Custom PC - Project Outatime

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Taking reliving your youth too far.

In the late 90s, PC performance was on a rapid rise. CPU speeds were getting pretty deep into the triple digits, real 3D acceleration was a thing and the games... oh man the games!

Intel had released the well speedy Pentium II and AMD needed something to answer with. Their K5 had been a bit of a fizzer and they had to get creative to come up with a true answer to keep Intel on their toes. Their salvation came with the acquisition of NexGen Inc, who had developed the NexGen Nx586 a generation earlier. They'd been working on their follow-up design, known as the Nx686, but after the acquisition AMD's work on an internal successor to K5 was halted and the Nx686 design morphed to become the AMD K6.

The K6 was a massive hit, offering near Pentium II performance for an fraction of the price. In 1998, the improved K6-2 was released featuring AMD's 3DNow! technology in direct competition with Intel's MMX. The K6 family still utilized Socket 7 like the older Pentiums but with K6-2, a 100MHz front side bus was utilized and the newer platforms to handle this were dubbed Super Socket 7.

Performance relative to Pentium II was "good" - in raw computing the K6 tended to be faster, in math the Pentium II usually got a bit of a lead. Or so the story went anyway!

This system was built to ape a system I once owned that itself was originally a budget rummaged together build hung around a motherboard featuring the VIA MVP3 chipset and a Cyrix 6x86MX CPU, later replaced with a K6-2 300MHz unit.

Specifications

AMD K6-2+ 570MHz CPU @ 617MHz, K6-3+ modded

256MB PC133 SDRAM

ASUS P5A-B ALi Aladdin V mainboard

40GB ATA hard disk

Samsung CD writer

NumberNine SR9 SGRAM S3 Savage4 Pro OC'd graphics card

Creative SoundBlaster Live! sound card

3Com EtherlinkXL

Imation LS120 floptical drive

Creative Live!Drive

Windows 98 Second Edition

Unique features

The whole point of this system was how not unique it is! The only real feature that was interesting was the extra cooling - as the turbo button serves no utility on a K6 system, it is instead wired to power on/off a Zalman 80mm fan fitted to the front of the chassis blowing air over the CPU.

Now, multiple iterations later to improve stability, the old VA503 that was horribly unstable has been replaced with a flash ASUS P5A-B Aladdin V board and the original K6-2 has been switched for the mighty K6-2+ 570, famous for needing just a delid and resistor mod to enable the full K6-3+ cache. It also seems not to be overly concerned about running at 617MHz!

Originally the aim was to run an ASUS V3800 Deluxe TNT2 Ultra, as an homage to the V3800 COMBAT TNT2 Vanta I ran in my childhood K6. But, along with the CMI8738 sound, these got swapped out in preparation for the Fragged Retro LAN in 2024.

The CMI8738 in later titles didn't offer any DirectAudio acceleration causing frame loss in Quake III, and through empirical testing the weak performance of the K6 combined with driver overhead compounds to mean the TNT2 Ultra couldn't put on a proper show and in the end the card that proved most capable was... the S3 Savage4. The NumberNine SR9 SGRAM variant specifically can be clocked quite high without major harm and gets framerates on the K6 that can only be bested by something as aggressive as a GeForce2 GTS!

Going forward there's a high likelihood the Creative setup is going to come out...

Personal history

The computer this system was built to duplicate was my gaming system built by horse trading in my teenage years. I ended up selling it to fund the acquisition of my first car which in turn I sold to acquire what would become the first car I really had a vested interest in and has culminated in what I'd refer to as my 'forever car', my 1987 Pontiac Fiero SE.

But 15 years ago I had a bit of a lust. I wanted my old computer back. It was long since gone, sold to a church friend of my father's. So the hunt was on - I needed to find a specific variant of Macase baby-AT tower, a suitable MVP3 board, a half decent CPU and a TNT2 of some kind. Bonus points for a CMI8738 sound card.

The case turned out to be easiest - scored through work as a recycling job. The motherboard (at least right now) is an FIC part also liberated from a recycling job. The CPU is a K6-2 500MHz that was in my stash from years earlier.

The graphics card was an eBay purchase, including the 3D goggles. It however needs work, the VRAM failed during some playtesting a few years back. The sound card I managed to find on local auctions for a whopping... five bucks.

This machine looks, feels and runs basically just like my original did way back in the day and yes, oh yes, it can run all the games from back then too. Makes me feel like I'm 15 all over again... just without as much acne. And with better personal skills. I think.

The current incarnation of this system is more of a 'What if' - what if younger me knew more, what if younger me knew what to tune, which chip to pick, which parts to select? Turns out I had a much nicer ASUS board in my stash that'd been there for a long while, and with the right K6 we picked up massive gains. By scratching running the TNT2 and going to the Savage, the lower overhead picked up massive gains all over the place. It was truly the machine that centre staged some of the first GPU Games streams and a permanent favourite.

Future plans

Outatime is always waiting on some choice upgrades to perk it up, but on the list at this stage:

Audio system. The Live! is very cool but we need something else, something less Creative Labs lest we get tarred as fanboys. There's a delicious Turtle Beach Montego II Aureal card on the way from Japan to solve this.
Stability mods. I think it's likely time the poor old weapon gets a recap session and a few minor modifications the community suggests to improve stability on stressed P5A-Bs.
Front display. The stock LED speed display let the damn smoke out so that's no good... but, being a KS330, it has that nice smoked window... I'm pondering installing an OLED screen behind it and having an ESP32 or something just cycle some cool graphics or possibly even feed some data from the system back to the ESP32 to show a few vital statistics. Have to be careful how we do that though, as not to eat system resources.