I think that a super fast Win98 machine only makes sense if you need to dual boot it with a more resource demanding operating system, such as WinXP. If it's just Win98 you need to install on to a retro mobo, and you've already got a fast machine for newer WinXP/Vista/W7 games, then IMO you don't really need an insane amount of CPU power. For Win98, you're looking at games published no later than about 1999/2000, and DirectX 6 being the highest release that you need to have working. IMO, a C2D + 3GHz system is overkill.

I think it would be better to concentrate an slightly older, more era appropriate hardware. Two examples are, and I'm sure you're familiar with both of them, the "evil" KT133A and the i440BX, boosted by a Powerleap adapter and a Tualatin CPU.

There are some games, that need insane amounts of processing power but relatively little GPU resources - that is flight simulators. And a very nice one (European Air Wars with all sorts of Mods) won't run propper under WinXP.

So I shall follow the voice of reason and sell my 4x512 MB Corsair DDR1 Ram, the AGP GF 7900 and the ASRock 865PE Conroe?

If I were in your shoes, I would sell that hardware. I would then reinvest it, and buy an Epox EP-8KTA3Pro mobo. I would flash its BIOS to the latest beta version, and drop in an XP-M such as a 3000+ rated chip giving you 2.2GHz worth of CPU power. That should run European Air wars OK. BTW, I would recommend the EP-8KTA3Pro non-Raid board, and not an EP-8KTA3+Pro Raid board. The caps on the Raid boards tend to be more rotten than on the non-Raid boards.

It's difficult to get everything "just so". I appreciate that the caps issue is a weak link on these boards. You could get them "upgraded" by a computer technician, if you don't happen to have the correct tools/expertise. Also, you will need a decent PSU - another niggling issue with high end Athlon XP powered systems.

If these factors are off-putting, and they are a bit I suppose, then would a "hot rodded" i440BX system be OK for European Air Wars, I wonder? If you manage to acquire a Powerleap adapter, and also a mobo such as the Asus P2B (there are other good FSB overclockers), you can overclock it to run at 150 FSB, giving you a real clock speed of about 1.58 GHz. That's a nice system! Two immediate bonuses are: no rotten caps, and no 5V "fat amp" PSU required. Other plus points: lots of CPU and FSB adjustment options, stable chipset, and ISA slots galore. This could be just what you're looking for, perhaps? Apart from the Powerleap adapter, this hardware is cheap and still available. You could also get a few "back ups", if you're concerned about OC'ing and its long term effects.

I've been working on a Win98 system with a Athlon XP-M, Geforce 6800GT and a pair of Voodoo2s.

So far the extra muscle is making for better stereo 3D gaming, since it's takes double the resources (stereo has 2 screens to process instead of just one).

Drivers have been a bit of a pain for me. Lke the last WHQL Win98 geforce drivers reeked havoc on my system, but I found a later one that worked wonderfully.

retro games 100 wrote:

If I were in your shoes, I would sell that hardware.

That shall be the plan...

I would then reinvest it, and buy an Epox EP-8KTA3Pro mobo.

I guess you suggest this board for an Isa slot? Cause otherwise it would be a poor trade off.

If these factors are off-putting, and they are a bit I suppose, then would a "hot rodded" i440BX system be OK for European Air Wars, I wonder?

Sure you can play EAW on a p2-350 with a single V2 in it. If you are desperate for a second machine (head2head), even a p133 and a V1 will get the other player (read cannon fodder) airborne...

But the game has a long config file, and a large community. So they turned quite a bit into hires stuff. My 1000MHz P3 can handle some of it.

I was just thinking how far one could push the envelope, once one gives up on ISA and AGP 2x. There are even faster P4-CPUs than 3000 MHz.

I just agree that there are too few games worth the trouble. EAW is certainly one candidate, but frankly, it is the only one I care for. And since it has many descendants, I can live with the unmodded version.

bushwack wrote:

I've been working on a Win98 system with a Athlon XP-M, Geforce 6800GT and a pair of Voodoo2s.

So far the extra muscle is making for better stereo 3D gaming, since it's takes double the resources (stereo has 2 screens to process instead of just one).

Drivers have been a bit of a pain for me. Lke the last WHQL Win98 geforce drivers reeked havoc on my system, but I found a later one that worked wonderfully.

I once had exactly such a system: XP-M 2600+ at 200x11, GF6800 and V2-SLI. I found - as you did too - that the GF6800 limits the drivers quite a bit. For EAW I found only one working driver. Other Win98 games didn't work at all with any driver. Stepping down to GF4200ti solved those issues. I haven't tried a GF FX 5800 or such. Decided to go the P2/3 route for all in one ability.

The 865/875 is the last Intel chipset to sport Win98 drivers, so if you want the fastest, that is it.

ux-3 wrote:

retro games 100 wrote:

I would then reinvest it, and buy an Epox EP-8KTA3Pro mobo.

I guess you suggest this board for an Isa slot? Cause otherwise it would be a poor trade off.

When I suggested this board, I was thinking of the ISA slot. But I was also thinking of the speed. Stock speed is 2.2GHz, and OC'd speed is 2.5GHz. That's a powerful system. IMO, it's worth the hassle. However, I've just thought of 2 alternative mobos. Ditch the ISA slot, and either get a KT333 chipset mobo (Voodoo5 friendly), or get an even faster nForce2 chipset mobo.

ux-3 wrote:

Sure you can play EAW on a p2-350 with a single V2 in it. If you are desperate for a second machine (head2head), even a p133 and a V1 will get the other player (read cannon fodder) airborne...

🤣

ux-3 wrote:

I just agree that there are too few games worth the trouble. EAW is certainly one candidate, but frankly, it is the only one I care for. And since it has many descendants, I can live with the unmodded version.

Yes, there isn't a good enough reason to build a machine for a small number of games.

valnar wrote:

The 865/875 is the last Intel chipset to sport Win98 drivers, so if you want the fastest, that is it.

Did you have to mention this? 😵

I was just coming to my senses...

retro games 100 wrote:

When I suggested this board, I was thinking of the ISA slot. But I was also thinking of the speed. Stock speed is 2.2GHz, and OC'd speed is 2.5GHz. That's a powerful system. IMO, it's worth the hassle.

How do you adjust the multi on this board for an XP-M? Just jumpers or can you set it in bios as well? Does it have spread spectrum as bios option?

with a machine that fast you could VM it

ux-3 wrote:

retro games 100 wrote:

When I suggested this board, I was thinking of the ISA slot. But I was also thinking of the speed. Stock speed is 2.2GHz, and OC'd speed is 2.5GHz. That's a powerful system. IMO, it's worth the hassle.

How do you adjust the multi on this board for an XP-M? Just jumpers or can you set it in bios as well? Does it have spread spectrum as bios option

You cannot adjust the multi on this board for an XP-M using either the BIOS set up options area, or using jumpers, in order to set these types of processors to their default (maximum) multi values. Instead, you can successfully adjust the multis on fast XP-Ms using Windows (98 ) software. Software = CPUMSR.exe, in conjunction with a low level device driver you also need to install.

You can increase the multi inside the BIOS to about 12.5x. This will result in your fast XP-M not running to its maximum potential, but you will get this speed in pure DOS.

I'm not sure about Spread Spectrum. Is this a concern regarding a Voodoo5? Voodoo5 cards work just fine in this board. I have tested both V3s and V5s. No problems, even with large FSB overclocks.

retro games 100 wrote:

You can increase the multi inside the BIOS to about 12.5x. This will result in your fast XP-M not running to its maximum potential, but you will get this speed in pure DOS.

I guess to me it is more impartant how flexible you can set it. I suppose 5x multi is the bottom end in bios? 3x by software?

I'm not sure about Spread Spectrum. Is this a concern regarding a Voodoo5? Voodoo5 cards work just fine in this board. I have tested both V3s and V5s. No problems, even with large FSB overclocks.

Unfortunately, my V5 is different (nice euphemism for defective) in that regard. It crashes with a spread spectrum - reliably on every board. Only "single gpu" works then. I have seen the spread spectrum option tied to fsb speed in kt133a bios. My kinetiz explicitly varies the spread according to selected FSB. The P3B-F does so too, but does not tell you about it. I deduced this possibility from the Kinetiz and tried 112 MHz FSB on the P3B-F. With such an overclock, the bios disables spread and my Voodoo5 works. Was I ever glad when I figured that one out!
I do have an Aopen P3 board that allows to disable spread in bios, but it gives you no voltage control (I wouldn't need it since I need not OC for spread to drop on this board) and it gives no FSB66 downclock option. So far, I am not sure if I can give that up instead. For now, I just OC 12% and have some spare CPUs and boards in case one goes boom.

I think 6x multi is the bottom end in the BIOS. Within Windows, I can't remember what the lowest multi is. It could be 6x.

Totally OT but today I checked the BIOS on my Phenom 2 machine and it allowed me to set the multi to 0.5 🤣

I had the Phenom II running at 100 MHz and booted into DOS. Sysmark, 3D Bench, Speedsys all ran just fine. Doom also ran fine. But I couldn't get the AudioPCI to work 🙁

For me, I do have a P4 3.2GHz in a 865 chipset ASRock motherboard. The main reason, I set this up, (other than pushing the Win9x based system running at it's max capacity) is to play those Win9x based games which are problematic without patches when running on Win2k and above. Eg. - System Shock 2, Thief 1 & 2, Revenant, and some other picky games.

But with patches appearing to help run such games in WinNT based architecture, the usefulness of a P4 Win9x system fades.

Still, that 865PE based system is very nice to have - especially with the Socket 775 friendly heatsinks. I just hate the Socket 478 based brackets-heatsink. In terms of CPU temperature control, I get frustrated in bringing it down, when compared to a Socket775 based solution.

And you can still run those Win9x games without problems when compared with so many problems with newer OSs.

More on this.

Thats close to my board alright. I even have 2x 256MB DDR3200 for dual channel mode. I have already taken out the C2D and the 2GB of corsair ram. What graphics card do you use with it?

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Totally OT but today I checked the BIOS on my Phenom 2 machine and it allowed me to set the multi to 0.5 🤣

I had the Phenom II running at 100 MHz and booted into DOS. Sysmark, 3D Bench, Speedsys all ran just fine. Doom also ran fine. But I couldn't get the AudioPCI to work 🙁

Hell's Bells! Try a Solo1 and report... 😀

Dump it. 😎
I had big plans myself some years ago. I got hold of a A7M266-D motherboard with 2 mobile Athlon XPs wired to 2266MHz, 2GB 400MHz(@266MHz 2-2-2) ECC REG memory, iPanel Deluxe, 80GB hdd, Aureal SQ2500 OEM(?)+Prodigy 7.1 HiFi, varying graphics from Videologic 3Dx to Geforce 3, with Geforce 6800GT/Ultra and Radeon HD3800 planned.
I thought this would be the perfect Win98/XP dual boot machine. Well it did not work out well as i planned, despite the fact the machine was fast as a 3200+ A64. Win98 had serious problems with more than 512MB memory, the board was discomfortable with a modern PSU, various driver troubles in Win98, the Prodigy 7.1 had IRQ issues even if it was alone, i could not put vidcards with back mounted heatsinks int the mobo, beacause the enourmus CPU coolers got in the way, the board was picky about IDE devices, and other nuisances.
XP portion was used only for web browsing, and simple office tasks, as i was playing the modern games on a C2D machine, and to my suprise a lot of Win98 games im interested in run just fine on the main Xp rig.
Recently one of the modules got faulty, and after that the motherboard did not accept any IDE devices.
That is my luck. 😦
Oh well, i had an Abit KA7-100 board with a K7100 cpu lying around, i used them to make a machine with the same purpose as the old one. My experiance with the new machine is much better, it has less ram(2x256MB PC133), and less processing power, but is much more compatible(ISA slot for DOS sound, Win98 is working fine with less driver trouble), and still feels quite responsive in WinXP.
Overall its far better suited for retro gaming, and while i really like that Athlon dually, it was total overkill for the task.