This system comes to use when it fits the hardware being tested and represents the lower end of a 3D retrogaming PC. It is fast enough for early 3D titles, but is also very useful for exhibiting CPU bottlenecks when compared to faster systems with the same graphics card.
The system itself is not exactly optimized (on purpose), so there are definitely faster systems with a K6-2 450 out there. It should represent a bread-and-butter K6-2 450 system from back in the day pretty accurately.
Hardware:
- Gigabyte GA-5AX Rev. 4.1 (ALi Aladdin V)
- AMD K6-2 450MHz (4,5x100)
- 128MB PC133 CL2 @ PC100 CL2
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 40GB
- Creative Soundblaster 128 PCI
- 3Com Fast Etherlink XL PCI
Software:
- Windows 98SE
- Unofficial Servicepack 2.1d
- DirectX 8.1
- ALi AGP 1.82e + ALi IDE 3.56
- Creative -some version from my fileserver-
To make sure that all results are correct and stay comparable even if further cards are added to a comparison that this system was used for, I restore a completely configured OS image before I test a new card. To make things easier to handle, I stored the image on the second partition and added the software Drive Image 3.0 to the Windows 98SE startup menu:
