a good place to start would be reading threads in the System Specs forum on vogons. There you can see what people have actually done and found useful.

Buying this stuff generally - there's also amibay.com - volumes of pc stuff are still pretty low on there but you can always post a wanted ad. It is moderated to try ensure sales go smoothly, which is a big plus.

Maybe you can tell us which parts you already have laying around?
Perhaps if you already have specific parts, you won't be needing to buy them and save some money 😜

Thx a lot. Sadly, I don't have any components yet 😢 I will inform my spec plan in next week.

You have 3 basic options.

Pentium III
Pentium 4
Athlon / Athlon XP

If you choose a Pentium III then I would look for a board that can run a Tualatin.
Avoid Willamette Pentium 4 CPUs, they are slower than a fast Tualatin Pentium III.
If you go for an Athlon I would look for at least the 1200 mhz model or faster.

Thanks. I am really appriciated to you. They are hard to find on Ebay and Amazon. Can you look for Pentium 3 Tualatin board? (Include ASUS,etc boards). I decided to go with Pentium 3 Tualain. I also like to know which graphic card is better (Geforce or 3DFX Voodoo).

While this machine is using Windows 95 and a bit too slow for some of the games you mentioned, it might give you some tips and ideas 😀

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_Vi9gZ … ETU-VWM7mUe52OB

A fast P III could be enough for your games. But I lack a bit of experience with Half Life to really make a judgement. Didn't this game come out a bit later though? Is Windows XP not an option?

It's a good start though.

Half-Life came late 98 when the P2-450s were rolling out.

I think i was on the almost same road here, wanted also made the fastest windows 98 se machine.. But trying finding an Pentium III tualatin platform isnt very easy *very hard* to find and those components are extremly rare now. And the Slot Athlons are not going to speedy as well.. I think you need to be happy to find an 1200mhz one.. Also socket A boards are not easy to find anymore (not in my envoirement)

So i decided to go for an socket a board that i might find.. I ended up with an MSI K7N2 Delta 2 motherboard.. This board have two benefits.. One its having an intergrade NIC (so i dont have to loose pci slots, because older boards do have 6 slots, and newer only 5.. So definitely ending up in a fully occuppied systemboard. because some graphics cards are dual slots that would give me some problems.
The other benefit is that its have sata on the motherboard, does solutions works most better than using expension cards..

Iam going use a athlon xp 2600+ 266mhz on it.. Should be fast enough for everything i want to do in this system.
And i want to make it dual boot.. So i would the beginning of windows xp.. And for non compatible games i want to try windows ME, maybe switch back to win98se.

There is a huge difference between beeing able to run a game and running it at "Maximum Settings".

Blood will not run in high res with good FPS on anything slower than a really fast Pentium III.
Half Life will also need at least a fast Pentium III to run at high res with high settings.

Hmm.... It seems to be tough to get them in a short time. Despite of this, here's my spec plan to show you.

CPU: Pentium 3-S Tualatin 1.4 GHz (Using as Dual or singe core)
GPU: Geforce or 3dfx Voodoo (Plz recommend to me between them as flagship model)
Mainboard: ASUS and GIGABYTE mainboards which supports P3-S Tualatin (As a flagship model)
Soundcard: Gravis Ultrasound, MT-32 Roland, AWEs
HDD: 120GB Western Digital (IDE or SATA)
Drive: // (CD-RW and DVD supported)
FDD: //
Frame and Essential: IBM Thinkcentre which supports Geforce and Voodoo, IBM Thinkvision C220P CRT,IBM mouse and keyboard (Not Lenovo's)
Speakers: Not decided yet. Can you help me to choose a high quality model? (5.1 and 7.1)
VGA: //
RAM: 512MB to 1GB (Kingstone, etc)
Cooler: //
Network Card: //
OS: Windows 98 SE with Linux or XP (Multibooting)

// sign means that I did not decide yet. You can add any other things on my list which are needed.

Btw, what do you think about high capacity disk patch? (It allows to use more than 130GB for Windows 98 SE and ME). Is antivirus software available for Win 98 SE?

I want to add that you can also use nforce3-150 (specifically this chipset version, newer versions of the nforce3 chipset dropped win98se compatibility) motherboards and get up to Athlon64 Socket 754 chips with full Win98se compatibility. I have one such board, a Aopen Ak89-MAX and it's fully compatible and supported with Win98se. Mine is sporting a 2.4 ghz Athlon64 Socket-754 chip.

That said, no matter how new you go, you're not going to get around the memory limitations in Win98se. There's no patch that removes this. The only thing you can do is install more than 512MB and then edit windows startup files to limit windows to 512 MB of your installed ram. In general you're looking at 512 MB maximum for compatibility. Win98se I've found gets "weird" with 768 MB of ram, exhibiting various bizarre behaviors. Not crashing, but just things don't work as they should.

I had done a lot of research and this is typically the fastest system you'll ever get for Win98se. One benefit is it also brings AGP 8x support to Win98se, something older motherboards don't offer.

Also if you're looking for "the fastest" side of it, the geforce 6800 ultra is the fastest video card I find that still has good support and works stable in Win98se. You can find some for sale on ebay for about $30 today, not terribly bad.

Such a system would mainly be good for like half-life 1, dues ex, and other DirectX-powered Win98se games. It would probably be too fast for older DOS games and the like. If you're not interested in DirectX games, and only older ones, the Pentium3 systems with a voodoo3 3000 AGP card would probably be best for compatibility and speed.

Also in general I've found that even though Win98se supports FAT32, in general you want to stick to around a 20GB or 40GB hard drive, maybe an 80GB but that's kinda pushing it. Again, with bigger partitions win98se starts getting "weird" again. so.. even though it will actually do it, it wouldn't work right. A decent 7200 rpm 40GB drive would probably be a good bet. If you're going with an older Pentium3 system, probably a 20GB drive (also 7200 rpm probably).

About the motherboard I mentioned, it doesn't have to be exactly the model I have, you can just look at all socket 754 boards and try to google their information and find an nforce3-150 one.

My PC will be focused on Direct-X powered games as the first for Windows 98 SE machine with DOS 7.1 (Rig will follow Late 90's to mid 2000's version). The DOS games might be few that I am just playing from mid 90's to mid 2000's games. How about network card, sound card, drivers (FDD,etc), cooler?

I would probably suggest an Intel Pro-100 PCI card for Win98se, if only because intel actually still has drivers available on their download center for these cards for win98se. They're common cards, usually really cheap, and rather easy to hunt down drivers.

Don't worry yourself about gigabit connections for win98se machines, sometimes you can find a gig-E NIC with win98se drivers but due to the OS's networking stack, you're not going to get read-write speeds over the LAN above 3-5 MB/sec anyway, no matter what NIC/hard drive combination you use.

The network card is solved. What about FDD and CD-RW with DVD supported driver? Are Gravis and Roland sound card is suitalbe for my PC? If not, please list other soundcards which fits for mine.

If you're going for a PCI-Only faster system for Win98se, a sound blaster live card can be had rather cheap and there's people that have posted driver CD's for em for Win98se somewhere here on vogons (search for em). If you're going the Pentium3 route, you can look towards ISA cards. But if you're playing DirectX games, generally most all sound cards are going to sound the same for those games, it's mostly older DOS games that still used wavetable sound that highlighted the unique sounds from different sound cards. That said, the Sound blaster 16 ISA cards usually sound "good enough" for DirectX games (although ISA only) and should have built in native driver support in Win98se out of the box from microsoft. You can generally find those fairly cheap on ebay if you look around a little bit.

Any later model CD-ROM (24x and faster) and all DVD-ROM or DVD-RW drive should be ATAPI compatible, and thus work in Win98se with no additional drivers of any kind, straight out of the box. As long as you find an IDE version. In general Win98se isn't going to support SATA of any kind even if your motherboard supports it so don't count on that and just go IDE for everything if you can.

How about other motherboards that use PCI and ISA together with Pentium 3 Tualatin S 1.4GHz? The soundcard does not matter whatever I use for playing Direct X games as you mentioned. Is FDD useful for my PC? Can you tell me ASUS mainboards for my PC?

P.S.It seems that I have to plan 2nd PC for DOS gaming like Blood.
I'am worrying that Diablo 1&2 uses glide which is not good for non glide GPUs.

Personally I've been looking for a 'name brand' (gigabyte or Asus, or something similar) Pentium-III motherboard that supports the Tualatin S 1.4 myself for a long while, and I haven't yet actually found one. At least not in the sub-$100 range. If you find one post here and let me know? 😀 I have a Socket-370 motherboard sent to me free from a friend out of a gateway machine but it only supports up to coppermine chips, sadly.

Hmm... you can tell me other products to me or ask any user in this forum. I found the post about Pentium 3 RIg (Link: My latest Windows 98 Pentium 3 rig.). I am still wondering about Floopy Drive...

There's no problem figuring out a -MODEL- of motherboard that supports this, I can look through gigabyte and asus websites and see the lists. The problem is in actually finding one for sale. 🙁

Also if you're going with networked Win98se, then you probably will have very little (if no) use for a floppy drive, most things you can browse the Win98se's shared folders from a Windows7/8/XP machine and copy-paste files in to it directly.