Hi, so I've been working for a while on putting together a system based mostly around early-2000s era components, although with some modern quality of life features where it makes sense. Here's the result:

Oh, wait, sorry. Wrong picture – that's my Ryzen 3700x workstation. Just a moment…

Ah, here we go (click to embiggen):

So, the goal of this project was to figure out what a gaming system from early 2000s would have looked like if it was built with a gaming PC aesthetic from 20 years later. LED lighting, windows, mesh case, the whole bit. And of course, it's (almost completely) functional! Everything except the front USB ports on the case works (and I might add that later with a PCI USB card).

As for specifications and parts choice, with some build notes:

• Case: Fractal Focus G in "Mystic Red". Chosen for being one of the few mesh-front gamer cases that still had multiple 5¼" drive bays. Has 3 white LED fans installed (stock 2 plus a third matching) along with a white LED strip mounted along the top, just above the window edge.
• Motherboard: MSI MS-5169 rev 4.0 ATX Super Socket 7. Using BIOS 3.5 for K6+ compatibility. I suspect this board needs to be re-capped, but it's been reasonably stable with power management features disabled.
• CPU: AMD K6-III+ 400ACR model. I'm currently running it at 500MHz (100×5) using the board's 2.2v setting.
• Memory: 1GB (2×512MB) eBay reseller re-marked PC133 SDRAM. I got lucky here finding some double-sided sticks that the motherboard properly recognized. (Thanks also to the late Rudolph R. Loew for PATCHMEM to make Windows 98SE stable with this ram amount.). The motherboard only caches up to 256MB, but the CPU's integrated cache handles the full memory size.
• Graphics: 3Dfx Voodoo 3 2000 AGP. I kept this card when I got rid of the original PC it was used with, and was glad to have a chance to use it in a new build!
• Sound: Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS. This card conveniently has an HD-Audio compatible front panel connection usable via a simple pin adapter. It works great with the modern case. (All the forum posts you can find about people having problems with the front panel connector are because they were using an AC'97 style case instead of HDA)
• Floppy: A Matsushita 3½" drive in black, in a 5¼" bay adapter.

The remaining parts aren't really period-correct (but i mean what on this system is?), but are rather quality of life updates.

• Network: Realtek 8169 Gigabit (there's no point in gigabit on this box, but I had the card handy. It's windows 98 compatible - uses same driver set as the 8139C)
• Storage controller: Silicon Image 3114 SATA controller. Storage was a pain on this box. I originally used an IDE drive, but wanted to switch to SATA to use newer more readily available drives. The VIA VT6212 controller (SATA+IDE) i originally tried almost worked, but had some BIOS compatibility issues. The Sil3114 was my next choice, and I ended up trying several BIOS revisions on the card before finding one that slotted into the boot order correctly. (5.0.73 RAID was my final choice with the 1.0.20.0 driver version)
• Optical drive: A Sony DVD-RW drive. Picked mostly for aesthetic reasons, it has a nice front panel. The ALI onboard IDE has an ATAPI DMA bug, so it's running PIO speeds only.
• Primary storage: Not visible (it's mounted behind the motherboard tray) – a OCZ Agility 2 SSD, 120GB. This is a 2010-ish SSD, notable for its use of the SandForce controller that performs data compression to reduce wear on non-trim-supporting operating systems. It seemed like the a good size and tech choice for this build. No reliability issues… yet.
• Secondary storage: A WD Green 1TB HD. At the moment I have a ~200gb partition on this drive exposed to Windows 98, but it's plenty to hold CD images so I'm not swapping disks for games. Also has a copy of the Windows 98 CD files so I can quickly reinstall if needed (and don't get prompted to insert CD all the time for drivers).

I currently have this system set up to dual-boot Windows 98SE and Gentoo Linux (lol). I actually use this system to test and maintain some of the legacy Linux drivers, it's running an up-to-date 5.6 series kernel. I'm also testing the Rust programming language and ffmpeg media library support for i586 architecture using this machine.

I have a few other parts I occasionally swap in – I have a variety of AGP graphics cards including ATI Rage XL, Radeon 7000 & 9200SE and Nvidia TNT2, Geforce 2 MX 400 & 4 MX 420 & FX 5200 that I'll sometimes use to try specific games or drivers with.

Anyways, I'm curious what people think about the idea of the modern aesthetic with period parts build; it's sort of the opposite of the "sleeper" PC. I personally find the lighting and window great for showing off the component choice, and the system works great. There's certainly no shortage of cooling airflow to hopefully prolong the life of the old components.

as for the IBM Aptiva in the first picture? It is a sleeper PC build, and really has an R7 3700x. Getting the floppy drive functional was tricky 😀 But I have the original board & processor from it, and plan to use those for a late-dos & win95 build in the future with a Voodoo 2 and an AWE64 Gold