Most people were running 64 or 128 MB in 1999. The rich kids had 256 MB or more.

That's the thought that was creeping into my head. I mean, the PIII Katmai 500 was basically US$700 when it was released, so already that's nearly a grand on just the processor. However, the TNT2 M64 was a lower-end card- I just wish that I could get the original prices on that model, when it was released in '99. I'd also like to get the price of that SE440BX-2 mobo, and that could give me a range. I feel like in this instance, 128MB of RAM would make the most sense for some reason, even with the processor costing that much. Not sure why.

Would 256Mb be more suitable for year 2000 build or still too much?

I think for Y2K, especially if you start getting into the 1GHz CPUs, 256MB should work well. I'm just thinking that for my particular build, 256MB is probably too much. I've went ahead and downgraded it to 128MB.

I had Katmai 450 mid/late 99, then Coppermine 700, and finally Duron 800 in late 2000. I think I got the Duron because it overclocked more and got me AGP 4x. I had been on 440BX for two years with ~4 CPUs.

Friends were getting Athlons and Coppermines in late 99. Lots of K6-2 people went to Duron and Tbird in 2000 for a totally insane speed boost.

RAM range would be something like 64-256MB.

1999 had some price gouging on RAM and some misleading marketing was involved as well so some were misled on upgrading ~94-96 machines to have 64MB because the ads said so (at least in the US).

32MB PCs were mostly budget "internet-ready" PCs. 64mb PC100 was often a budget enthusiast path (not many games really required 64MB). 128MB's usually fine for most by the end of the year (most OEM pcs that had that much to flaunt usually had some other bad bottleneck). 2000 started seeing 256mb-327mb systems more frequently. Anyone claiming 512MB is the 1999 retro experience are talking out of their ass.

I've been playing Half-Life with the 128 megs of RAM, and so far, I've detected very, very few differences- it still runs fine, despite the fact that the RAM has essentially been halved. So I really see no real reason to re-upgrade right now, the higher amounts of RAM don't really seem to improve performance all that much (at least in games). Maybe if I was running a bunch of stuff at once, I might start to see issues, but I highly doubt it. At idle, Windows 98 SE reports that system resources are 91% free, and that's with the MS Office 97 shortcut bar running in the background, and the tray applications for my video card and sound card running in the background (also, that Microsoft "Find Fast" garbage- I probably need to disable all that, at least the MS Office stuff, but I haven't gotten around to it yet).

Also, I find it kind of funny that they used RAM as a direct selling point, and then turned around and cheaped out on the other components to save money. It's not shocking per se, but it is interesting. That reminds me, I do have a story that my mom told me about a Compaq Presario that she got from Sears around 1999- apparently, it was a nightmare. I don't know where I'd put something like that, but I feel like people might find it interesting.

I do feel that there were systems with 512MB+ RAM in them that existed in 1999- they just weren't available to the public because they costed a small fortune, and probably had something to the atone of 6+ SCSI HDDs: things like extremely powerful servers, or data centers.

Yes of course. Servers are a different world. Xeon servers with 4 GB RAM were already a thing in 1999:

https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/hp-netserver-lh-4

I had a Gateway PIII 500 MHz Katmai system in late 1999. It had 128 MB of RAM, a 20 GB HDD, an AudioPCI 128 sound card, and an 8 MB TNT2 Vanta (the bottleneck). It probably cost about $2000.

Katmai500 wrote:

I had a Gateway PIII 500 MHz Katmai system in late 1999. It had 128 MB of RAM, a 20 GB HDD, an AudioPCI 128 sound card, and an 8 MB TNT2 Vanta (the bottleneck). It probably cost about $2000.

Very similar to mine, albeit my card has more VRAM, and is probably faster. I also have a PCI sound card that is 2 years too late, it's an AOpen AW744L-II, apparently released in at least 2000, but the box says 'Windows XP' on there so it's probably one made in '01. I also need to get a time-accurate HDD eventually.

Katmai500 wrote:

I had a Gateway PIII 500 MHz Katmai system in late 1999. It had 128 MB of RAM, a 20 GB HDD, an AudioPCI 128 sound card, and an 8 MB TNT2 Vanta (the bottleneck). It probably cost about $2000.

Pretty much spot on here. What you got really depended on the budget. Katmai was high end, so I'd personally shoot for 128-256mb if I wanted to be super time-period accurate for a person who wasn't insanely rich.
A cheap machine in 99 came with 32mb ram, a decked out gaming rig had 128mb, Johnny Overkill had 256mb (or possibly more).
4GB hard drive on the low end, 20GB on the high end (WD Caviar) or smaller high speed drives.
Sound Blaster Live X-Gamer or any Aureal Vortex 2 based card were the two sound cards I remember the most.
TNT2, Matrox G400 MAX, ATI All-In-Wonder 128, ATi Rage Fury Pro, Rage Fury Maxx, GeForce 256 (late 99), Voodoo 3. The G400 was actually very popular in those days.

I had a Coppermine PIII 650MHz in late 1999, which came with 128MB RAM. That seemed quite bog standard by that point for a "decent" PC.

I did upgrade to 256MB RAM in late 2001. This system eventually ended up with 512MB RAM, though I'm not sure whether that upgrade was done before or after the PC was taken out of active usage in early 2005.

I got 512MB RAM with my Pentium 4 machine in 2002. It had a 2 (or 2.4 GGhz CPU), a GeForce 4 Ti 4200, so it was close to really high-end for the time. And 512MB surely was more than you needed even then.

My relatives had a Pentium II 233 since 1998 or 1999, I think, so kind of a mid-range system for the time. It had 64 megs of RAM. So yeah, I think, for 1999 128 megs would be high-end, 256 megs would be workstation territory.

Even boot/Maximum PC magazine listed 128 megs of RAM for their 1998 and 1999 "dream machine build". And their 1998 machine is a dual slot 1 system with SCSI disks.

There is any drawback on using more RAM?

I mean... Of course any program will need that, but if for any reason you need to access the web, every bit of RAM will be used.

I'm building an Athlon XP PC with 3x512MB Ram... I know that my CPU will bottleneck any game I want to play before my RAM, but will help online. Later on I'll use 2x1GB DDR400 for the same reason...

My old Super Socket 7 machine had 96MB SD-RAM installed in it, which wasn't that bad back then. I have a Socket 462 system that has 256MB RAM installed and a video card that's not period correct (planning on putting a GeForce4 Ti4200 in the system and repair my VooDoo2 card), but, everything else is period correct.

Specs of my machine:

Motherboard: DFI KM266PRO-MLV
CPU: AMD Sempron 2200+
RAM: 256MB DDR333 (16MB used for the integrated S3/VIA v400 video since the PCI video card is installed)
GPU: EVGA nVidia GeForce 6200 PCI 512MB
Monitor: NEC MultiSync LCD1850e Dual VGA
Sound: Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Platinum SB0100
HDD: Maxtor D740X-6L 60GB
ODD0: LG CD Burner
ODD1: Samsung DVD-ROM
OS: Microsoft Windows 98SE w/ DirectX 9c
Speakers: JBL Platinum speakers
PSU: 400W DiabloTek with the ATX-ATX w/ -5V adapter

As for the RAM for mid 1999 gaming, I'd stick with 128MB, depending on the game you want to play.

I built my first PC in early 1999, so the parts I used would make it a 1998-era PC. I only had a modest budget of around $1,000, give or take a few $100. So here's what I ended up with:

ASUS P2B Revision 1.02 (i440BX chipset, Slot 1)
Intel Pentium II 350MHz "Deschutes" (100MHz FSB, 2.0v)
128MB PC-100 SDRAM (in a single stick)
Diamond Stealth II G460 (i740 graphics chip, 8MB VRAM, AGP 2x interface)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold (8MB RAM, ISA interface)
UNKNOWN 10/100 Ethernet (PCI interface)
UNKNOWN 56Kbps modem/fax (ISA interface)
Maxtor 10GB PATA IDE HDD
24x CD-ROM PATA ODD
1.44MB 2.5" FDD
ZIP 100MB PATA
Windows 98 (first edition)
17" Cybervision CRT monitor display
Powered audio-monitor speakers

The computer lasted me in this configuration for over a year. Played Half-Life, Final Fantasy VII, and a few other games on it just fine. Also had Borland C++ Builder 3, a code compiler on it and it was faster after its build than anything else in the college computer lab. That 100MHz memory speed and FSB speed increase from 66MHz really made a difference in both gaming and code compiling. And I NEVER ran into memory issues with 128MB of memory.

I didn't see 256MB of RAM until I built my second computer after 2002, an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ "Palomino" based system that ran Windows XP, before any Service Packs were released. Obviously, 256MB of memory is awful once you hit Service Pack 2. At that point, I wouldn't recommend anything less than 1GB of RAM, but that came a few years later, when RAM prices had dropped accordingly.

Now, that system above has been reconfigured about two years ago as a retro gaming build. Let's see the changes I made now that price was not an object.

ASUS P2B Revision 1.02 ------------------------> NO CHANGE (just a BIOS flash to latest version)
Intel Pentium II 350MHz "Deschutes" --------> Intel Pentium III 600MHz "Katmai" (100MHz FSB, 2.0v version)
128MB PC-100 SDRAM --------------------------> 256MB PC-100 SDRAM (memory is cheap, so I added a 2nd stick)
Diamond Stealth II G460 (i740) ---------------> Diamond Viper V770 (NVIDIA Riva TNT2 32MB AGP card)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold ---> Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE64 Standard (no longer have the Gold)
UNKNOWN 10/100 Ethernet -------------------> 3COM 10/100 Ethernet PCI
UNKNOWN 56Kbps modem/fax ---------------> REMOVED
Maxtor 10GB PATA IDE HDD --------------------> Western Digital 40GB Caviar PATA IDE HDD
24x CD-ROM PATA ODD -------------------------> 42x CD-RW PATA ODD
1.44MB 2.5" FDD --------------------------------> 1.44MB 2.5" FDD
ZIP 100MB PATA ---------------------------------> ZIP 100MB PATA
Windows 98 (first edition) --------------------> Windows 98 SE (upgraded from the original version that I still have)
17" Cybervision CRT monitor display --------> 27" Samsung HDTV (1024x768 res)
Powered audio-monitor speakers ------------> 27" Samsung HDTV
-----------------------------------------------------> 12MB STB-1000v Voodoo2 3d Graphics Accelerator
-----------------------------------------------------> 12MB STB-1000v Voodoo2 3d Graphics Accelerator

Yes, there's two in there in SLI now. I get the best of DirectX 5-7 with the TNT2 card for games before the introduction of the Radeon and GeForce GPUs (i.e. pre-hardware T&L) and the best of GLIDE back in its hey-day (which I never had before).

My take on the proper RAM amount for mid-1999 gaming rigs would be 128MB. Windows 98 had GOBS of memory space with 128MB and never had any issues, even when doing actual work like compiling computer code. I know I doubled it to 256MB during the rebuild a few years back, but that's because I was going complete over-kill on the system, maxing out the CPU with the fastest available that would work (the P3 Katmai), doubling the RAM to see how web pages would work (Vogons and Google are the only things that work right on Firefox 2.0), etc.

My first computer, bought with two paychecks from my crap factory job in 1998, is a Sockey 7 AMD K6-2, which I still have hooked up. It maxes out at 128MB, I believe, but 1GHz systems were rolling out at the time, and my motherboard was ancient even when it was new.

128 MB RAM seems to be the standard by the end of 1999, combined with a 500 - 600 MHz Pentium III.

Graphics card prices in July 1999:
Voodoo3 3000: $180
Voodoo3 2000: $130
Hercules Terminator Beast99 with S3 Savage 4 Pro: $130
Diamond Stealth III S540 with S3 Savage 4: $130
Diamond Viper V770 with Riva TNT2: $250 😵
Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor: $150
ATI All-In-Wonder 128 with Rage128: $191

Unfortunately no TNT2 M64 prices here.