That's your max? I'd suggest a 'max' would be somewhere in the Core2 / Athlon64 area.

No, by max I meant max for the period. Anything more would be way overkill, and 98 wouldnt be able to handle dual cores.

What period? PIII Tualatin 1400 is mid-2002 by which you could have an Athlon XP 2200+.
If you want to be period correct you should use a CPU which was available before WinXP. Of course the Tualatin is a fine choice regarding power/heat.

The amount of RAM is probably also not period correct. And there are several postings on Vogons that to use more than 512MB with 98 you have to use some tricks.

Overkill depends on the games you want to play.

For me, for a maxed Win98SE system, I would go for a 3.2GHz P4 system with 8X AGP slot. I have good experience with Asrock boards in this.

Win98 chipset drivers on modern hardware?

Well, the real Win98SE max stats are:
PCIe with an Intel 915/925 chipset.
Pentium4 6xx CPU.
512 Mb RAM.
Geforce 6800 Ultra or Radeon X850 PE (newer cards haven't Win9x drivers).

But the more classic way is - Intel 865/875 with a Socket 478 Pentium4 and AGP 8x.

I would go for a 3.2GHz P4 system with 8X AGP slot.

Those Asrock boards are nice, but I'd use a Celeron 4XX instead... similar speed to a 3.2 P4 at stock, but they run a lot cooler and are also quite overclockable if you're so inclined.

Gamecollector wrote:

Well, the real Win98SE max stats are: PCIe with an Intel 915/925 chipset. Pentium4 6xx CPU. 512 Mb RAM. Geforce 6800 Ultra or Ra […]
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Well, the real Win98SE max stats are:
PCIe with an Intel 915/925 chipset.
Pentium4 6xx CPU.
512 Mb RAM.
Geforce 6800 Ultra or Radeon X850 PE (newer cards haven't Win9x drivers).

But the more classic way is - Intel 865/875 with a Socket 478 Pentium4 and AGP 8x.

Maximum video card for Windows 98 would be a eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme. Highest core and memory clocks of any GeForce 6800 Ultra but very rare. Only like 150 of them were made (and I have one).

http://www.evga.com/articles/public.asp?AID=188

And x850 doesn't have a Windows 98 driver. ATi stopped supporting Windows 98 after the 9800XT.

Theoretically, an AMD Sempron 150 could run Windows 98 and run it faster and cooler than an Athlon 64 FX. Multi-core processors could also by utilizing only one core, but that would be a waste of a multi-core CPU unless you're setting a dual boot system with 2K/XP/Vista/7 that will use the additional cores.

Look here for late model motherboards that are still supported under Windows 98

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/97588-modern- … ith-windows-98/

Sound seems to be an issue since the motherboard manufacturers were making their boards Vista compliant by then and Vista supports 7.1 surround sound chips that Windows 98 doesn't. You can still use a PCI sound card, though, so no real biggie. Just disable the onboard sound in the BIOS.

heres one I just put together not to long ago. Its my max while keeping incompatability issues to a minimum and trying to stay at least somewhat period correct. I didn't want to go with anything after around 2002. I guess its an arbitray date but I think around this time is when Win98 was really going away and XP was coming on full steam.

Win98SE
AMD Athlon 1800+ 1.5ghz
512MB RAM
Geforce 4 ti4600
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
36GB 10krpm SCSI hard drive running from a Adaptec scsi controller card
then I have your standard cd drive and dvd drive as well as a 1.44MB FDD as well as an Iomega 250mb zip drive

I like to test windows 98 pc's by playing Simcity 3000. If it can run that intro smoothly then its all good.

sliderider wrote:

And x850 doesn't have a Windows 98 driver. ATi stopped supporting Windows 98 after the 9800XT.

Catalyst 6.2 for WinME is supporting Radeon Xxxx series and Windows 98.
I own the Radeon X850 PE AGP, so - I'm 100% sure about this.
Yes, there isn't "Windows ME" or "Windows 98" choice for the Radeon X8xx series in the AMD driver selector. Well, not only Catalyst programmers are *censored* in AMD.