What would a budget rig of say... late 1998 looked like?
I've got on hand a 466MHz Socket 370 Celeron, with an MSI 440BX board (I guess and early revision?).
What would the rest of the specs looked like?
Budget?
A second hand Pentium MMX with a PCI graphics card and a 3DFX Voodoo 😀
Even though your CPU is higher spec than a Pentium II system of the time (pretty much budget for the day), a lot of OEM's were shipping with NVIDIA RivaTNT'/TNT2's and Ensoniq Audio PCI's around that time. Probably no more than 128MB RAM at most; 8-12GB HD or so.
Budget would be something like this:
K6-2 350 or 400 or even a Cyrix M-II
64MB RAM
Riva TNT or Voodoo 1+2D 2MB card
4GB HDD
otherwise a similar system with a Celeron 300A
I think MMX 233 is way too late for late 1998. Perhaps early 1998...
wrote:Even though your CPU is higher spec than a Pentium II system of the time (pretty much budget for the day), a lot of OEM's were shipping with NVIDIA RivaTNT'/TNT2's and Ensoniq Audio PCI's around that time. Probably no more than 128MB RAM at most; 8-12GB HD or so.
Ok, would it fit more into 99 then? I've got a 128mb stick of RAM in it.
As well as two 8mb V2s.
This is just more out of curiosity.. really not sure if I would build it or not considering I have a Tualatin capable board with a 1.1Ghz Celeron.
The budget rig my dad bought in late 1998 had a Celeron 300, 64MB of RAM, a 2GB hard drive, and a 2D video card. 🤣
My rig in 98 was an Acer Aspire. 300A Celeron, 48mb ram, rage pro turbo onboard & a 3.2gb hdd 🤣 Wish I still had it.
My current equivalent is an IBM Aptiva K6-2 450, 128mb RAM, Rage pro turbo onboard, V2 8mb & a 20gb hdd.
So many combinations to make, so few cases to put them in.
A late 98 budget rig would most likely have been built around an AMD K6 up to 300mhz. They were a lot cheaper than Slot 1 systems so you would have gotten a lot more for your money and the AMD chips outperformed other Super Socket 7 competitors for the most part so that's where your money would have been better spent. The first gen Riva TNT cards were just starting to come out in mid 1998 so a Riva 128 probably would have been considered a budget card by the time late 98 rolled around. With Ati you probably would have been looking at a Rage XL or Pro as the budget line because the Rage 128 was being released in mid 98, also. Most people with tight computing budgets would still have been making do with 64-128mb RAM and probably wouldn't have upgraded to Windows 98 yet.
