I thought Northwood worked fine. Never used anything better than that with 98 though

I use P4 3.00E as the dualboot WinXp/WinME PC since 2005. This build is powerhouse for Win9x...
Drawbacks:
1) Several PC games aren't installing/working correctly because of the new CPU_ID code. Gulf War: Operation Desert Hammer and Pro Rally 2001 as examples.
2) Unfortunately it looks like Voodoo2 isn't working correctly too (very fast CPU?). There are freezes in some games.

My W98se/P4 setup is 533 fsb [so I could get a board with a Voodoo 5 compliant AGP slot] and PC333 ram. I monkeyed around with a number of Northwood cpu's and finally settled on the 3.067 though 2.8 was plenty fast for 3dfx games. And I couldn't resist the urge to max out the board with the extra 200mhz...

What video card do you have for 3dfx? Your motherboard is nice but the slot wont's run a V5 so I presume you have a V2, 3 or 4?

The most power-thirsty 3dfx/glide racing game I'm aware of is Grand Prix Legends [1998]. The original patched version with some period graphic upgrades runs great on the Northwood, but to max it out with the most recent hi-res mods I have it in my main W7 pc under a glide wrapper or in D3D mode.

Thanks for the advice, all of you experts that tread the path before me! I did score a nice Northwood 3.4 for uber-cheap on eGad. At the price, figured it was worth a shot, if it doesn't work out, still have the Prescott. As much as I love my vintage computer hobby and spend way too much disposable income on it, I can't stomach paying the $100+ prices for a 10-year-old P4EE.

I was running all this "stuff" in a 423 board (D850GB) w/ a maxed out 2.0GHz CPU and hungering for a Powerleap 478 adapter, but prices are crazy, and the good prices were usually missing the special bracket and heatsink, so I dropped back and punted. All the chips fell into place and after about a year I was able to find the new (in the box) 478 board (right after I had everything setup the way I wanted it...why can't I just leave stuff alone?) so I decided to try it. It will be nice to get rid of my el-cheapo Sil3114 PCI RAID running my SATA drives in favor of the on-board SATA, and I free up a PCI slot. If I'm feeling it, I'll shoehorn in additional SATA drives and use my SyncRAID card...for its 64MB cache and driverless install, and copy all of my favorite Win98 titles to the RAID array or use an old Logicraft CD-ROM emulator software I have and mount the images.

For video, I'm running a 6800 ULTRA AGP w/ 2x Black Magic Voodoo2 12MB, which worked well on the 423 board. I thought of trying to do the Geforce/Voodoo5 PCI dance, but it seemed like it would be a hassle. I like to hit the button and have at it, instead of messing with a VGA switch or splitter, etc. It would be supercool if I could somehow install some Erazor card and use my Revelator glasses on this machine as well, instead of having another computer for it. Oh well, might be a good multi-boot experiment someday.

Sound is your ubiquitous Vortex2 w/ XR385 board. I've spewed enough...thanks for listening.

That's a nice video setup - let us know how it goes with the Northwood 3.4 [must be 800fsb] on W98se and games... should be a beast.

Thx! Waiting to get all my parts in front of me...I'm anal that way! Lol!

7cjbill2 wrote:

Thx! Waiting to get all my parts in front of me...I'm anal that way! Lol!

Most freezing game for me is Serious Sam: the Second Encounter (in Voodoo2 compatibility mode). If I start any demo - there is a freeze after some time. The sound is working, the video is still, Ctrl+Alt+Del isn't working.
It looks like Voodoo2 isn't loving 800 MHz FSB... 🙁

The test PC is P4 3.00E/Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000/Windows ME/2 GB RAM (with MaxPhysPage=1FFFF, so the OS is using only 512 MB)/ATi Fury Pro/STB Voodoo2 12 MB (3.02.02 driver).

Well, time will tell when I get my system back up and running. Although, of all the games I have, I go back to the same few consistently and really hope I don't experience problems with those titles, particularly Dethkarz, Speedbusters, and Re-volt. Love those with my Interactiv FX wheel!