What OS are you planning on running? And, are you going to be running DOS titles as well?


If you're going to be running DOS titles, The SB live and the Audigy 1 can both do DOS emulation. I hear the Audigy 2 can be hacked for it, but I had no such luck.

If you're running Win98, the best card you can buy is an Audigy 2 ZS platinum (there are 98 drivers for it, although when I tried them I had serious issues). Audigy 2 value only has drivers for XP and above. Audigy 1 and lower all have Win98 drivers.

It's not a huge investment to get a SB Live value. There are still mountains of them in OEM anti static bags available for around 10 bucks shipped. Totally worth the step up from on board IMO.


EDIT:
I forgot to add, if you are looking for DOS support, I don't recommend you go totally retro and buy an Awe64. No EAX, it's more CPU intensive than the later stuff, and you're already cpu limited running the V5 5500 with a 1Ghz PIII (though not terribly limited). An Awe64 IS easier to set up with DOS emulation, but I remember years ago now I had a SB live with DOS emu set up just fine and it actually sounded better with analog output than the Awe64 did hooked up via PCM over SPDIF. The only reason to go with the A64 is if you want it for retro chic, or for the sound banks (which I admit I didn't try, perhaps that would make it sound better or equal to the SB Live). If you go for an A64 Gold, also be prepared to shell out the same amount of cash you would for an Audigy 2 ZS (or even a little more). All that said, if you want an A64 for some reason, then go for it. I have an A64 Gold, but that box is for old stuff only (everything else gets run in a wrapper).

QuoteOriginally posted by sliderider

QuoteOriginally posted by baz101180

I have a creative voodoo2 12mb card and a voodoo2 powercolour 12mb card and wont to use them in sli with Diamond viper V770 ATX AGPx2/4 32MB and piii 1.2 ghz will the voodoo 2 cards over heat at all with a fast cpu as they have no heatsinks. I have them in a ocuk terminator gaming case witch has a big fan next to the voodoo cards will this be ok.

I'm not sure that SLi will be very useful other than to increase the screen resolution with that CPU. The Voodoo2 was extremely CPU bound when it was released and continued to scale for a long time as CPU's got more and more powerful. Your 1.2ghz CPU will probably just about  max out the speed of a single V2. My PIII 1ghz machine did when it had one in it, but it couldn't feed an SLi setup fast enough to max it out even at 1024x768. The last machine I had them installed in was a P4 2.4ghz and the pair of them were still scaling in that machine. Who knows how much faster they would be a modern machine? Of course by that time there wasn't really any support for Glide anymore so I had to upgrade to a Radeon and haven't used the STB's much since. I'm building a new vintage rig now and want to start using them again, though. They were a blast.

Please tell me that was only with newer D3D or OGL titles. Otherwise I just wasted cash replacing my broken powerleap 1.4ghz celeron adapter (it never worked, so I'm stuck at 800mhz Katmai right now).

This is pretty dang awesome.


Is there any chance you might be able to run a bootable cd or flash drive with a linux distribution and run lspci -vv from a command line?

It should show all PCI express and PCI devices. I would image that PCI bridge will show up in there somewhere, and it would also show what clock rate the V5 was running at on the pci bridge.

I'm guessing that stock, with just the adapter, it may be running as 66mhz PCI like the V5 agp did, and if the clock speed scaled with the overclock, then it may be running at a higher rate, like 70 or so mhz.

I keep trying to remember what program I used to show pci bus data on windows XP. I'll see if I can track that down as it would be easier for you to verify with a windows program.


This is really nice work though. I had always wondered about those PCIe bridge devices. It seems they work a lot better than anyone would have expected.

I'm building a V2 rig for dos glide titles (hopefully it will work properly, or I'll need to get a V1, I've heard conflicting reports about that), but would like to be able to max the resolution out.

Did any of the DOS Glide titles run at resolutions above 800x600?

Just to chime in, I also recommend you use the integrated graphics for that setup.The M64 resides on the PCI bus, which you want to save for your V2's and your sound card. The less devices on that bus, the better, although I don't think you'd really see a performance difference between the two.

1024x768 at 256 color sounds wrong for the M64 though. I had one in my first computer and that thing hauled for a 2d card. I seem to recall running at that res in 16 bit color. I think I had a 2MB M64 though. I didn't realize they made a 1MB version.

That helps a lot, thanks rotten.

When I used the 3dfx reference drivers, the system said 16MB of texture memory and 8mb framebuffer). At least I'm pretty sure it did. I'm getting a different result from the FastVoodoo drivers, and it's been a few weeks now. Using the FastVoodoo drivers it shows 4mb framebuffer and 8mb of texture memory, but the overlay is screwed up (I'll take some screenshots when I get a chance.

Neither driver showed all of that information as legibly as your screenshot does. It almost looked like the text was off center.

However, it's clear I'm getting the full 24MB, I just didn't think about the fact that 8 of it is frame buffer memory.

This is addictive though. I bought three cards so I had a spare I could put in a shadow box and hang on the wall. I'm now planning a second build with a solo V2 card, and wondering if I shouldn't snag another V2 and sli that rig too.

Yeah. That's the weird thing. Memory on the front and the back, 24 chips total. The cards should be 12MB, but they just don't appear to be that way (in software at least).

I can post pics of the back soon, but the picture of two Black Magic cards on Wikipedia depicts the exact cards I've got. Same exact memory part numbers, and same copyright date.

I will point out that the memory part numbers do not all match.
Part numbers on the memory are not all the same though, is that normal? They are all Alliant V53C16258HK25, but the top portion of the memory chips says 9905F and 9903F

Are the 3dfx reference drivers botching this somehow? The drivers report a 4MB framebuffer but only 8MB per card.


I'm going to try the FastVoodoo drivers, maybe that will help.



EDIT: I edited the topic name to make it clearer.

Alright, this is just weird.

I went on the bay recently and found some STB Black Magic V2's brand new, with oem packaging. They were supposed to be 12mb versions. I snagged three of them (everybody needs a spare right)?

They have ram chips on both the front and back of the card, and the card is marked C 1998 STB systems.

Looking at pictures at FalconFly, the 3dfx cards (which were 8mb), are marked c 1999, not 1998. I've got two competing skus though (an 8 mb and a 12 mb sku).

Do I have some sort of weird transitional card here?

Can anyone tell me exactly what I'm dealing with here, I've got maybe 12 hours to make a decision to keep them or send them back.