An old business laptop, benchmarked.

Introduction

In the UK we have an event called a car boot sale.. Americans, imagine a field full of mini yard sales and you get the idea.

The basic idea is that you show up to the designated field early in the morning with your car full of old crap that you want to get rid of, you pay one fee to get in, set up a wallpapering table and spread all of your worthless items all over it. Others then pay a small fee to get into the field for the chance of buying someone else’s junk, all to clutter a different home until the new owner gets tired of it and either dumps it or takes it back to a car boot sale, for the cycle to continue.

It’s strangely British but not at the same time, the problem is that we’re not naturally good at haggling, I think most of us would just pay the price of something to spare the awkwardness.

Occasionally I like to go and look out for old computer equipment but rarely do I get any success. The problem has been caused by eBay, Vinted and smartphones. You see, keen people that can actually be bothered show up very early, before most of us are even awake, then go around with their phone scanning the items against eBay listings then flip anything valuable later the same day.

By the time I get the kids up, fed, in the car and along to the field, I suspect anything like a £10 Voodoo 2 is long gone.

I was at one of these, ready to give up and go home when I spotted this old laptop. It’s not very eye catching but, I was there for computer bits and there can be no argument that this fit the description. I bravely asked how much, the seller said he didn’t know. I offered him a tenner and he took it.. that was about that.

There was no charger and he said he has no idea if it works or doesn’t.

So that’s how I picked this old business laptop up. As there was no charger it sat on the shelf for a good 6 months before I decided to take the plunge and buy one, I finally plugged it in and guess what, it worked… well, sort of… the fixing was comparatively easy, in fact, I’d take some trickier problems to overcome next time.

Dell latitude

If you were a consumer in the 90s wanting to buy a laptop, you’d probably be looking at a Dell Inspiron, a name still around today.

If you worked in an IT department though, and you needed to buy 1,000 laptops for your business, you’d be buying Dell Latitudes. They were designed to be more durable, more serviceable, and built around standardised parts to make life easier for IT departments.

In the late 90’s, model names for the Latitude started with the letters ‘CP’ the either t or x, These came with a sturdy chassis and interchangeable accessories such as modular optical drives, floppy drives, room for a secondary hard drive, and extra batteries.

The CP family spanned several tiers:

• CPt-C – the cheapest option; Celeron 333/400, NeoMagic graphics, a smaller screen
• CPt-V – the mid-range model; Celeron 433/466, ATI Rage Mobility M1 graphics, and based on the CPx-H chassis.
• CPt-S – the best Celeron CPt; Celeron up to 600 MHz, ATI graphics, and the CPx-J-derived platform.
• CPx H – Pentium III 450/500; essentially the premium equivalent of the CPt-V.
• CPx J – Pentium III 650/750 with SpeedStep; the direct premium counterpart to my CPt-S.

So, for the full naming convention, you take the model number above, add in the processor speed and then add one of the following suffixes depending on the panel resolution:

• ST – 12.1-inch screen, 800 x 600 resolution.
• XT – 13.3-inch screen, 1024 x 768 resolution.
• GT – 14.1-inch screen, 1024 x 768 resolution.

So this Laptop I have here is a CPt-S600GT, a high-end 600Mhz Celeron with a 14.1 inch screen, fun eh? This is the sort of knowledge that will really impress the ladies.

The Restoration

Although the system display switched on straight away it would hang on the initialisation screen, which gave me a sinking feeling. I suspected faulty RAM (as it hung when trying to count it), but I noticed that the tray that holds the hard disk was missing its screws… someone uncaring had obviously been in there.

I pulled the tray and HDD out, pressed the power button and it posted straight away, counting all 128Mb of RAM then getting a more welcome, and understandable, error message saying “no boot drive”.

Into BIOS then – well there isn’t much else to do when you don’t have a boot drive – and a happy discovery, the laptop had Rage 3D graphics. I was expecting some sort of no name 2D graphics with 2Mb of VRAM, allowing me 1024×768 resolution as it’s only bragging rights, instantly I had begun to like this machine more.

Replacement IDE disk drives looked expensive and may have had limited life left anyway so I got myself on AliExpress and picked up a laptop IDE to CF card adaptor and a 32Gb CF flash card to stick in it.

The installation of Win98 was easy enough, though finding the sound card drivers took a few goes I’ve definitely spent far longer looking for working drivers on other machines. The Rage video drivers were easy.

The laptop battery was unsurprisingly dead, and the space for a second battery was empty. Still, it runs happily when plugged into the wall, lucky as I can’t see any replacement batteries on eBay.

All in I think the cost to get this running is around £35. It’s not much to look at but it is solidly built and I’m happy to own it… just imagine how common these must have been back in the day and how many were just binned over the years.

As far as restoration goes.. as things were running so reliably I didn’t want to strip this thing down and risk breaking any brittle plastics or anything else that’s inside. I’ve always been more of a PC guy than laptops, I guess I should pull it apart and clear out the dust and thermal paste.. one day.

If this same set of components was in a beige desktop box I would be really happy, as it stands I was just interested to see how it all goes.

Ati Rage Mobility-m1 2x

Before the research behind this article I knew very little about Rage graphics before, except they were the ATi 3d accelerators before the Radeon brand.

The names are a bit of a confusing jumble of suffixes, Rage II, XL, VR, Pro, Fury, 128 among others, it’s not easy to tell which is good and which is bad.

The Mobility Range is a little smaller and seems to be based on the Rage II, Rage Pro then Rage 128 Pro GPUs.

These GPUs would not share the system memory and would have their own dedicated RAM – so that’s something, not that the Ram they come with is especially speedy or anything.

Here’s something I found also – you could get these Rage Mobility chips on an AGP/PCI graphics card for a desktop computer, a little strange.

Intel celeron 600mhz

Now the GPU has been looked at, I guess it’s time to look at the CPU… it’s hard to be excited by anything called a Celeron – at least with a few famous exceptions.

Celeron was Intel’s long-running budget processor brand, to compete in the low-cost PC market against similar cut down options from AMD, Cyrix and other value-oriented CPU makers. It took Intel’s mainstream processor designs and reduced cache, features or platform capabilities to lower cost

The first Celerons were based on the Pentium II. The initial Covington models had no L2 cache at all which was not a great start and is probably where my discrimination for the name began… the complete absence of L2 chache made them poor performers; Intel quickly corrected this with Mendocino “Celeron-A” parts carrying 128 KB of on-die, full-speed L2 cache.

That formula became the brand’s identity: use a current Intel core, but cut cache and sometimes bus speed or features, then sell the result at a lower price. Intel positioned Celeron for it’s “value PCs,” while Pentium served mainstream buyers and Xeon targeted workstations and servers

Despite all of this negativity, the Celeron 600 in here is actually quite interesting. Yes, it lacks the 256Kb of L2 cach that the Pentium II has but it matches all other aspects of it’s bigger brother including the 100Mhz Front Side Bus – something that the Desktop Celeron 600 does not have.

This Mobile Celeron 600 belongs to the Coppermine-128 generation, released in June 2000… compared to how much you would have to spend for the desktop PIII 600, this laptop and it’s Celeron is a bit of a bargain.

Game Benchmarks

I’m confident in my suite of DirectX 9.0 games to be benchmarks but finding the very first 3d accelerated games and finding test for them is so much more difficult.

Frame caps are common so no chance of such neat and scalable graphs, also much more fiddling is needed to get things working, then there is more switching between Open GL, Direct3d and Software mode, some of which perform better on this hardware than others.

Hopefully the below is a good start point to see how this laptop performs anyway. I have a appetite for ATi Rage now so will set up a windows 98 machine, I have a Riva TNT just delivered also for a little comparison.

Incoming (1998)

Incoming was released for PC in 1998 by Rage Software, using an in-house 3D engine built specifically to showcase then-new 3D accelerator cards. It supported Direct3D 5 and 3dfx Glide, with no software-rendering fallback, making a 4 MB DirectX 5-compatible 3D accelerator a minimum requirement.

The game combined arcade-style shooting, flight combat and driving sections across six alien-invasion-themed worlds, with high-speed missions, laser weaponry, explosions and detailed 3D environments. Its minimum specification was a Pentium 133 MHz, 16 MB of RAM, 50 MB of hard-drive space, a sound card and Windows 95; Rage recommended a Pentium 233 MHz and 64 MB of RAM for smoother performance

Need for Speed: Road Challenge / High Stakes (1999)

Need for Speed: Road Challenge was released for PC in June 1999 by Electronic Arts, as the fourth instalment in the Need for Speed series. Known as Need for Speed: High Stakes in North America, it was developed by EA Seattle and used an updated version of the engine from Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit, supporting Direct3D, Glide and software rendering.

The PC version’s 3D renderer was built around DirectX 6, with hardware acceleration bringing reflective environmental mapping, projected headlights, fog, lens flares and other effects that were demanding for late-1990s graphics cards. The game could also run in software mode, but this was substantially slower and visually inferior, making a DirectX 6-compatible 3D accelerator the practical choice.

Another game capped at 31fps I’m afraid so the results are a little misleading. Software mode looked awful and performed a lot worse than Direct 3d (though FRAPS wouldn’t run so I can’t say exactly by how much.

There are no presents so I just tweaked the many options right down for a ‘Low’ and switched it all on for a ‘High’. Performance at ‘Low’ 640×480 was very good, you could likely turn on a a few extras.

Formula 1 Racing (1999)

Official Formula 1 Racing was developed by Lankhor and published by Eidos Interactive for PC in 1999. It used a Direct3D-based 3D engine designed around late-1990s consumer graphics hardware, making it a suitable period test for DirectX 6-class cards such as the RAGE Mobility M2.

The engine rendered the officially licensed 1998 Formula One season across 16 circuits, with textured circuits, grandstands and trackside detail, while allowing adjustable simulation settings, damage and multiplayer races for up to 12 players. Its technology was typical of the era: hardware-accelerated Direct3D rendering paired with a simulation model that could be tuned between arcade-friendly handling and a more detailed racing experience.

The game is very reliable, just run the Hardware Accelerated version and it starts up, no fiddling required.

Despite this, there is little difference between the visuals of hardware mode vs software mode which is a little surprising. there was also very little differences in the results for that matter. Perhaps something else in this laptop is holding it back.

320×200 looked really bad so I didn’t test it, 1024×768 ran really slow so I didn’t test it.. leaving some very similar results to choose from – I would recommend Software mode at 800×600 as the best of them, it didn’t feel that smooth to be honest, a bit of a shame!

Unreal Tournament (1999)

Unreal Tournament was released for PC in November 1999 by Epic Games and Digital Extremes, as a fast, arena-focused companion to Unreal. It built on the Unreal Engine with refined multiplayer deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Domination and Assault modes, plus a distinctive arsenal of weapons and mutators that helped define late-1990s online shooting.

The game included bot support from the outset, making it equally viable for solo play, LAN games and online matches. Its PC release dates vary slightly by region, with 22–23 November 1999 commonly cited for the initial launch.

Unreal Tournament is a game where changing settings made surprisingly little difference to the overall performance, clearly there is a bottleneck somewhere on this system unless multiple components perform equally bad.

Direct3d mode gives the best performance in frames per second (marginally) however with large glitches appearing on the screen which was not ideal. Software mode by comparison looked far better, to be fair the UT menu system didn’t even list Direct3d as a potential option when starting the game, listing only software mode as a ‘certified, compatible device’.

I tried to force OpenGL but the game just crashes on launch.

320×240 is your best bet in software mode, not really very exciting to look at but surprisingly playable.

Colin McRae Rally (1998)

Colin McRae Rally was released for PC and PlayStation in 1998 by Codemasters, using a purpose-built 3D engine designed around DirectX 6 and Direct3D hardware acceleration. On PC, it supported 3D-accelerated graphics cards of the era, with Codemasters recommending a Pentium II 233 MHz, 32 MB of RAM and a compatible 3D accelerator for the best visual quality.

Well the game has a 35fps cap so, not particularly helpful for benchmarking purposes. The Mobility Rage has the power (perhaps surprisingly) for this cap to restrict the average framerate significantly.

Note when testing, this benchmark was done with Riva TNT selected, there is a Rage II but these options seem to just change the settings of the game to those recommended by the card you select, including limiting resolutions.

The only card that would allow me the maximum 640×480 resolution was the Riva so I selected that and maxed everything else out.

A good result here, and a good looking game.. the screenshot doesn’t really give it justice, 640×480 is just a tiny image when viewed on a modern screen!

Counter Strike (2000)

Counter-Strike began in June 1999 as a free team-based modification for Valve’s Half-Life, created by Minh “Gooseman” Le and Jess Cliffe. It quickly became one of the most influential online shooters of its era, pitting Terrorists against Counter-Terrorists in objective-based rounds involving bomb plants, hostage rescues and elimination.

The first retail version, Counter-Strike 1.0, arrived on 8 November 2000, but the original game had no built-in bots and was designed primarily for LAN or online multiplayer. Official bot support came much later with the Turtle Rock Studios bot used in Counter-Strike: Condition Zero.

Quake II (1997)

I could not get this running in Open GL mode, annoying. Software looked and ran fine, I’ll return to this as it would be a perfect game to test with this hardware!

TOCA 2 Touring Cars (1999)

System Requirements: Pentium 200Mhz (Min) Pentium II 266 Mhz Recommended. 32Mb RAM, DX6.0 supported 3d Graphics Card

TOCA 2 Touring Cars is Codemasters’ 1998 BTCC racing game and a direct evolution of the original TOCA engine. It shares its technical lineage with Colin McRae Rally, which was developed from a second-generation version of Codemasters’ TOCA technology, though it was substantially reworked for rally physics and point-to-point stages

Its PC version is capped at 30 fps because the physics are tied to the frame rate; running faster can alter handling and car behaviour.

Synthetic Benchmarks

Rage Dawning Tech Demo

Rage Dawning was ATI’s 1999 promotional tech demo for the Rage 128, created by 3DForge, a division of Futuremark. It followed a glowing orb through a canyon and Egyptian temple setting, showcasing real-time lighting, reflections, particle effects and cinematic presentation rather than offering conventional gameplay.custompc+2

Although built to advertise the Rage 128, the demo was DirectX-based and could run on other Windows 98-era graphics cards, making it a useful visual benchmark for period hardware. It was distributed with ATI driver CDs and later circulated as a standalone download; it is best known today for its atmospheric music, reflective water and elaborate effects sequences.

3d Mark 99 Max

3D MARK 2000

Not all tests would run on 3d Mark 2000 so not the most reliable of results

Summary and Conclusion

I thoroughly enjoyed playing with this old Dell which is great as I previously regretted the purchase, it just shows you can never judge a (note)book by it’s cover.

The Coppermine-era is very sought after with collectors and, although this is a Celeron in a Laptop its still from an exciting time in PC history. Don’t get me wrong, if it had said Pentium III I would be happier, still having the top-of-the CPt range is a win for me.

The Rage Mobility is also a lot of fun to play with, of course it isn’t powerful but it seems to be a good pairing with the Celeron 600, often software mode and hardware mode give very similar results suggesting that perhaps one is not holding back the other (or perhaps both are being held back by another part of the system – but I don’t think so).

I was happy with the CF card mod in place of the hard disk, it’s silent in operation and access times are fast enough. There was no problems with set up. I can also whip it out and put it into my big PC to transfer other games directly onto the card instead of using CD’s memory cards or bothering to set up a network.

The laptop itself is a solid design and it’s hard to imagine that the hinges or other parts will let go, like you get with newer machines.

It’s a big shame that I can’t seem to find a replacement battery for it, but to be fair, If I were travelling I’d be more likely to take a WinXP era laptop with me for the wider variety of games.

Although the 3d Windows 98 era gaming is far from amazing, there doesn’t seem to be that many late 90’s laptops with 3d accelaration of any type.

I would recommend that you snap one of these machines up if you see one available, if the Win’98 performance isn’t doing it for you then you always have the Dos performance and DOS compatible ESS Maestro to play with also.