET600. (Got a Hercules Dynamite 128/Video with the later chip still waiting for it's use) But the S3 and Cirrus chips have way less issues. They are accounted for like for Sound Blaster sound, basically everyone had them.

[@rasz]

Were there any 3D Windows games you would really want to play on P133? get a Voodoo 1 and bask in the glory of 1997-98 3D gaming, it was the only card worth getting until AGP and >200MHz CPUs came out, and even then it Voodoo 2 took its place as the king of the hill.

[@JimGaminGHD]

Name of your pc case?

[@kght222]

people don't like the fx series because it was about as powerful as the geforce 4 series but implemented a new version of direct x a year after the geforce 4 came out. there were games you literally couldn't play with the highest end geforce 4 card and they would run fine on the cheapest fx. a year to year shift like that is a nightmare on both ends, consumer and producer.

[@TheVanillatech]

Strange graphical glitches in Total Annihilation. But surprisingly awesome performance given the level of hardware the game requires. TA was years ahead of it's time. It wasn't until fast Pentium 4's came out that you could LAN the game properly with the full 250 unit cap and not get massive stutter. TA came into its own almost a decade after release, on Pentium 4's or Core 2 Duos, with the 1500 unit limit modifier at 1280x1024 ... and it was just amazing. Back when the game released I had a Pentium 200 vanilla, which was a very nice rig at the time, and it barely ran the game at 640x480 with shadows and shading options turned off. You would build your army of destruction and lay waste to enemy polygons, the battle largely out of your direct control as the AI and explosions sapped your PC of everything but it's heartbeat, your CPU fighting to stay alive! One time my friend Alec made 40 Mavericks and marched them toward my base. I only had 15 vamps after a misguided tech switch and I knew I didn't have time (or the framerate to micro) to take his robot army down, so I launched my single nuke into the middle of his monstrous metal machine of death. The PC froze slightly before the nuke hit and I gritted my teeth ... then the screen flashed in a blaze of reds and whites and the little speakers screamed in an atomic death call. Then nothing. My PC reset itself. It just couldn't handle it. I think that P200 knew that what just went down was so epic, so utterly devastating it had to crash itself just to say alive. Alec and I declared a draw, and 2 weeks later we both bought Pentium III 550's.

[@IndygoEEI]

Thanks for the review phil as I've been eyeing that exact GPU card you covered. BTW for those of you watching, I've seen that card for sale on Ebay in AGP format. It's available on Newegg PCI and AGP flavors but is more expensive. It seems to be manufactured in China and it's amazing that this card is still being made in 2017! Also I have MX 4700 AGP card on AMD Athlon 3.0 Ghz Win98SE machine. I have Nvidia BFG 5500 and Jaton 6200 PCI cards on hand. I am also running the latest drivers. I'm wondering if I should swap out the card or buy a lower spec card. Currently my games screen tear pretty bad and I need to fix that. Yes, the computer is scary fast but it's all we had in the collection of computers donated to us as my 2 Ghz Pentium 4's Motherboard died...

[@philscomputerlab]

For tearing try enabling v-sync.

[@Guillermo_XT]

Fx5500 Pci 256mb (AXLE) does not run in GA-586-TX3 with AMD K6-2 400. Got mine today and i had to send it back :-/

[@philscomputerlab]

That sucks :(

[@Guillermo_XT]

@@philscomputerlab I thought I could insert any pci card (not PCI-E) but it seems that there have to be some compatibility limitations? Specs: Ga586tx-3 Motherboard+Bios update Amd K6-2 400 (6x66mhz) 256mb SDRam Fastrack Ultra 100 Matrox Mystique + Diamond Monster 3D 4xUsb 2.0 Pci Card 80GB HDD

[@dallesamllhals9161]

​@@Guillermo_XT Sapphire Radeon 9250 (PCI, 128MB) = How to PIMP a socket 7.

[@charonunderground8596]

Very good video but missing comparison to pentium 3 with the same video card

[@92trdman]

Will you test Voodoo 2 and Aureal A3D 2.0 card again ?

[@philscomputerlab]

You're better off with Voodoo 3!

[@drzeissler]

Does the audician have "wdm" drivers for win98 ?

[@philscomputerlab]

VXD drivers under 9x. ME comes with WDM drivers and refuses to install the 9x VXD drivers if you try.

[@drzeissler]

That's REALLY BAD for me...or did I get you wrong? I do not want to install vxd-drivers under ME, I need wdm-drivers under 98se because of the cd-audio-emulation with deamon-tools.

[@drzeissler]

esupport.sony.com/BR/p/swu-download.pl?Change_Template=1&SMB=YES&session_id=afe6285b137395440e319e452681115e&upd_id=1757 ??

[@heyyitsultima]

Phil, do you have a K6-III+ you would be willing to sell? I have been searching for one for months now, and accidentally bought a K6-III when I first started my rig, and it's not quite living up to what I'd hoped it'd do. If not, I'll keep looking and thanks for the awesome videos man!

[@chrisrudi7162]

Hello Phil, great video. I have a 5200FX 128 PCI, then a 5500FX 256 PCI and a 6200 256 PCI card. I was so crazy to test these cards from the 486 DX2 66 to the Pentium 3. I have a lot with me on old systems with Intel Triton, VX, HX, NX etc. up to the LX / BX chipset no picture comes up. The PC starts up but the monitor remains dark. Even on old Pentium Pro and an old VIA Apollo VPX chipset, all tests were unsuccessful. Have you ever got such cards to work successfully on such old boards? If so, I would be happy to receive a tip. By the way, they work on newer boards from Socket 370. Therefore I rule out a defective one, especially since it is the case with all the cards mentioned. Many sizes from Germany, Chris

[@yosemite-e2v]

The boards they won't work with probably don't have 3.3 volts supplied to the PCI slots. I've never tried one of the newer FX 5500 cards (such as the one in this video) on my Asus TXP4, but the older FX 5200/5500 cards work quite well with it. With a K6-3+ at 500 MHz (6x83) 256 megs of RAM, and the 45.23 it will score 2,800 points in 3D Mark 2000, only 200 points lower than the Super 7 system in this video. The TX chipset has memory bandwidth that's only a little lower than my MVP3 motherboard with four bank memory interleave enabled (a feature the TX doesn't have) and 112 MHz FSB.

[@dallesamllhals9161]

Pretty sure that Socket 7 boards won't work with 'em? You need a Super 7.

[@Cognizance4]

In my SIS Super Socket 133 Mhz, the 5500 PCI doesn´t work :) It´s because the PCI Version is a 5500 AGP with a brigde chip to PCI, which means, the SIS Chipset, which doesn´t have support for AGP, doesn´t recognize it. I tried it a with a lot of those Card, it never worked :) The 5200 with almost same Chip doens´t have those limitations.

[@gvi341984]

How well does it handle the internet

[@QuadTubeChannel]

I ran a 400@550 MHz using Win 98SE and then XP Pro. This CPU handled them both well, especially the I/O performance which went through the roof compared to the K6-2 thanks to the 256K on-board L2 cache. However this is going back some years. I feel that it would struggle today from the start due to things like its lack of SSE support, limited memory capacity on the motherboard and a plethora of web pages that seem more interested in advertising that they are delivering the content you were actually looking for. Not sure how it would handle an alternative operating system. Sorry I can't give you a more definitive answer.

[@ND22M]

Phil, great video as always. but i would strongly suggest that you try windows 2000! XP is a memory hog and with only 768 mb of ram - maximum supported - you will quickly run into problems!

[@philscomputerlab]

We shall see :D

[@MrKillswitch88]

256 and 512mb was standard for greater part of the decade, amazing how long a bog standard p3 system was viable even for watching youtube until like 2009. SP3 is fine at least for me but with the updates the performance loss is just too much. Keep it off the net or on a small network and it will be lean enough. People often choose to run SP2 for slightly better performance.

[@ND22M]

Windows XP runs like a dog with 256mb of RAM or less! I remember upgrading my own system from windows 98SE to XP in 2002 and with 256mb 98SE was running like a champ (games included) while XP crawled! Even after upgrading to 512mb games ran better with 98SE than XP. I am talking strictly about RAM; I think the CPU will run XP just fine!

[@CobsTech]

25 views, anyways the reason why people don't like the FX5500 is because its not a GeForce, its supposed to be a Quadro card, which instantly brings in limitations and the fact that it uses PCI and not AGP or PCIe limits bandwidth, etc.

[@gerot201]

i had the same setup but i akso used a voodoo 3 for agp.

[@GiSWiG]

Nice vid, thanks for info on the Audician settings. Just goes to show that you gota watch every video cause ya never know what to expect! :-) (it would be nice to add that info to a 'tips' section on your site for the Audician.

[@philscomputerlab]

I know, there is so much I could add. Wish I had more time...

[@GiSWiG]

Hey, follow up videos/review are not a bad thing especially when you have new info to add.

[@philscomputerlab]

True, I've got two videos in the works around this project :)