When it comes to period correct or not I exclude power supplies, cooling, optical drives and to some degree storage.

Non of these affect the performance except perhaps storage but for for example using a small flash DOM with a bog standard ISA controller does not bring more performance than using a noisy period correct SCSI drive with a cashing SCSI controller.

Running Winmark my all ISA DX50 build (in progress, DX2/66 atm) with a 256MB Transcend DOM gets pretty much the same disk score as the best score PC Magazine got when they tested DX2/66 systems, the PC Mag system used a fancy caching controller. As long as the performance dosn't get totally unrealistic not having to listen to a noisy SCSI drive makes it worth beeing a bit less strict and I still consider the build "period correct".

I also substitute other stuff.

1991 there was an ISA video accelerator card called the Opta Mona Lisa. This card had a Tseng ET4000AX with 512kB to 1 MB DRAM for VGA compatibility and a Ti 34020 accelerator chip with 2MB to 4MB VRAM for speedy performance in high and true colour modes in Windows. I do not own such a card but the ISA Tseng ET4000w32 has the same DOS performance as the Mona Lisas ET4000AX and at least decent Windows performance so it will have to be close enough.

If I would have been really anal I would have used my Orchid Fahrenheit 1280 with its lousy DOS performance or a Tseng ET4000AX with its lacklustre Windows performance. I would also have used an ISA caching controller with a nosiy but speedy hdd and probably not used the system much because of the racket it would have made.

Personally, I would extend "period correct" to anything I could conceivably upgrade from the original build without having to replace the motherboard. It's kind of like "wear items" on a car that way, I think. Power supplies and hard drives are like brake pads and tires IMO.

The only line I draw is compatibility with my original OS, motherboard, and CPU. As long as Windows 98 SE (in my case) supports a given component without post-lifecycle hacks/unofficial patches, I'd still call it period correct.

As people before me stated, period correctness is a pretty fluid thing for me as well. For example, I started off with a Pentium 133 and 16MB of RAM and ended up with a Pentium 200 and 96MB of RAM a couple of years later. I was always about a generation behind current tech as well. Could never afford the latest and the greatest 😀

Define Period Correct.

When the era of discussion is windows XP, and Windows Vista (2005) period correct doesn't hold much meaning and is mostly not useful.

If you want to build a period correct XP and leave dates out that ranges from everything from pentium 3s. pentium M, pentium 4m, pentium 4, pentium D, Xeons, Atholons, Atholon 64s, Conroes, Core 2 Duos, Core 2 quads. Early 2nd generation Core Architecture like I3-i5-i7 such as on x58 platform is still fully supported on XP.

So This is obviously just my opinion if you want to build a XP computer, you should just build a XP computer that is as big and bad as you can. 2005 perioud correct is not very useful. If it was me I think 2009-2010 is a better period to build a XP machine from.

My main idea with this build was that every hardware in the system must have win98 drivers, so it can run both win98 and winXP and no yellow exclamation marks in device manager in win98se. Most parts are from the pc I used back in 2006 or close to that.
I guess the thing that made me wonder was the way it looks. I suppose I can't see it when I close the case but the big "arctic freezer 13" logo in the cooler doesn't make it look like it is period correct. 😜
It is surprising that they still sell modern coolers with socket 939 support.
The system might not be considered retro yet, but I am sure it will be considered some day.
When I am looking at period correctness, I just usually look at the release date of parts and they must be around or before the time I am aiming for.

Baoran wrote:

My main idea with this build was that every hardware in the system must have win98 drivers, so it can run both win98 and winXP and no yellow exclamation marks in device manager in win98se. Most parts are from the pc I used back in 2006 or close to that.

I think you're going to be hard-pressed to find a mid-2000's era set of hardware that's going to play nice with Win98. I would end the Win98 era in late 2001 to early 2002, coinciding with the start of the WinXP era. I'd say if you want a 90's gamer, you want to build a Windows 98 SE machine. If you want an XP machine (which is what it sounds like you have), that's something else entirely.

Like I said the build is almost finished. What made things easier was that my old late 2004 socket 939 motherboard had already win98 drivers for it so that is where I got the idea actually to make it into a hybrid between win98 and winXP.

I think you might have some trouble with older Win9x and DOS games with new GPUs, but things on the later end of the Win9x spectrum should be great on that rig. Super lucky you've got a late 2004 board with Win98 drivers since even Microsoft stopped supporting Win98 January of that year.

I just think your reading too far into the "period correct" There is nothing about a 2005-6 PC that is period Correct to windows 98 era.
People who build Period Correct systems are doing it just because they

A. either want that retro experience like playing a DOS game on a 486.
B. the software or programs they want to run only play nicely on specific hardware. (which I don't think 90s Era programs and software will all play nicely on AMD 64.)
c. there is nothing special about Mid 2000s hardware. On the contrary most people consider this a time frame where hardware was evolving and there was a lot of hardware overlap like manufactures were still manufacturing AGP, SCSI even though PCE-E and SATA was the norm.

Given that XP runs on a vast range of hardware and most people consider this the golden age of technological advances. So Period Correct XP doesn't seem very useful to me in that definitions and you are just artificially limiting yourself by creating artificial constraints.

If I wanted a build that ran XP and 98 I probably would of choosed something other than Athlon 64 Architecture not that there is anything wrong with that.

rob8086 wrote:

I think you might have some trouble with older Win9x and DOS games with new GPUs, but things on the later end of the Win9x spectrum should be great on that rig. Super lucky you've got a late 2004 board with Win98 drivers since even Microsoft stopped supporting Win98 January of that year.

Yeah. It isn't really meant for dos games. I did try few dos games and I do get FM music out of it but no dma support so no sound effects. I have a 486 33Mhz pc for dos games, so dos support isn't that important. But I think it will be good for wide range of windows games.

It is true that I am artificially limiting things with wanting to have win98 support as well but this is pretty much the pc that I was using winxp with back then, so it can be considered period correct winxp pc for me (except the cooler and the psu) and it can be expanded to be used with win98 games as well which means I can save space by not having so many computers. Athlon64 was definitely better option than pentium 4 back then so it is pretty much the only pc I have had with non-intel cpu.

Baoran wrote:

I have a 486 33Mhz pc for dos games, so dos support isn't that important. But I think it will be good for wide range of windows games.

Ahh, yeah you should be perfectly fine then. I didn't realize you already had an old machine for the older stuff. Yeah I'd say anything that XP machine won't handle for being too new, your old one should be able to handle. And hey if not, there's always Windows 98 😎

rob8086 wrote:

Baoran wrote:

I have a 486 33Mhz pc for dos games, so dos support isn't that important. But I think it will be good for wide range of windows games.

Ahh, yeah you should be perfectly fine then. I didn't realize you already had an old machine for the older stuff. Yeah I'd say anything that XP machine won't handle for being too new, your old one should be able to handle. And hey if not, there's always Windows 98 😎

Last night I even managed to get sound effects to work in dos using different dos driver version. I only tried the quake and doom because they come with the phil's dos benchmark package and I have not installed any other dos games there yet.
Well, like I said anything else working is just a bonus.

In practice, whenever I tried a dual-boot PC, I ended up using the newest OS the most. It just wasn't very practical to boot into Win98 anymore and it was kind of slow. Maybe dual-boot is useful on a machine that's not your main PC. Generally speaking, I was always a bit reluctant to upgrade the OS but after I did, never looked back.

It isn't going to be my main pc. It is actually going to be third older pc that I have built. My main pc still has windows 7. I recently bought a new gaming laptop and it came with windows 10 and I hate windows 10. At least when it comes to windows 10, I much rather use windows 7 on my main desktop pc even if the gaming laptop probably has equal or better performance than my main pc.

Messing around with old hardware has been fun and I definitely have spent more time messing with the hardware than playing games with the pcs I have built. The games that I have played on retro pcs has been mostly old dos games so far.
I get these ideas like this one often thinking that it would be cool to have a pc with full win98se compatibility while being fast enough that it could run crysis in windows xp. Who knows how much I will actually end up using the pc. 😜

Warlord wrote:

Define Period Correct.

To me I'd say that the machine would at least seem to be a typical or plausible representation of a computer that could be from that era. It should at least seem to be from such a period.

Personally I don't really care though if a graphics card is 3 years older or younger then the motherboard, but for some reason I wouldn't build a Pentium 1 rig into a modern warp-capable christmastree case with all the shines and such.

Frankly, I don't even really care about the name "period correct", but I do like retro rigs that use old or oldish parts that were originally from the same era, including PSUs (provided it doesn't kill said hardware 🤣).

Honestly, if I can put it in a modern case with a modern power supply, it's going to keep my precious, vintage components alive that much longer. So I guess I like "period correct" in the inside, modern materials, power, and cooling on the outside.

I have two 100% period correct builds. One of them is my 1998 dream PC. Even the drivers are late 1998.
The specs are:
Tyan S1836 Intel 440BX mobo with onboard Adaptec UW SCSI, Dual Pentium II 400, 512MB PC100 RAM, nVidia Riva TNT, 3Dfx Voodoo2 SLI, Creative AWE64 Gold, Aureal Vortex2
3xSeagate Cheetah 10.000rpm 9.1GB
Dual-booting Windows NT Workstation 4.0 SP4 and Windows 98

Pretty epic build. I think I'll make a build log thread later. However there are several problems when it comes to using this computer.
1998 server PSU was very loud and not too stable, I had to replace it later on.
10K rpm Cheetah SCSI drives from that era are as fast as they are unbearably loud
Also 3x9GB isn't too much for two OS and a bunch of CD images on the HDD for the games to play

Next, Windows NT Workstation can run some games like Half-Life and Unreal but for the most you have to switch to Windows 98 which is known to be very slow and buggy compared to NT, has no NTFS support, no SMP support. I'll probably stick with a later beta of Windows NT 5.0 (which is a beta of Windows 2000)
So, going period-correct limits you in many ways but gives that authentic experience.

To me, period correctness only matters so far as compatibility is concerned. For example, someone on here recently had a thread where they were using an Asus P5A (Super7, 1998) with a Pentium 233MMX (1997), and Windows 3.1 (1993). As I had pointed out in that thread, a 5 year hardware and software gap in those days is quite significant, would not get the most out of the hardware (a concern when ATX Super7 boards are rare, or at least expensive), and could lead to driver troubles and other quirks.

There is no reason other than nostalgia to artificially limit your choices. I would not use an older power supply or fan, but I would use an old Hard Drive for that wonderful whirring sound!

Baoran wrote:

Would you be able to consider it period correct build if everything else would be from the period you are aiming for but you would use a new power supply for reliability reasons and modern cpu cooler?
I was about to finish my athlon64 build from around 2005, but my only atx psu that I had from the period failed. Also because I used thermaltake tai-chi case with my athlon 64 in 2005 or 2006 or so and it had integrated liquid cooling in the case, so I seem to have lost the original cooler that would have come with the cpu.

Yeah I'm using AT power supplies for most of my 386/486/Pentium builds, but once those go, I've got a few ATX-AT adapters and a few ATX power supplies. If my XT style power supply in my 386SX breaks, I'm just going to rip the guts out of one of those small ATX power supplies and engineer it into the XT power supply chassis so that no one can tell.