Yes, most of the later 1999-2001 games work fine on WinXP as they have official Win2000 support. I haven't used Win98 on more powerful hardware than my Pentium III system, but from what I've read and heard it behaves fine on P4 hardware.

After I got a Soundblaster X-FI Titanium HD card in my modern computer the need to play later WinXP/Vista games (for the EAX sound) fell through. They run well in Windows 10 with maybe a tweak or two.

I don't plan on using ME. I try to avoid it since it does not support switching to MS-DOS that well.

I would rather go with an Intel chipset, such as i865, on Socket 775 with an unlocked X6800 for Win98SE, rather than a VIA chipset. Intel is usually rock solid on Win98.

j^aws wrote:

I would rather go with an Intel chipset, such as i865, on Socket 775 with an unlocked X6800 for Win98SE, rather than a VIA chipset. Intel is usually rock solid on Win98.

I'm looking into that, but the available boards with AGP, i865 and Core2 support is quite limited. They are also not as "highend" as my ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe with the attached coolenss factor.

I'm also wondering if a Pentium 4 3.2ghz extreme edition will be fast enough for the GPU with either a 6800 or X800/X850. I know I can install 7000 series from nvidia, but I'm going to stay away from unofficially supported components. Not much point getting a Core2 if the GPU can't do much more anyway. This is something I'm going to test 😀

So I did a quick bench with my Asrock 775DUAL-VSTA board. First with the Core2 Duo X6800 @ 3.2 ghz and then with a Pentium 4 HT 651 Cedar Mill at 3.4ghz. Result in 3DMark 2003 was 12800 witb the X6800 and 11800 with the Pentium 4. I know that the Pentium 4 Extreme in the P4P800-E is even quicker than the Cedar Mill on VIA chipset, so the difference will be reduced. It is just showing that the system is mostly GPU limited.

I also tested Sacrifice which ran beatifully in 60fps at 1600x1200 with everything at max.

So I dragged out my P4P800-E and installed the Corsair CMX PRO memory sticks (with activity LEDs). Turns out one stick is dead. Since Corsair has lifetime warranty I've already created a ticket to see what happens. I'll be curious to how they will respond 🤣