So after weeding out a lot of hardware, and seeing what's left that works, I've come to the conclusion that the best scenario for my "retro rig" is to conflate what would've been three machines into one. And luckily there's enough hardware to do that! 😀 Hopefully it won't break too much stuff either - I'll take my chances with the handful of "really old" (compared to the hardware being used) titles and compatibility otherwise.

Had it all hooked up and running on the bench tonight, and came up with a few questions that I don't know the answers to:

First is, in the system performance thing on UBCD I tested all of the disks, I'm wondering how to interpret the "score" it gives each disk. I don't mean the "raw" data (like average read latency or buffered reads), but the score that pops up in the lower left-hand side - the three disks in the system had relatively similar "raw" scores (and they're pretty similar disks, capacity aside), but one of them scored almost three times higher than other two (900 vs 352 and 381). Or is that number basically meaningless?

Second question is, I've got a Voodoo 2 PCI that was going to go in one of the builds, I hooked it up in this machine and VGA display was fine (that's probably the first "instant win" from the part-bucket that the Voodoo2 came out of 😒 , AIDA16 identified it correctly as a Voodoo 2 (continuing the trend of good things 😎), but I'm guessing there's no further testing I can do until I load Windows and install device drivers for it? (superscape 3dbench didn't seem to change with the Voodoo2 installed or removed so I'm assuming it was running on the other card both times) Additionally, I understand the Voodoo 2 itself will generally only operate up to 800x600, but is there a limit on the pass-through resolution? (a quick search didn't yield much 😊)

Finally, anyone have a favorite/suggested Voodoo2 driver for Windows XP? 3dfxzone gives me a few options, FastVoodoo2 4.0 XP Gold and Koolsmoky Voodoo2 look like the best choices. Either looks like it should work...

Oh, specs for those interested:

Mobo: Asus P4B-LA
CPU: Pentium 4 2.0GHZ 180nm (benchmarks I've found online, and the system performance test, seem to indicate its about equivalent to an Athlon 1.4, but it has SSE2 and more importantly: I already have it and it works - seemed to stay pretty cool during testing with a later-generation Pentium 4 in-the-box cooler (The one with copper in the middle))
Memory: 1GB SDRAM
GFX: GeForce FX 5900XT + Voodoo2 (technically the Voodoo2 isn't "needed" but since there were no major hiccups with dropping it in during testing, and since its unlikely to find a home anywhere else, I figure until/unless it gives me a reason to remove it, it can stay)
Hard-disks: Samsung 40GB, Quantum 13GB, WD 6.5GB (all three seem to work, the WD is a little loud when it first starts, but otherwise they seem okay - not getting any SMART status errors, and they all completed a few rounds of benchmarking/testing)