It is really remarkable how poor the per-clock performance is without hyperthreading. I don't regret the purchase - $45 for a dual-core CPU with heatsink/fan and an Intel D945PSN ATX motherboard was a hell of a deal, and it's been a very solid, reliable system. But there's no small performance delta …

For an original Pentium with MMX I'd suggest a Voodoo2 with a decent 2D card, or a Voodoo3. Both can be had pretty cheaply, both support multitexturing, and both have integrated triangle setup engines, which will remove a little load from the not-exactly-stunning capabilities of the CPU. If the …

I used a Dell Optiplex with a 2 GHz Northwood and 768 MB of Rambus at my last job, and it was pretty underwhelming. The performance wasn't bad for everyday tasks, but some of the newer apps my office used just CHURNED - ArcGIS, in particular, was close to unbearable. Good job on the build, though - …

The awe-inspiring power of a Cyrix 6x86 PR200+ with 64 MB EDO RAM and a 4 MB Monster3D/4 MB Matrox Mystique got me through the game well enough. Software rendering was more or less out of the question, but the Mystique's 2D really did make the best of a bad situation on the rare occasion that I …

Igracek: I have high-quality VBR .mp3's sitting around my hard drive right now that would probably transcode to .ogg's very cleanly. Let me know if you want them zinged your way.

Regarding the Pentium. Bad news: the 430TX was a chipset that doesn't cache beyond the first 64 MB RAM, with roughly a 5% performance penalty for every additional 8 MB beyond that number. You'll be better off either reducing the quantity of physical RAM to 64 MB, or disabling the L2 cache within the …

For running older DOS games it may help you to download the renutil application for the V2100. That should allow you to "trick" applications into using the VESA 320x200 mode instead of the Verite's dog-slow VGA emualtion. After a few minutes of lucky Googling and a quick visit to archive.org, I have …