While waiting on your exact model, what I can say is that the 9600 Pro really brings that extra smoothness in games like Mafia or GTA III that my FX5600 Ultra just couldn't provide, I felt it immediately after switching cards, but still felt adequately "from the era" if it makes any sense. Maybe the Geforce 4Ti 4200 will compare better but you'll certainly need some extra oomph to go on from 2002 forwards or it will be noticeable.
As for sound, if you already have an Audigy 2ZS and if you'll end up playing some later DOS games occasionally in this build (like Doom, Duke 3D, etc, the usual suspects) then you already have the perfect card for that hardware config IMO. SB Emulation won't be any different from the Live! cards (maybe someone can prove this wrong), just install the .vxd driver and you're all set. And while being similar for SB Emu, in Win9x games the Audigy 2 ZS is way superior. I think it's perfectly acceptable or even good for most newcomers to occasional DOS games, here's a 2 EX (same SB Emu):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODfUjEMgB7Q
In general, most people here are from a certain age upwards and tend to give much more importance to early to later DOS games, especially regarding sound, as they remember a specific card at the time that they had and are very used to a certain chip sound for example. I played most games as a kid at the time through PC speaker so a lot of them just sound weird to me in any other way. I think you could use what you have and check the SB emulation out, either from the Live! or the Audigy 2ZS, I think you'll be more than happy with it. Plus if you'd want to give full emphasis on DOS games you wouldn't build a Tualatin PC.
I'm curious if there is a 1.4Ghz Tualatin compatible board with an ISA slot, I imagine it would be very expensive nowadays.
The thing about Live! cards is that Creative just plain bailed on the drivers, which is weird because the hardware is clearly well made. I have had multiple revisions of Live cards in multiple builds with various OS, and between signal noise, purity and even output level issues on different quality speakers, they're just not worth it. On my Win98SE PC every single Live driver version I tried was what was keeping the pc from soft restarting in Windows, freezing in the shutdown screen! I only found this out years later, people kindly pointed out it probably was nusb to blame but nope, confirmed. After years dealing with the issues above, a simple Audigy 2 solved everything in 5 minutes, and with better quality to boot. Such a waste of potential, the Live! cards are very affordable and plentiful and could be an excellent bridge between the 90s and 2000s gaming, but oh well.
I love the later 1990s - 2004 era of games and there's just something special seeing the Pentium III platform at its peak. Tried WinME with my 1.4 Ghz Tualatin build and I just love it. Recently built another similar one to make it a multimedia build also. Installed some quality CD writers to make it my CD burning station and routed the sound from the Audigy EX's external panel to my cassette deck so I can record some playlists quickly and easily. Some musical styles and eras just sound "better" to me through cassette 🤣.
Sorry for the long reply, I just really like this topic!
