I've always wanted to drive a Ferrari. My Mom knew about this desire, and I remember one sunny Sunday after school when Dad was late coming home from work. He walked, ya know, since we lived on the Air Force base.... Anyway, I finally convinced her to let me take the Mustang for a spin to pick up some needed groceries. That was my first experience in a hot car...
My AMD 233 isn't exactly a VW bug, but I knew when I started shopping for a PII system that it would be a whole new adventure. The ASUS board had already been released, so I ordered the board with a PII chip and decided to make the big switch! Truth is, I hate these changes, but I needed the second system and with some very cool new sims in the offing this seemed as good a time as any! I got myself ready for adventure: coffee pot on the go, half inch logging cable neatly coiled on my office floor...
Obviously buying a new main board these days means the LX chipset with AGP support and SDRam. I wasn't sure that Ultra DMA would be all that amazing, but it didn't hurt that it too was supported. Who knows, maybe Ultra DMA would make a difference?
The ASUS mainboard supports AGP, SDRam and UDMA. SDRam is considerably faster than EDO ram. The performance gain isn't that noticable at the moment but will be more significant when AGP is supported. As for Ultra DMA, I was surprised to discover that it seems as fast as SCSI III! Since the cost is CONSIDERABLY less this is GOOD NEWS! I am comparing the speed of this system to an AMD 233 which has become my reference system. The AMD is equipped with a DTP caching controller and a Seagate Cheetah hard drive running at 10K RPM.
When the system first booted up with the new Fujitsu UDMA drive I was amazed at the speed at which my programs were loading. Hmm, better uncoil the cable! I honestly couldn't tell any difference between the SCSI system and the UDMA system. Load times seemed the same or slightly less (with reference to the increased CPU clock perhaps). And BOOT times are more than twice as fast under UDMA than under SCSI III.
New hard drives supporting the UDMA standard have been available for months, and the overall impact on a fast system is well worth the investment. It is commonly recognized that there is little point in having a very fast cpu unless other parts of your system can keep pace. The great thing about these new drives is they cost no more than the old DMA drives for the same capacity!
The ASUS board is nice looking and quite small. The design is jumperless and will run up to 333 MHz (the oem version is cheaper and uses jumpers). Jumperless simply means that all the settings you need to make can be done via the bios software and you don't need to remove the case and look for tiny black sliders to place over microscopic pins. For install info check out my earlier Review.
The system configuration is fairly standard for a high end PC. 64 meg of SDRam, happens to be Toshiba 10ns rating. Instead of a Creative Labs part I have a Ubisoft Game Theatre 64. The sound is very clean and running through a Yamaha stereo with small speakers in front and 100 watt speakers behind in my small office this is quite a killer! Initially I installed an STB Velocity 128 3d, then later swapped in my Matrox Millenium with 4 meg and the Canopus Pure3d to do the bull work. A Toshiba 24x IDE CD Rom completes the internal package, and my TM gear is hooked up to this one, and CH and SUNCOM gear to the AMD system.
The mid tower ATX case has two extra fans: one on the lower front and one below the power supply. I have all this hardware mounted so that I can safely clock the CPU to 337.5 MHz. The bus is set at 75 MHz and 4.5 x clock.
As you can imagine, running at 337 MHz I was all set to burn rubber and so I carefully anchored the system to my desk with the half inch logging cable I drug out of our back woods... Can't let this Intel baby get away! The turbo boost for this first test was supplied by STBs Velocity 128 under Direct 3d.
The beta I had nearest to hand happened to be DiDs F22: ADF and I was pretty curious to see what she could do! Oil was fine, I topped up the tank and threw back the pop top, securing watertight doors and put er in gear!
The engine purred nicely as I popped the clutch and booted WIN95. On seeing that annoying and ridiculously cluttered desktop I promptly clicked on the ADF icon and sure enough! Load times were noticeably down.... a promising sign!
I chose one of the more familiar training missions: USING EMCON. (For a report on that particular mission see my Preview). Sure enough, frame rate was up and so was gameplay... Scrolling the virtual cockpit was somewhat improved and likewise with switching views. On a brand new 17" Voxon monitor running under 16 bit color, the sim was beautiful.
K, enough of that jet biz, I longed for the fresh breeze in my hair and the sound of a rotary engine. I put er in neutral and went digging for my map of the French trenches.... After securing my goggles I strapped into my favorite Spad and fired up Flying Corps Gold. Ah, this is the life! The last update added D3d support and it purrs along nicely, I can tell you!
Unfortunately, with all my writing I haven't been flying much lately and it didn't take long for some jerk in a red biplane to paste me all over the field.... Didn't get his licence number but it was obvious he felt REAL BAD about smoking my shiny PII system... (might have been an AMD biplane....)
Ok, no more Mr. nice guy. I decided to put the JSF beta back to work. At the highest detail levels this beta has been known to give cramps to dual Cray systems.
Hmm, I must have been doing something wrong. The frame rate wasn't great but it wasn't awful either.... At 800x600 I would guess around 10 fps with all the stops pulled out. I wonder what it would be like running under 3dfx??
Rubbing my hands together gleefully, and with ego still smarting from the AMD...er, I mean red biplane guy, I got out the wrenches (spanners for you UK types) and tore the pistons out of my machine. Greasy, black, and with bruised knuckles (aren't you glad we don't have to use torque wrenches on these things??) but ready for action I removed the V128 and installed the Matrox with Canopus Pure 3d alongside. Canopus happens to include a utility that allows some overclocking of their board, and on a 75MHz bus I figured it should smoke along pretty nicely!
I tripped quickly over to my brother in laws place (he drives a hot car too) and borrowed some old intake manifolds to load up the truck. See, I just KNEW this baby would be tough to hold to the road... I didn't wanna smoke up the whole neighborhood, and my wife always complains when I burn rubber anyway...
With the Testarossa now complete (yah, I really touched one once) I once again prepared to engage the clutch. With the latest stealth fighter warming up on the runway I knew this would be a "peak experience." I almost felt like humming some old John Denver tune....
With that sentimental feeling, I knew it was time to fly. I summoned up images of Tom Cruise in Top Gun... I thought of the Saddam Hussein in the enemy MiG showing up at the edge of my DEFENSE MFD. I looked around, and double checked that all the graphics options were MAXED OUT..... and HIT THE AFTERBURNER BUTTON on my stick..!!
I sunk backwards into my chair.. my life flashed before my eyes. I had the stereo cranked... the cat shrieked and jumped off my lap, leaving my leg bloody and sore... (never take a cat into a stealth aircraft anyway....)
Frame rate had at least doubled. THIS was flying. After taking out the MiG I ordered my wingmen to engage some other dudes... and suddenly I had that Spad XIII feeling...
Flying Corps looked better under 3dfx since D3d lacks support for some features. Frame rate was through the roof on this one, and if you know much about this sim you know that it is essentially photo realistic with excellent flight modelling and excellent sound. I managed to get a piece of the red dude this time around, the thup thup of my machine gun causing the cat to run in terror from my office for the second time. The bandages on my leg were looking a bit red, but I figured I could hold out til the paramedics arrived... Anyway, we virtual pilots are a tough lot. I dumped the last of the whiskey over my leg to be sure it wouldn't get infected... My spit landed in the can with a loud PING!
K, back to reality. I didn't fire up ADF that day cause I passed out from pain when the whiskey hit those animal wounds.... I waited til two days ago when the Glide version arrived. See, I wanted revenge on that darned animal and I just KNEW that the way to get it would be to fire up ADF, tie the cat to the sub woofer and crank the volume....
My kids nixed the cat idea, but I got old Betsy... er, the Ferrari ready to go anyway. This time I was ready to go with Longbow 2 and F22: ADF. Can you say "AWESOMELY FUN?" A guy almost needs to consider investing in nitro glycerine to do this kind of testing...
I've garnered some wisdom over the years so I waited til the house was empty, ensured all the stereo connections were okay, and cranked the volume to about 65%.... Even at this level the hiss from the stereo was quite minimal. The static generated was more substantial though, and my hair was standing on end....
I had completed the initial Longbow 2 missions and the opposition was starting to dig in. This meant even MORE fun for me. LB2 is quite fluid even on my 233, so I wondered what it would be like on THIS machine...
I chose my pilot, clicked on campaign, and dropped into the FARP mission planner. I ditched the Kiowa and selected a radar Longbow. Made sure my team mate was up to snuff and headed back to the tent. OK, lets rev er up and let er go!
The sounds in Longbow 2 rival anything out there, but the graphics are better than most. I dropped out to the option screen to ensure that all settings were to the max (which is where I fly on the 233 also). Back to the chopper...It was a night mission doing some close air support. The sim was COMPLETELY fluid, I would estimate 30 fps. TOO MUCH! It doesn't get any better than this!
After a four km run I was hitting the armor hard. Effects in LB2 are dazzling at 20 fps, but at 30 they become even more impressive. Unfortunately, I forgot to slide the difficulty toggle back to the middle and the effects of machine gun fire on my Longbow were also fairly impressive! I didn't notice the chaffing on the 1/2 choker cable and before I knew it me and my impressive hardware were a smoldering heap on my office floor....
Nah, ok, I'm coming back to reality... give me a minute... The great thing about this impressive hardware is that a few months down the road it will be affordable for many more of us, and if you are a dedicated sim fan chances are you upgrade once a year or so anyway. Retire that old 166 and let the kids have a go, or set up your own LAN and dig into the multiplayer of LB2, which is probably about the most fun you will ever have in any sim on the market. (Can't wait for F22: TAW!!)
Ok, for the moment a 333 MHz PII system is like a Ferrari; a bit out of reach. But with a good 3dfx board you can enjoy these sims on your P133 if you turn down the detail levels. And when you are ready to make the jump, maybe six months down the road, the K6+3d will be available, running on a 100MHz bus and with DUAL MMX units! By that time incredible new sims like Flying Nightmares II, Falcon 4.0, and F22: TAW will be out.... (VBG)!! In the meantime, watch for a follow up on this article when the new RocknRide motion simulator arrives at my door this coming week. Meantime, I'll start digging around in the woods for some more choker cable...
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Last Updated August 30th, 1997