Lovely little system that, I've got a Dell GX1 that I'm trying to keep as close to factory as well. Got a matching keyboard somewhere as well.

I also used to have a GX110 and still have the motherboard, I also have the riser which may be the one you are looking for. I'll have a dig around in my storage

Personally I'd stick a DVD drive in there, 1998-99 was the beginning of the DVD era, I always find it easier to source them than the cd anyway and they get reserved for my older 486-pentium builds.

Can't go wrong with the cpu for the era and OS you want to run.

I'm always torn to be accurate with storage and risk running out of space or just whacking in a later model drive. I tend to go with larger sizes now again unless its for the older 486-pentium machines that rely more on DOS than Windows.

Integrated graphics were awful on these older machines. at the very least keep the Virge. Its tricky knowing how few slots you have, how are they taken up so far? one for the virge and one for the sound card? If you had the space I'd keep the virge and add the V2 for the best of both worlds. I'm lucky with the GX1 that as its a taller desktop it has space for 2 ISA and 3 PCI so I don't have to pick and choose so much

It's a slim profile desktop case so the Riser card has only 3 PCI slots, and that's all expansion I have. Currently, 1 is taken by the Virge, 1 by the SB 128 PCI. I have 1 unused PCI slot. The ideal case would be to use a Voodoo 3 PCI but alas I have none, so I am considering filling that remaining PCI slot with a Voodoo 2, which I think would make games up to 1999 playable at 640x480 or 800x600. That means no ISA sound cards for me. I can live with that. But should I stick with the PCI 128 or replace it with a Live! card? Which one would give me less headaches and better sound with DOS games?

imo, both will give you headaches for DOS games. Why would that make you unable to use an ISA sound card ? Can't you just take out the sb 128 and replace it with an ISA sound card ?

Deksor wrote:

imo, both will give you headaches for DOS games. Why would that make you unable to use an ISA sound card ? Can't you just take out the sb 128 and replace it with an ISA sound card ?

The Riser shipped with the system has no ISA slots, only 3 PCI slots. To use ISA cards I would have to get one of these: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-85525-OptiPlex … d-/231737941226 and to be honest I don't fel like paying 20 quids on a riser card for a PC I got for 10 bucks. I can live without Pure DOS in this PC, as long as MS-DOS Mode in Win98SE works to my satisfaction, I'll be ok. I have a feeling SB Live! would be enough for that with its SB16 emulation?

As your not trying to go for an exact year like your other builds I would go with:
Riser Card:
Keep an eye out, If you come across one call it fate, but for now build the PC as if your stuck with PCI only.
CPU/RAM:
Agreed unless you want to max it out for some reason.
HDD:
Not going for a period build, Use whatever has enough space for what you need.
Optical:
Again its not a period build, Use whatever suits your needs.
Sound:
Give the PCI 128 a try, I think its got the same dos support as a Live anyway. If you would rather keep the MX300 where it is then fair enough and it kind of fits having an Dell Live! in a Dell system still.
Video:
I would use onboard and have SLI in this, 667 is a good match for a SLI setup, and knowing your using SLI makes you feel special (well I do anyway)
D3D games will suffer though, but you have to have an excuse to fire up your other systems from time to time!

Re ISA, I don't think its a big deal either, the CPU is fast enough to play dos games from within windows which gets around a lot of sound issues as long as you are ok with it not being true dos

Oh I thought yours had an ISA slot as well

Motherboard:
I don't think it uses 440BX, but rather a 810E chipset.

Options on video card:
1, get a Voodoo3 PCI and everyone is happy
2, get a Voodoo2 and replace it with the SLI setup in MMX; transplant SLI into your GX110
3, transplant SLI into your GX110 and forget about Glide gaming on MMX...

lazibayer wrote:

Motherboard: I don't think it uses 440BX, but rather a 810E chipset. […]
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Motherboard:
I don't think it uses 440BX, but rather a 810E chipset.

Options on video card:
1, get a Voodoo3 PCI and everyone is happy
2, get a Voodoo2 and replace it with the SLI setup in MMX; transplant SLI into your GX110
3, transplant SLI into your GX110 and forget about Glide gaming on MMX...

*facepalm*

This is correct.

Here's a thought.. I already have a Voodoo 3 system and PCI Voodoo 3s are very rare where I live.. How about I replace the Virge with a Riva TNT or TNT2 M64 PCI? As much as I dislike the idea, I could just grab one from Electromyne with Phil's 20% (?) off coupon, it doesn't really amount to all that much in the end, and would really make this a much better system, at least somewhere between a Voodoo 2 and a Voodoo 3.. I think that would be substantially faster than the Rage PRO PCI (which I think would be much faster than the Virge anyhow, so that is probably a definite upgrade I should do regardless..)

EDIT: I found a G450 PCI for sale for an OK-ish price.. I love Matrox and the G450 is around TNT2 levels IIRC so I will get it.

appiah4 wrote:

Here's a thought.. I already have a Voodoo 3 system and PCI Voodoo 3s are very rare where I live.. How about I replace the Virge with a Riva TNT or TNT2 M64 PCI? As much as I dislike the idea, I could just grab one from Electromyne with Phil's 20% (?) off coupon, it doesn't really amount to all that much in the end, and would really make this a much better system, at least somewhere between a Voodoo 2 and a Voodoo 3.. I think that would be substantially faster than the Rage PRO PCI (which I think would be much faster than the Virge anyhow, so that is probably a definite upgrade I should do regardless..)

EDIT: I found a G450 PCI for sale for an OK-ish price.. I love Matrox and the G450 is around TNT2 levels IIRC so I will get it.

If you want the closest configuration to a stock machine ... Dell offered TNT2 M64 16MB PCI as an upgrade for GX110.
Otherwise G450 should be at least as fast as M64.
Rage Pro might be even slower than i810E... It would be interesting to see how the two compete. The integrated graphics core of i810E and memory run at the speed of FSB (133MHz) while those of Rage Pro run at 75MHz.

I think I have a couple of those but they were full towers.

lazibayer wrote:

If you want the closest configuration to a stock machine ... Dell offered TNT2 M64 16MB PCI as an upgrade for GX110. Otherwise G […]
Show full quote

appiah4 wrote:

Here's a thought.. I already have a Voodoo 3 system and PCI Voodoo 3s are very rare where I live.. How about I replace the Virge with a Riva TNT or TNT2 M64 PCI? As much as I dislike the idea, I could just grab one from Electromyne with Phil's 20% (?) off coupon, it doesn't really amount to all that much in the end, and would really make this a much better system, at least somewhere between a Voodoo 2 and a Voodoo 3.. I think that would be substantially faster than the Rage PRO PCI (which I think would be much faster than the Virge anyhow, so that is probably a definite upgrade I should do regardless..)

EDIT: I found a G450 PCI for sale for an OK-ish price.. I love Matrox and the G450 is around TNT2 levels IIRC so I will get it.

If you want the closest configuration to a stock machine ... Dell offered TNT2 M64 16MB PCI as an upgrade for GX110.
Otherwise G450 should be at least as fast as M64.
Rage Pro might be even slower than i810E... It would be interesting to see how the two compete. The integrated graphics core of i810E and memory run at the speed of FSB (133MHz) while those of Rage Pro run at 75MHz.

Interesting. I am trying to secure the G450, I'm kind of enthusiastic about it. If that fails, I have two options:

a) Grab the TNT2 M64 from electromyne
b) Replace the SLI in the MMX system with the Rage Pro and use the SLI in the GX110. The concern here is: Would that run too hot in a slim desktop case?

My worry is TNT2 is pretty limited in its usefulness unless you stick with 2D games and you'll probably end up going to your year 2000 PC more often then not.
At least with Voodoo 2, its still useful for glide and even though you do have a v3 based PC the SLI justifies the setup.

With that all said if your excited to go down the G450 then that's definitely what you should do, even if you end up changing things around later anyway.
I would think the Voodoo cards would be fine in the slim line case, maybe add a fan over the cards to get a bit of extra airflow to be on the safe side.

I just hung a small fan using cable ties off the holes in the card above corner, in this case your soundcard which I can see has them (most do)

If I was in your shoes in this situation, here's what I'd do:

Riser: Keep the PCI-only riser for now, and buy the ISA+PCI riser as soon as one comes on sale at an affordable price, that way you'll be able to test out an ISA sound card eventually to see if it's a good match.
CPU: Keep the CPU the way it is, at least until you've tested enough games to decide whether it's too fast or too slow, then go from there.
RAM: Keep that as it is too.
HDD: Since you plan on dumping enough ISOs to fill up the 20GB drive, I'd say upgrade that to any IDE hard drive that's between 40-120GB of capacity.
Optical: I agree with replacing the yellowed CD-ROM drive with some sort of DVD drive. that way you can expand the potential of being able to transport files from your modern host to a DVD-R as well as seeing if the system is any good for DVD Video playback, beige bezel IDE DVD-ROM and DVD-RW drives should be easy enough to find depending on your flexibility on buying stuff online.
Sound: Keep the SB PCI128 for now. Dell OEM SB Lives are known for having problematic drivers and the DOS compatibility is more or less the same, when you get the ISA riser I'd try a SB AWE64 with it.
Video: It seems that you've already figured that out, but out of the choices specified on the OP, I'd go with choices D or E. you can get a molex fan to put on the video card of your choice if heat is a concern.
OS: I agree that Windows 98SE is a good choice for that system, after all it does have a COA label which should work with any OEM disc.

Nice system - similar specs to a Gateway desktop that I have. It feel like sort of a sweet spot for the era, and is the one I've been using the most.

There's just something nice about a good compact desktop system, complements a larger tower system well. You can do most of your fiddling and hot-rodding on the easier to work on tower, and keep the desktop a nice stock machine. Good luck.

Im currently negotiating the sale of a G450 PCI and a Radeon 7000 PCI. One of these will be the replacement VGA and I will keep the SLI where it is. The 7000 has a better performance no doubt but the 450 has better VGA out.. Decisions..

EDIT: Bought the Radeon 7000 PCI after finding out there was actually a Dell upgrade option for this card for Optiplex PCs. I think I'll also end up getting the PCI 450, I will probably put it in my MMX 233 system and take the SLI setup out, and change my 98/99 Voodoo 3 PC into GF256 DDR + Voodoo 2 SLI because why not..

Ok, this project is moving along, here's an update:

Both the Radeon 7000 PCI and the Matrox G450 PCI are in the mail. I have no idea why I got both, other than not being able to choose between a card with less compatbility overall and a card with inferior performance. I am currently leaning towards using the G450 in this build, as I want to make this PC home to a very, very diverse range of OSs:

• MS-DOS6.22/Win3.11
• OS/2 Warp 4.52
• Windows 98SE
• Windows 2000

The only problem is that I have no idea how to go about setting up this kind of a multi-boot environment. Common sense says go MS-DOS -> Win98SE -> OS/2 -> Win 2K Linux and ultimately stick with Win2k as the boot loader after the install..

Needless to say, this much stuff will need more space than the 20GB Hard Drive inside at the moment, so that will be replaced with a 120GB Seagate IDE I happen to have around (which is coincidentally the largest HDD the motherboard will recognize). Nice.

Half of these OSes will require a sound card with good DOS support so I've been looking around for my options for a good PCI card with DOS support, and short of paying what I think is too much for a ESS Solo-1 with wavetable headers, I came up with nothing. Then I stumbled across a GX110 PCI/ISA Riser card that will fit my system (Low Profile Desktop), so I grabbed that today and it's also in the mail as I type this. That means, now I have 1 ISA, 1 PCI and 1 shared ISA/PCI slot instead of 3 PCI slots. Yay me.

Now I need to decide on an ISA card. I have an AWE64 Value, which would normally be the logical go-to choice, as I am expecting a SIMMCONN to use with it pretty soon, but I'm not sure that would work very well in the cramped confines of this case and a riser card, like at all. I also don't enjoy the idea of removing it from my first, and possibly most beloved retro PC. So now I have to pick from the following list of ISA cards I have at hand (or if Vogons really say I should, I will get another AWE64 Value.

• Best union MF-1869 (ES1898F)
• Creative Sound Blaster 16 CT2290 (OPL3)
• Creative Vibra 16 CT2890 (OPL3)
• Creative Vibra 16 CT2940 (CQM)
• Creative Vibra 16 CT2980 (CQM)
• Edison Gold 16 (ES688FC+CloneOPL3)
• Yamaha SM718 (OPL3)
• Zoltrix Audio Plus 6400 3D PnP AV309 (CS4232+CS4289)

I will most likely roll with the Yamaha since genuine OPL3 is great, but I'm also curious about how ESFM and Crystal FM sound, so I may do a bit of card swapping at the DOS stage before finally moving to the Yamaha. I am planning on using an SB Live! PCI in addition to the ISA card because I just love using SF2 soundfonts and Live's MIDI Synth in Win98/2k. I will be using a Dreamblaster X3M through the ISA card's MIDI port for DOS MIDI. This is all theoretical, I have no idea how to do this and never ran two sound cards in one PC before, so all tips and pointers are welcome!

Alas, this is where we are. I will post photos as parts come in. Ultimately, once everything is ready, I will start the clearing and restoration process.

I actually quite like the sound of the ESFM. In some ways I find it a bit more rich than a normal OPL3

First graphics card arrive. Here it is, after some thorough cleaning: