I've been working hard for past couple of days on my Athlon Voodoo2 SLI/GeForce4 ultimate gaming rig, and I finally got some decent results to share with you guys
So, let's get on with it... I've been meaning to make a single unit which would cover approx. 10yrs of retro gaming, somewhere along the line between 1994 and 2004. This obviously includes some of the older, DOS-based titles such as Carmageddon & Carmageddon Splat Pack, Grand Theft Auto & Grand Theft Auto London 1969 & similar along with the more recent ones, such as Half Life 2 but there was a catch - As we all know, running all these games off a single platform would have been impossible, which is why I came up with Dual-Boot feature, to have the best of both worlds! Having a single 40GB HDD, I made 2x 20GB partitions & installed Windows 98 (SE) on one and WinXP Home (SP1) on the other one. Most ppl would think that's easy enough, right? Well, better guess again!
The biggest challenge (at least for me, personally) was the driver issue, it's pretty difficult to have 3 video cards working together in pair, with 2 of them being from 1997 and 1 from 2003!
As a general rule with drivers & updates, everyone always recommends using the latest version, right? Once again, wrong! I've tried using the latest nVidia Forceware with my GeForce4 4200Ti but as you'd imagine, I've been having loads of weird problems with the older games. Games like Colin McRae Rally 1 & 2 for example and many other titles! So, I had to go back to the drawing board & tried with different version this time, 29.42 which kinda worked... Until I got to install Need for Speed 3, 4 & 5 (Porsche Unleashed), that's when all the hell broke loose. Game(s) randomly crashed, or even hanged with nothing but the black screen upon loading & similar. Eventually (after lots & lots of testing), I've settled for 45.23 from 09 October 2003. It seems to be a compromise between the old & new, right in the middle!
Technically speaking, we're looking at the system with 3 video cards, featuring previously mentioned nVidia GeForce4 4200Ti Titan series, hooked up to a pair of 3dfx Voodoo2 1000 cards (12mb), working in SLI. As most of you know, V2 cards had 3 processing units, which means this system has 7 in total! True, V2 cards had different kind of processors (as someone recently corrected me), but it STILL has 7 processing units all together, which I find seriously fascinating
Motherboard is ASRock K7VT2 Socket A running AthlonXP 1800+ @ stock 1533MHz. It has 2x modules of 256MB DDR400 which is unfortunately running @ 266 due to motherboard limitation. Same thing with 4200Ti, the card itself is AGP8X, but it's only running at 4X...
Cooling solution is pretty awesome (if I may say so), consisted of Cooler Master Jet7 CPU cooler which looks like jet engine (has a speed controller) and a single 120mm blue LED intake fan, blowing air across all 3 video cards. Of course, the fan is primarily here because of the Voodoo cards, as 4200Ti already has a fan of its own, along with hefty looking heatsink
Case is also Cooler Master, midi-tower with front USB & audio ports (all working, of course), you may have already seen it in my previous posts. In fact, I even have mass-storage drivers for Win98, so that I can use flash drives & external hard drives!
If you take into consideration that Voodoo2 cards DO NOT work under AMD architecture (not without the special drivers, that is) and also the gaming time era, covered by the hardware inside this thing, I'm pretty happy with how the things turned out in the end
40GB of pure classics in all shapes & sizes!
I'll be uploading pics shortly, but DO keep in mind that once again, I'll be going with Imagebam. I did try with alternative services, but unfortunately none of the other ones support multi-upload, sending all 68pics at once for example. (or if they do, I would need to register in order to use their services) Soooo, sorry guys. If you can recommend something better, I'm all ears!
