For two years now, 3DNews has had a “Computer of the Month” column, in which we consider the optimal hardware configuration in accordance with the needs of the buyer and the thickness of his wallet. But after all, our site has existed since 1997, and then we had not yet invented any “computers of the month”. What if we mentally move into the distant past of the IT industry (if not to the very beginning of 3DNews, but, say, twenty years ago) and imagine what combination of devices was possible in those days? On one condition - we will not constrain ourselves with financial limits and assemble such a computer for which there is enough imagination, if only the hardware remains within the limits of that era. And then we will check what the then dream system is capable of in the most demanding games of the turn of the millennium, because our goal is an uncompromising gaming PC.
Single processor platform on Pentium III
When choosing a computer by the standards of 1999-2000, you can go in one of two directions, taking an Intel platform with a Pentium III CPU or an alternative from AMD with an Athlon CPU. The archaeologist of the IT industry is faced with a difficult choice, because both architectures at that time were equally good in order to build a powerful gaming computer. In addition, AMD chips based on the Thunderbird core had such an advantage as motherboards with support for DDR SDRAM memory. The most knowledgeable readers may notice that there are boards with DDR or even RDRAM slots for the Pentium III, but this is still exotic and hard to find on sale. Be that as it may, we opted for the Pentium III - mainly for sentimental reasons, because just in 2000, Intel made a bet on the new NetBurst architecture and Pentium 4 chips. And the later releases of the Pentium III, thus, drew a line under an entire era, while Athlon on the K7 architecture has been successfully developed further.
Having closed the issue with the platform, you need to decide on a specific modification of the central processor. If we are not going to deviate from the round date "20 years ago" and respect the strict time frame of 1999, the choice comes down to one of the models on the Coppermine core. But let's still expand the conditions of the problem. What if we push the Pentium III platform to its limits? Then the choice of CPU is obvious - it's a Pentium III-S on the Tualatin core with a nominal frequency of 1,43 GHz! And the motherboard matches it - Abit ST6 on the Intel 815EP chipset. Old-timers remember that this is one of the best Pentium III overclocking boards, so we did not miss the opportunity to overclock the CPU to 1,68 GHz. The RAM slots occupied three PC-133 modules with a total capacity of 384 MB - the board can master twice as much memory, but this is not necessary for gaming tests.
|  |  |
The Abit ST6 board lacks a built-in network card, because at that time a computer without Internet access was completely normal. A 3Com 3C905B-TX 100 Mbps adapter that matched the year of manufacture solved this problem. But in terms of the disk subsystem, we cheated and connected the SSD using the PROMISE Technology SATA300 TX2Plus controller: the speed of loading the OS and programs from an IDE disk is not the experience that you want to experience decades later.
Dual processor platform on Pentium III
An Abit ST6 motherboard and an overclocked Pentium III-S - most of us could only dream of such a computer 20 years ago. But as time has shown, it was necessary to dream of a dual-core system. Of course, most programs for home PCs, not to mention games, in those years could not use two central processors, but there was such an opportunity in hardware, and now we have taken advantage of it.
The plans for this article originally featured a two-socket ASUS CUV4X-DL motherboard - officially it is not compatible with Tualatin chips, but it can accept two Pentium III-S after modifying the connectors (or using adapters). Alas, our copy turned out to be half dead, but an equivalent replacement turned up in the form of Intel SAI2 on the ServerWorks ServerSet III LE chipset. In addition, this board made it possible to gain 2 GB of RAM using four PC-133 register modules. Agree, this configuration already looks quite modern, especially with an SSD drive.
| | |
This platform has only one critical flaw - the lack of an AGP connector, so the choice of a graphics card for a two-headed Pentium III-S is significantly limited compared to Abit ST6. Fortunately, the SAI2 board not only provides standard 32-bit PCI slots, but also two 64-bit PCI-X slots, for which there are suitable video cards. We occupied one of them with an Adaptec ASR-2230SLP/256 RAID controller for the Ultra-320 SCSI bus and assembled a RAID-0 disk array from three Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 hard drives with a spindle speed of 15 rpm. Of course, even an array of three server 15th drives is not a rival of an SSD, but still, in terms of the speed of starting the OS and installing programs, RAID gives a huge advantage compared to a single hard drive.
| |
Video Cards
When selecting video cards for the test, we again focused more on a certain level of technology than on a strict time frame. The 1,43 GHz Pentium III-S processor appeared in 2002, not long before the release of the GeForce 3 and Radeon 8500. But programmable shaders are already a giant watershed in the history of the GPU, before which we decided to stop. On the other hand, video cards from the time when the very term Graphics Processing Unit (which, by the way, was invented by NVIDIA specifically for the GeForce 256) was not yet in use, are also hardly suitable for building a dream on a top-end Pentium III. The best companion for such a system - both in terms of chronological proximity and historical significance - will be one of the early models with hardware T&L: either NVIDIA GeForce 256 or ATi Radeon DDR.
The GeForce 256 needs no introduction - it is the firstborn of the GeForce family based on the NV10 processor. A huge transistor budget for those times (17 million with a 220 nm manufacturing process) allowed NVIDIA to integrate a geometric unit into the GPU that performs the transformation and lighting of polygons. However, the potential of this function was fully revealed only in the next iterations of the architecture, when the speed of the central processor no longer allowed to serve the GPU without hardware T&L as efficiently.
An equally important event for 3D accelerators was the change of RAM from the outdated SDRAM standard to progressive DDR SDRAM, which allowed the GPU to double the frame buffer bandwidth. NVIDIA introduced an NV10-based graphics card with DDR chips shortly after the original GeForce 256, but instead we opted for the next model, the GeForce 2 GTS. It differs from the GeForce 256 not only in the type of RAM, but also in the doubled number of texture mapping units. In addition, the GeForce 2 GTS has the beginnings of pixel shaders, which, of course, were completely ignored by game developers of that time. But in general, the GeForce 2 GTS is just a successor to the ideas embodied in the GeForce 256.
The very first Radeon, like the GeForce 256, later became the founder of its own family of graphics cards. This device has made ATi one of the leading players in the discrete GPU market - at least in terms of technology. The R100 chip repeated all the best that NVIDIA had at that time: hardware T&L and support for DDR SDRAM memory. Due to the architectural features of the GPU, the Radeon DDR did not have a high fill rate compared to the GeForce 2 GTS, which was its main rival. But the R100 has an important advantage - the function of cutting off invisible surfaces (Z-Culling) in the early stages of the pipeline. Thanks to it, Radeon DDR effectively uses the massive memory bandwidth of DDR chips and is able to compete on equal terms with a competitor when rendering in 32-bit color.
At the time when the GeForce 256 and Radeon DDR appeared, NVIDIA and ATi (and then AMD) had not yet managed to divide the market for discrete video cards. The 3dfx company was living out its last years, and the Voodoo5 5500 accelerator became its swan song. The best video card that 3dfx managed to put on the market is based on two VSA-100 chips connected by an SLI interface - the developers of this architecture initially planned to increase performance by soldering several discrete GPUs on one board (up to four in the Voodoo5 6000). A single VSA-100 processor at its core is not too different from the previous generation Avenger chip (Voodoo3 series). The main thing that 3dfx has done is support for rendering in 32-bit color, which all previous devices from this company were deprived of. But when two VSA-100s with SDRAM work in tandem, the video card has the same bandwidth as DDR memory. In addition, the VSA-100 has a feature long ahead of its time: a hardware buffer that accumulates the results of rendering multiple frames (T-Buffer). Due to the T-Buffer, effects such as high-quality full-screen anti-aliasing, motion blur, or even simulating shooting with an open aperture due to background blur are available to the accelerator. And many years later, in the unofficial drivers for Voodoo5, a temporal smoothing function appeared, which operates on the data of several consecutive frames.
All of the listed video cards were produced in a configuration with an AGP or PCI interface. This means that any of them will find a place in a dual-processor system on an Intel SAI2 motherboard. Alas, the test samples of the GeForce 256, GeForce 2 GTS, Radeon DDR and Voodoo5 5500 that we have available work on the AGP bus, so for SAI2 you will have to look for other options - for example, the classics in the form of a pair of Voodoo2 connected by an SLI bridge. And if so, then why not add the Voodoo3 3000 board to the list of test participants - at least for comparison with the Voodoo5 5500, which is close to the Avenger chip in terms of GPU architecture. And, in the end, Voodoo is always interesting, because GeForce and Radeon are still with us, and 3dfx devices are forever gone into history.
 |  |
After weighing all the pros and cons, we added another board to the list of test participants - the Matrox Parhelia accelerator with a PCI interface. On the one hand, we agreed not to touch video cards with programmable shaders, and the Parhelia is a device of the same period and the same capabilities as the GeForce 3, GeForce 4 and Radeon 8500. On the other hand, the Parhelia-512 of 2002 is one of the latest high-performance GPUs, which were mass-produced on boards with a PCI slot, and not just any, but 64-bit PCI-X. Its testing will show the maximum performance that can be obtained on the Intel SAI2 board.
Source: 3dnews.ru
