I think it would help if you specified what games you're looking to play on this rig - or at least what period games you're looking for. Lots of old games require - no - are more playable / stable on windows 98 / ME rather then windows 2000 / xp. In fact some games flat-out refuse to run on XP or have trouble installing - but that's a pretty rare occurrence. I don't know of any game capable of running well on a 700MHz PIII cpu that requires windows XP. In fact I'm pretty sure games that required windows XP only came around at the end of 2005 - so not really retro and way to demanding for a PIII machine. I'd say stick with win98se.

As for win 2000 vs win XP - I've always been more partial to winXP, but be warned - it will run like crap on a PIII machine, even with lots of ram. I only install XP on faster machines like Socket A Athlon XP CPUs or fast Pentium 4 builds. Installing win 2000 doesn't feel right for me - it was designed as a work OS, not a gaming OS - just like windows NT witch it's based on.

Soundcard-wise: an ISA card like the SB16 is more suited for DOS gaming. For early windows games you could use the SB16, but I recommend the Sound blaster live! or better yet - a Creative 128 PCI or a Yamaha DS-XG YMF-724 / 744 or 754). The latter cards have wavetable MIDI emulation usable in some late dos games like the Descent II windows / 3dfx port and others. If you're dead set on populating that ISA slot, get a Creative AWE64 - this gives you the option of playing late dos games under real dos with wavetable midi music. The 128PCI and YMF-724 also have good dos drivers, but I don't know if wavetable midi music works on either of them under real dos.

Good luck with your build.

For such a machine I would definitely stick with Windows 98 SE because it comes with MS-DOS 7.1 and lets you play both types of games.

Because the machine has an ISA slot you have a wide range of choices. For PCI my go to card is the Vortex 2. You could run that as well an ISA, disable the ISA card under Windows and not install the DOS Vortex drivers.

Yea, too many options really 😁

Thanks Kane for your suggestions.

Well, Win XP is Windows NT 5.1 so technically ALL games and apps that work in XP should work in Win2k Pro also but not all do due to installers checking the OS version which IMHO is ridiculous and more than likely that was due to pressure from Microsoft on 3rd party developers in order to intice people to switch to XP.

I'm aware of SB16 and it being more suited for DOS gaming, it's actually my favorite card for DOS games which is why my Intel 486DX4-100 build has one also installed, however this Pentium III build will be for late DOS games that have SVGA support such as Duke Nukem 3D Atomic, Shadow Warrior, Blood, Grand Prix 2, etc. As for Windows games, 99% of the retail games I own work in Win98/Win98SE, ME, Win2k Pro and Windows XP, the other 1% require either Win2k Pro or Windows XP to install and/or work.

I don't know about what you mean about the Pentium III 700Mhz, as it is a pretty beastly CPU for it's speed range, i've had games that required Pentium 4 1.4Ghz to run just fine at 30fps - 60fps on it, just depends on the game and the games settings I guess, i've had XP on it before and it wasn't slow at all especially with a Promise ATA133 card installed. The 440BX chipset is legendary for it's overall performance so that could be why XP ran well on it before. I am however looking towards using a Pentium III 1Ghz Slot-1 CPU (100Mhz FSB model) and if I must I suppose I could give up my 440BX chipset board and get a board that natively supports 133Mhz FSB; either another Slot-1 133Mhz FSB motherboard (they actually exist), or a Socket 370 motherboard and if I go Socket 370 I'd completely go full on Pentium III-S Tualatin. 😎

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

For such a machine I would definitely stick with Windows 98 SE because it comes with MS-DOS 7.1 and lets you play both types of games.

Because the machine has an ISA slot you have a wide range of choices. For PCI my go to card is the Vortex 2. You could run that as well an ISA, disable the ISA card under Windows and not install the DOS Vortex drivers.

Yea, too many options really 😁

Phil! That's a good idea to disable the ISA card in Windows [I totally forgot you could do that, heh]. BTW, I love your Youtube channel, been a subscriber since your Mau1wurf1977 days, i'll from time to time binge watch your channel haha, really great stuff on your channel. 😁 😎

That's awesome 😀

Seeing you have the 486 with excellent DOS compatibility, what I found is that late era DOS games have excellent compatibility with PCI sound cards. So you could start off with the PCI sound card and see how you go? You can always get an ISA card later.

ISA sound cards work great in Windows 98. I wouldn't worry about performance, that Pentium III will easily handle it. The main thing you're missing out is on technologies such as A3D or EAX. These are nice to have.

I can't give any recommendations but can say I have DOS 6.22 (with Windows 3.11) and Windows 98 SE and an AWE 64 on my PIII 1 GHz + ASUS P2B system. Technically, you could triple boot DOS/Win98/Win2K. I previously had triple boot with WinXP but the performance in XP was poor.

Alright the Pentium III build is done... for now. 😉

Penitum III 700Mhz Coppermine Slot-1
ASUS P3B-F v1.04 with final released BIOS
256MB PC-100 RAM (might install 512MB later but I doubt that will be needed)
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB (AGP)
Promise ATA-133 card
3Com EtherLink XL 10/100 TX NIC
Sound Blaster Live! with additional I/O bracket

I've decided to not include the Voodoo 2 12MB SLI cards due to the Radeon 9700 Pro not playing well with them for some reason [desktop corruption, etc]. I may tinker with it again at a later time.

The Radeon 9700 Pro has breathed new life into this Pentium III system. Previously I was using a Nvidia GeForce FX5500 256MB (AGP) and got 3691 3D Marks in 3DMark 2001 SE with the Radeon 9700 Pro it's 6118 3D Marks which IMHO is a massive increase. The true tell-all is of course with games performance. Just by eyeballing it, Star Wars Battlefront runs smooth as silk around 50-60fps with the highest settings (minus FSAA) whereas with the GeForce FX5500 it was bogged down and stuttery, around 15 or 20fps on medium settings. Massive framerate increase with the Radeon 9700 Pro, absolutely not regretting buying it (I got it recently and an absolute steal at only $20 USD especially considering it was brand new NOS).

The Radeon 9700 Pro on this 440BX board however requires AGP 1x mode, it locks up and freezes in AGP 2x mode (i'm guessing it's a limitation of the 440BX chipset with this card) no matter what OS is used. Not that it matters the actual performance between AGP 1x and AGP 2x modes is 0.05% so IMHO the whole AGP 1x, 2x, 4,x and 8x thing was for marketing purposes and doesn't really pose any realworld terms of performance.

I should note that the 3DMark 2001 SE scores and game framerate I mentioned above was in Windows 98SE. In Windows XP SP3 the 3D Mark score dropped down to 5144 3D Marks using the Radeon 9700 Pro, and around 3100 3D Marks with the GeForce FX5500.

I'll be doing further gaming tests over the next few days with this build and i'll post the results here in this thread. I'm still debating if I want to use Windows 98SE or Windows XP SP3 for the build so i'll also post that ultimate descision in this thread as well.

In addition, the 9700 Pro was a milestone GPU, on the order of the original Voodoo or the Geforce 256. So, using one gives you historical cred.