Build advice for an old school 3D rig?

Discussion of legacy stereoscopic 3D gaming hardware and software (e.g. NVIDIA XP stereoscopic 3D drivers).
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VanBurenPhilips
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Build advice for an old school 3D rig?

Post by VanBurenPhilips »

Hey folks, I haven't posted on here for a long time, hope everyone is well.

I've been 'getting around to' building a retro rig for old games & 3D for about 4 years now, I swear I will do it one day ;) Here's the old kit I still having lying around:

- 2x 7900 GTX cards
- Sun (rebadged Sony) GDM-FW900 monitor
- a bunch of EDimensional VGA dongles & shutter glasses

I had it in the back of my mind to buy the rest of the kit (hopefully cheap) to complete the 'best' rig for the job. But now I'm just about to upgrade my main PC and these parts will be retired:

- MSI P7N Diamond motherboard
- Core 2 Extreme QX9650 cpu
- 8GB RAM (DDR2)

Is it worth hanging on to these to use in the old-school machine? Or are they overpowered or unsuited to the job in any way? It occurred to me I might be better off using the best single-core CPU I can find, rather than a multi-core. Grateful for any tips :)


[EDIT] Having just read Neil's 'common fixes' thread I'm more inclined to sell these parts now and then buy a suitable single-core CPU, mobo & RAM later, when I finally get round to building this thing. Is that the best plan do you think?
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cybereality
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Re: Build advice for an old school 3D rig?

Post by cybereality »

I believe there are ways to get dual-cores to work, but may involve disabling the extra cores (which kind of negated the advantage of using these chips).

I haven't messed around with those old drivers in so long, I can't even remember the best chip to get.
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Likay
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Re: Build advice for an old school 3D rig?

Post by Likay »

Later legacy drivers works with dual cores. 162.15 and 162.50 does for sure.
In some cases you do want to use older drivers and therefore needs to switch off all but one cpu-core. I used nhancer for it.


You can also make a "dual boot" by adding an extra line to the "Boot.ini" file on your windows drive.
The original relevant line probably looks like this:

Code: Select all

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP" /fastdetect
Copy that line and add "/NUMPROC=1" to it.

Code: Select all

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP, 1 core" /fastdetect /NUMPROC=1
If you keep both lines in the boot.ini file you will be given a choice of multi or single cpu when booting up the computer. It helps if you add single core or 1 core or similar after "Microsoft Windows XP" to help know which is which.
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VanBurenPhilips
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Re: Build advice for an old school 3D rig?

Post by VanBurenPhilips »

Hey thanks guys. Maybe it's best I just keep this kit then - more convenient than selling it & buying other parts, and it means I'm ready to build any time, rather than procrastinating even more :)

I didn't know about the later drivers using multi-core, and I think that's a driver combination that may work with Doom 3, one of the games I want to try (although I gather Doom3 itself doesn't benefit from multi cores). I was wondering whether one core of my QX9650 would be significantly slower than, for example, an AMD FX-57, but it probably doesn't make any practical difference considering the age of the games I'll be trying.

New parts for my main PC have started to arrive; I'll let you know how the 'vintage' rig goes when I build it :)
VanBurenPhilips
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Re: Build advice for an old school 3D rig?

Post by VanBurenPhilips »

Darn it, another U-turn, if I keep this up I may fall over & puke.

Was looking at the still-assembled retired things the other day and it struck me that I won't have a free PCI slot, then I remembered there's some other old kit I want to include in the build. I've got an old Sound Blaster Live 1024 Player and Cambridge Soundworks 4.1 speakers. May be just nostalgia, but I think these have given me the best sound experience in games of a certain era and I'd like to use them again.

So I'll need a different mobo. Might still make sense to keep the CPU & RAM I've got.
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