I'm always one for trying something a bit different, so here is my latest Windows 98 / DOS build.

It's a ECS P6VEM3 motherboard, which has a soldered on VIA C3 CPU. Whilst it's a lowly 733MHz CPU, it is from spring 2001; around the time the Tualatin was released, so I hoped it would be faster than say, a 733MHz Coppermine - yeah, about that...

Anyway, I paired it with 256MB of SDR RAM, and the chipset / onboard video is a SiS 630e. Pretty woeful but it was primarily going to be a DOS PC, the main reason being it is very quiet! I used my Soundblaster Live for the SB16 emulation in DOS, although I was originally going to use the built in audio VT1612A, but all the drivers I could find reported that they couldn't find any relevant hardware... oh well.

tiny heatsink and fan combination! Some are passively cooled.

My only vaguely reto-y PC case I have left 🙁

With my 17" Dell LCD and Acer mechanical keyboard

So is it any good? It works pretty well in Windows-based DOS. A few games run too fast, only one or two don't work with the Soundblaster's SB16 emulation, so pretty good for what it is! I tried disabling the internal cache and it is un-usable in Windows. The few games with speed issues were fixed, but most games were unplayably slow (3-4 seconds per frame kind of unplayable)

A few benchmarks from Phil's DOS benchmarking package:
3DBench 1.0c: 377fps
Chris' 3D Benchmark: 63fps
PC Player Bench: 36fps
Quake: 31fps

Is it any good as a Windows 98 gaming PC? Balls no!

3DMark 99: 2,186 (4,358 CPU)
3DMark 2000: 697
Quake 3: 23.5fps (also very laggy menus)

It's the first PC I've actually played any DOS games on though so I'm not interested in making a DOS PC. I'm tempted to drop my Voodoo 3 in there to see if there is much improvement, or maybe just put my usual Athlon 800 set up back in.