First off, just would like to thank everyone for the detailed and informative responses. Given my information I would never have considered without checking so it's been very useful.

Skyscraper was bang on with regards to that motherboard, It's absolutely that board, I checked the with the seller and yes that is indeed exactly what it is, I think they might even have Compaq PSU's for sale seperately, so maybe it's worth asking them about some sort of bundle deal as well. I could definitely use a case as well.

I've had my eye on a Vortex sound card for a little while now, but I the AWE64 is something I've added to my watch list. And so from what you've said unless I need any specific effects (none of which jump out at me ) that should handle it.

USB 2.0 PCI card is a must think. Will definitely look at getting that.

I heard back from the local shop about the stock they might have btw. Sounds like they might have a bit of a gem in but I'd like to run it by everyone since it's (somewhat) price-y but the specs sound like they could be ideal.

It's a Dell XPS T500,

Has 1 AGP slot, 5 PCI and only 1 ISA slot.

All they can tell me of the CPU is it's Pentium 3/500, I assume this is the katmai range?

256mb RAM

Also has a VANTA TNT2 graphics card

And a Win98 disk.

Now they're asking £100 for it, so I'm not sure if that's obscene money for that kinda of spec or not but I thought I'd run it by everyone here.

I wouldn't give them the time of day tbh. Pre-built systems were terrible then, and are even more terrible now. You can expect a power supply that will blow up fast, and will be impossible to replace. The board won't be the best either.

100GBP for that in my opinion is unreasonable. I would take it for 20, maybe 30 if I am feeling lucky, and I would take the GPU, Memory, CPU and nothing else.

If they gave you a good Intel board in a reasonable case for those specs, and included a drive, I would think 100GBP is a good deal, but the case is there is no reason you can get the good parts in there for 30 pounds.

For the sound cards, why not having both ? ^^
You might have to tweak things (adresses, irq, dma, etc), but normally it should work. I did that once and it was great.
If you plan on using also a network card, you can forgive about using usb 2.0. Not because it won't work, but because if you have a shared directory on your network, you won't need the USB anymore ^^

100£ for a windows 98 PC is a really high price imo. My pentium 2 build costed me at best 25€ and it has a voodoo 2 SLI, 128MB of ram (not because I don't have more, but because I don't need more than 128MB 🤣), 40GB HDD, etc ... Allright it's not really finished for what I want to do with it, but it could be considered to be finished for most people. When it will be really finished, it may have costed me 50€ at best, but that would be with really good cards in there

When it comes to OEM systems the quality differ depending on the manufacturer and the intended market.

Compaq Deskpros from 1998 -1999 are second to none when it comes to qualty while Dells from the same time period probably isn't as good! 😀

If you buy an OEM system be sure you get one equipped with a motherboard with ISA slots and an AGP slot.

There is no such thing as a power supply from 1998 that is still good today unless it's been recapped. There are "working" examples that have not been recapped, but I wouldn't trust any of them. I'm throwing my opinion in with Ampera. Avoid all OEM systems most of the time unless they are somewhat complete and you intend to open up everything and recap if/when necessary. Especially if you want lots of options in the BIOS to do things like disable caches (hopefully modbin or similar could help; it's a possibility but not a definite). Actual quality of hardware varied and some were good but not nearly as customizable.

I agree with Deksor on the sound card - ISA and PCI together is ideal for DOS+Win9x gaming so yes AWE64 + Vortex 2 would be a good combo in my opinion. I did have a Vortex 2 back in the day and it was quite nice in Windows. I just never really used it in DOS like Phil has. But you won't need to with an ISA card and you'll get better compatibility.

Righto, will definitely pass on that then.

Found a Slot A Gigabyte GA-7IX for cheap which is something I'm considering, as well as a Slot 1 Dell 13150 mobo.

I have an old PC I just found in the cupboard, was an old works PC. No ISA slot sadly, and doesn't power on but it does have an AGP slot. That said the PSU looks like a right PITA to replace so I think I'll carry on trying to build from new.

In terms of casing, will any ATX case do?

sketchus wrote:

Righto, will definitely pass on that then. […]
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Righto, will definitely pass on that then.

Found a Slot A Gigabyte GA-7IX for cheap which is something I'm considering, as well as a Slot 1 Dell 13150 mobo.

I have an old PC I just found in the cupboard, was an old works PC. No ISA slot sadly, and doesn't power on but it does have an AGP slot. That said the PSU looks like a right PITA to replace so I think I'll carry on trying to build from new.

In terms of casing, will any ATX case do?

Don't go with OEM motherboards. Intel has the best Slot 1 boards, if you can get a SE440BX-2 you've gotten the cream of the crop.

Alrighty, the gigabyte one wouldn't be OEM?

The only SE440BX-2 available I can find is £80 with a P2 processor.

Gigabyte might be good. Here the SE440BX-2s are selling for 30 bucks. Try to find an Intel board, but whatever you use, make sure the caps are good. Nichicon, Nippon Chemicon, Sanyo/Goldstasr, Rubycon, and Panasonic are all good brands with a few more on the list.

sketchus wrote:

Alrighty, the gigabyte one wouldn't be OEM?

The only SE440BX-2 available I can find is £80 with a P2 processor.

OEM when used in the context of computers typically means prebuilt machines from companies like Dell, Compaq, HP, IBM/Lenovo, Gateway, eMachines, Acer, etc. Gigabyte has likely made some OEM motherboards over the years for some of those companies, but motherboards with a Gigabyte logo on them are generally enthusiast. Generally the OEMs would have their motherboards built and branded with their own company name and part number. I know Asus has built boards for OEMs.

I don't know if you're willing to consider items from the US but there are a few options on UK's Ebay for decent motherboards that have very reasonable P&P (S&H to us) charges over to the UK, more in the ~45 GBP range delivered. You can get a P3 in the range of say 733-933MHz for around 10-12 GBP shipped. Though I have no idea how UK taxes work on used items so I'm not sure if you'd be liable for any significant amount of taxes, especially for items shipped from the US.

Otherwise, have you taken my suggestion and searched through the "sold items" so you can get an idea of what prices other people pay? Go by prices of sold items, not prices of current listings, because some sellers use unreasonable prices and simply never manage to sell anything. But if they keep them listed, you might be mislead about how much that item "should" cost.

Yes, I can see the SE440BX-2 listed on ebay for around that price, but then we have about £40 import charge slapped on top, which is the real kicker.

The caps on the Gigabyte mobo are this:

EDIT

£45 delivered would be fine for what I'm looking for certainly. This might sound stupid but what do you tend to actually search for on Ebay? I find that you can get wildly varying results depending on what keywords you use.

The processors themselves are not expensive at all here, I could get one of them fairly cheap I'm certain. It's the motherboard itself. Everything but that seems reasonably priced.

But looking at sold listings is a nice idea, I'll do that too.

sketchus wrote:

Yes, I can see the SE440BX-2 listed on ebay for around that price, but then we have about £40 import charge slapped on top, whic […]
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Yes, I can see the SE440BX-2 listed on ebay for around that price, but then we have about £40 import charge slapped on top, which is the real kicker.

The caps on the Gigabyte mobo are this:

Hmm, not 100% sure. That could be Nichicon as they do make caps of that color but "usually" those caps have markings on the negative that look like "> - >" and this just has the "> >" with no minus sign from what I can see.

Black Gate caps which audiophiles tend to like are also those colors but those also typically have the minus sign.

I'm not aware of any Teapo or Capxon lines that look like that, but there are other bad brands out there. Teapo was one of the most commonly used bad capacitor brands.

All that said, I do believe those are Nichicon. I'm just not 100% positive.

They also look to be in good shape visually, though it can be the case that caps can look good but actually be bad. But with good looking "probably Nichicon" caps you should be fine.

And daaaamn that tax is crazy! I hope we don't wind up with such thievery over here but I'm worried 🙁 won't name any reasons, it's probably obvious and is off-topic.

With bad caps how soon would you expect to notice something? Most of the items I'm seeing have a 30 day RTB option, which is nice.

Well I think the Gigabyte might be a reasonable starting point. It's really cheap too, only £15 posted so it's not a huge money sink. It is AMD though, if that's an issue, I would ideally like a P3 board.

And with regards to the tax, it's really crap being a retro gamer based in the UK.

If you're into console gaming, almost all PAL consoles from NES to PS2/Xbox are universally worse and require importing or modding to get the proper experience.

sketchus wrote:

With bad caps how soon would you expect to notice something? Most of the items I'm seeing have a 30 day RTB option, which is nic […]
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With bad caps how soon would you expect to notice something? Most of the items I'm seeing have a 30 day RTB option, which is nice.

Well I think the Gigabyte might be a reasonable starting point. It's really cheap too, only £15 posted so it's not a huge money sink. It is AMD though, if that's an issue, I would ideally like a P3 board.

And with regards to the tax, it's really crap being a retro gamer based in the UK.

If you're into console gaming, almost all PAL consoles from NES to PS2/Xbox are universally worse and require importing or modding to get the proper experience.

Depends on how bad they are and which caps they are. In some cases you could have a capacitor that is "not good" but hasn't completely failed (with a short or open circuit) and not see too much of an effect. Or you could have one that has just barely started to wear and you could get instability. You could have one fail open (which would be like not having any capacitor in that spot) and if it had other caps in parallel with it, those other caps might still be enough.

Overall I think Gigabyte is generally a good brand so that board is probably fine. I don't run a Gigabyte board in any of my computers currently but I've bought several over the years and have been satisfied with nearly all of them (basically there was one board from them that I really hated but that was a much newer Z68 chipset from around 2011 or 2012 ish).

I am indeed into console gaming (somewhat, anyway) and I feel pretty strongly opinionated on NTSC vs PAL but I don't want to comment too much on that as I don't want to cause an argument, haha. Though you and I might agree about it.

OK, well that's something else I'll keep an eye on. I would like to think the Gigabyte one is going to be OK, but I'm still gonna keep my out out for something that seems perfect. Only cap issue I've delt with in recent memory was taking a potentially leaky one out of my original Xbox.

Well I'd certainly be interested to hear about he NTSC vs PAL thing. I know that they say NTSC = never the same colour, but the speed decreased and border in PAL are pretty jarring.

Missed your question about case. Any ATX (not "Extended ATX") board will just fit in most ATX cases. And you could even go AT and fit it into many cases with minor work, though AT was generally phased out after socket 7 and slot 1 boards should be either ATX or possibly proprietary in some OEM cases.

Also try to pick up an old but not very old power supply from around the ATX12V 1.3 generation. They'll have good 3.3v+5v power ratings (most PSUs provide this info on a sticker). Enermax Noisetaker is a great option, you can get like 200w on 3.3+5v, while still getting good 12v current.

As for NTSC vs PAL actually it's not that I hate PAL; it's just that content is difficult to adapt between the two systems and in so many cases NTSC content was ported over to PAL in the easiest way possible like how a lot of 24FPS film was simply sped up to 25FPS which is absolutely unacceptable. NTSC does have a lot more of an issue with rainbowing and dot crawl and I've actually done a lot of work with video restoration and encoding so I'm very familiar with those problems. And in doing all that work I have trained my eye and I spot even the smallest amount of rainbowing and dot crawl that other people have confirmed that they can't see (even after I point it out to them in many cases). Most Youtubers that capture footage from old systems tend to use composite and they don't even run the video through equipment with a good comb filter so we get absolute crap video and it drives me absolutely insane. Those videos are unwatchable to me in some cases. I won't generally play a retro console without doing an RGB or at least S-video mod on it. And once that is done, it's a requirement to add scanlines on modern displays, so I have a couple of video scalers (a DVDO one and a Micomsoft one).

Thanks for the info on the case and PSU.

I know part of the fun of having a retro PC is the old look, but I might end up going for a newer looking ATX case just since it'll not likely be hugely visible etc.

With regards to that PSU, would something like that be OK for the TI4200?

And seems like we agree with regards to PAL vs NTSC. Some conversions are downright awful, especially ones that don't even have sound conversions so they just even sound slower.

As for RGB, I've spent a silly amount of time recently perfecting my video output for my retro consoles. Even bought some £40 component cables for my original Xbox. SNES with true RGB can't be beat, that's for sure.

Oh and on Ebay search mainly in the "Motherboards & CPUs", "Motherboards", "Vintage Computing" and "Wholesale Lots" categories.

Search for terms like "Pentium II" "Pentium 2" "Pentium III" "Pentium 3" "Slot 1" "440BX" etc. Use quotes most of the time. Don't search descriptions if you want to look through mostly relevant results and if you don't find anything you like that way, flip on the description search. You'll get more matches but you will also get more false positives. Do include the Pentium 2 stuff as long as you can find cheap Pentium 3 CPUs, which shouldn't be an issue. You'll find more socket 370 CPUs than slot 1 but you can use either with a socket adapter (sometimes called "Slotket" as some manufacturers like Abit used that portmanteau). But do avoid Tualatin generation P3 because it's not nearly as compatible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_P … microprocessors <-- you'll want Coppermine. A lot of Ebay sellers list the 3-5 digit "sSpec Number" column in their auctions so you can do a pretty good job searching by those (but you'll have to look up several of them to find one at a good price).

You can also use the condition filter - select all of the options except "new" and "for parts or repair". Do include the "not specified" option so you get results from lazy sellers that don't fill that in - but again it'll cause you to get some false positives.

You can also search those categories with a "newly listed" filter if you like. Newly listed won't necessarily give you well-priced listings, but good stuff sometimes sells quickly, so looking at it with that filter can help you spot new listings of good stuff before other people do.

Ti4200 isn't all that much of a power hog. Maybe 20 watts or something like that. A good PSU choice specifically is Enermax EG375P-VE, but even the smaller EG285S can do 145w 3.3v+5v which is better than almost any new PSU even a 600w one (because newer computers mostly only use the 12v rail). Thus I actually think the 285 would work for you but you can "play it safe" and go for the 375. Enermax is not the only good PSU manufacturer and other good ones include Seasonic, Super Flower, Enhance, Flextronics, etc. But Enermax Noisetaker is easy to find used for cheap (at least here in the US) and has better 3.3v+5v than most other options I see. If you do look up other brands, make sure to check the label for the 3.3v+5v wattage and I'd say it should be a minimum of 130w (lots of Seasonic PSUs from a few years ago have 130w). And look for one that has SATA connectors as well as Molex because adapters are annoying. And look up brands on sites like this - don't just go by certification. AMD used to "certify" PSUs for example but they certified lots of VERY bad PSUs like Allied/Deer. LOTS of power supplies out there should be avoided.

So far:

ti4200 came in agp 4x and 8x flavors. Check your model.

Don't use a card like that in a super socket 7 board, it is a bit risky as it might draw a bit too much from the agp slot for some boards. And it is complete overkill speedwise.

Yes, k6-2, k6-3 etc runs best on super 7 boards (100fsb) but they work also fine on a lot of normal socket 7 boards using the 66 or 75mhz fsb. THAT is what the 2x mult =6x multi is for, so you can use the 66mhz fsb x6 setting and still enjoy 400mhz on an old board. Around twice the speed of a normal pentium.

Not only Intel made great boards, a lot of manufacturers did. I prefer Asus.

When it comes to Bios options, you better stay away from Intel, Compaq, Dell etc.

No brand will give you guaranteed good caps, also not Intel.

Don't make a big deal about the caps. Yes, this stuff becomes old and caps do not live forever. And yes, a lot of times when they LOOK allright they might be, but they can also be non functional.
I have around 40+ retro motherboards and allmost all of them have only original caps and work 100% I Also have a lot of old psu's, AT and ATX and they work fine with original caps still.
Got 100+ graphics cards all working with original caps. So yes, check them, but don't worry too much.

Learn how to recap yourself, so you can fix things cheap and fast in the future.

Enjoy!

All AT power supplies were inefficient and none of them ever ran cool. I would advise recapping any of them before they blow up rather than wait for a problem. No brand capacitor will hold up for long periods of time in heat. Motherboards are far less likely to be problematic than AT PSUs since there is less thermal density - the heat generating components are far more spread out. Running AT PSUs with original caps is always risky. I'm not trying to tell you what to do - you can do what you like - but I don't recommend it. AT PSU will have maybe 50% efficiency which means that the PSU dissipates around the same amount of power as the entire rest of the system, but is compacted into a much smaller case. Even if it's got a fan, it's still a much more demanding environment. Early ATX power supplies were around 60-65% efficient. AT was lower. Edit to add: If you're at least checking the caps every once in a while, though, that should be fine. But most people aren't going to do that.

With more modern PSUs with higher effiency and even better ventilation+fans, I would certainly expect the caps to last a good while.