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My Home Computer

Hardware

I have an IBM Aptiva E3U.  It has an AMD K6-2 350 with 64 Meg of PC-100 memory, a 100MHz Front Side Bus, and ATI Rage Pro AGP 2X on the motherboard. It does not have an AGP slot, contrary to my initial belief (I really need to read the fine print more closely).  This motherboard is one of those highly integrated ones where there's only one shared PCI/ISA slot and one ISA slot that comes with a V.90 Lucent LT WinModem in it.

Software

It came with Windows 98.  I downloaded DirectX 6 which has support for 3DNow built in.  I downloaded ATI's latest Rage Pro beta drivers which now have support for a full OpenGL ICD and 3DNow as well.  On top of all that I downloaded AMD's source-modified version of Quake II 3.19 which has a generic 3DNow OpenGL driver in it.

Performance

Quake II now runs as good as a 4 Meg Diamond Viper 330 on a PII 450.  Incoming runs almost as well.  When I first got it B Hunter wouldn't even run.  Now I get a 3DMark99 of 777.  With monitor a system like this would be roughly $1500. In summary I feel I have hit the sweet spot in terms of price/performance for the current model year.

Planned Upgrades

The mathematicly inclined among you will notice that 2 PCI cards don't fit well into the one slot I have available so I'm hoping that someone will make an ISA Vortex2 based board.


Last updated: 1998-11-1
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