cpu/mobo is a pretty expensive, highend early 1999 config. Swap for Pentium III 1100 or Celeron 700@1.1GHz and you will match GF2 perfectly for gamer 2000 build.

Looks good. If you want to play games in pure DOS, you'll want a different sound card; for just playing them inside Win98, the SBLive is fine.

I'd upgrade RAM to 256MB or more if possible.

Cheers guys,

Will consider the upgrades, but I'll be seeing how things run stock first of all. Have a good friend who is also very knowledgeable about hardware from this period so getting advice from him too.

For DOS sound, I've picked up a couple of ESS Audiodrives and so one of these should fill that requirement, I'm hoping.

Hi guys

With life getting in the way, I’m only just getting around to sorting this machine out.

I’m looking to buy a GeForce 4 Ti 4200, but I’ve got concerns about those cards being AGP 8x and my mobo (as listed, above) is only 2x..

Not sure if that’s dangerous or if my specific board will allow that?

Cheers guys

Watch it with video cards like that, aside from the AGP speed, sometimes the bus can't provide enough power through the slot.

ras2a wrote on 2019-03-08, 17:23:

I'll be looking to play Thief and Thief 2 (my fave games ever) so hoping the above is powerful enough?

That rig is more than powerful enough for Thief 1&2.

The only other thing that you might want to consider is getting a sound card that supports Aureal A3D in some form. I recently tried Thief Gold with a Yamaha YMF724 which uses the Sensaura 3D sound API (it emulates A3D to an extent) and the accuracy of the positional audio was leagues above using a SBLive or even an Audigy 2 ZS.

If you can find one cheap, try getting your hands on a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. That card has an even better Sensaura implementation. Or, if you don't mind spending (a lot) more money, go for a genuine Aureal Vortex 2 for the premium A3D experience.

Should be fine, GF4 Ti is the last of the known good cards with BX motherboards. The FX series is where you may/may not have trouble.

As reference I've got a Ti4600 on my 1Ghz system running a 200W PSU, Dell branded Intel M/B. Same card worked fine on a Dual 600Mhz system with a P2B-DS

Not sure how much performance boost you'll get a 450 will be holding back the card, but hey you need to have a bottleneck somewhere right?

Cheers guys.

Chinny, do you have the same board as me? I’m thinking I get a slocket adapter for my slot 1 mobo and get a PIII 1GHz 370. Any ideas if I’d be able to go with 133 for both the CPU / RAM (my mobo manual says it supports 100 FSB, but then it does seem to report overclocking capabilities)

Any ideas if this board would support Taulatin PIII or Celeron

I don't have the Aopen branded board however BX motherboards are for the most part created equal.
You can definitely overclock to 133FSB. This does have a side effect on AGP bumping it up from 66Mhz to 89Mhz. Many cards like the GF4 are cool with this, GF2 can be hit or miss.
Taulatin support will come down to the motherboard revision. On Aopen boards looks like 1.03 onwards is ok but would want to double check the exact revision first.

Thanks a lot mate, appreciate that