For the spare PCI slot, you could try a DX 6 class GPU, or an OPL3 class sound card.

That Q6600 should be able to do 3-3.2Ghz on stock voltage. 3.6-3.8Ghz is doable depending on your particular CPU but maybe not on X38.

The Q9650 should be able to do 4Ghz or close to 4Ghz.. but not sure about on an x38 board.

The LGA775 platform gets much nicer once the bus speed gets up around 450 or so. 480 is really nice and around the max my Gigabyte EP45-UD3P / Q6600 G0 setup was stable at at 3.84Ghz.

Yeah that's the plan. Right now this board doesn't overclock at all, no matter if it's 1mhz increase in FSB it just reverts to defaults, voltage increase, 1x ram stick, none of it matters. Once the heatsink arrives I'll downgrade to an older BIOS and see if I have any luck. If not I'm fine with 3ghz for compatibility testing. I have a PN532-E but heard it's horrible for Windows 9x and I like this board much better. 9x is solid on this X38.

Enable C.I.A. and set it at slowest setting.
Put more voltage on MCH (+0,2V), but I'm not 100% sure which setting you should use (Overvoltage or Reference Control).

PS. 16GB DDR2 on Intel is crazy.

Thanls, I'll give those a shotm in case I skipped over them somehow.

Yup, this motherboard was used in my server running FreeNAS for a decade. 16GB with FreeNAS is actually pretty small but for desktop use is overkill unless you're using VMs (which I will be) or using it for a ram disk.

For the GPU I should be fine with the Quadro FX 1300 for palletized textures

For the audio I'm interested but seems like it would be a pain to acquire a working Yamaha soundcard not really interesting in putting that much work tracking it down and hoping it works...mabye I'm just being lazy, I'm also wondering if I'd be better off with OPL3LPT or OPL3EMU if I'm not worried about real DOS support but it would be a nice to have.

i tired hard to get FX1300 to work on 98se

Every driver i tried except for soft modded 71.84 gave me problems. my card started crashing on the 1st demo scene of 2001se benchmark and I would have to power cycle my pc beasue the whole card would just shut down. I don't know if there was a hardware problem with my card or if it was my motherboard or whatever.

Somone was supposed to follow throught with tests to compare but it didn't happen. The 5x series drivers dont work the the 6x series drivers were unstable and graphics glitches so good luck. The 71.84 driver was the best and i just modded the INF by copying the lines for the fx 1300 from the 6x series driver and pasting it in the 7x one

I ended up finding a ASUS CT-479 pentium M adapter so Ill just run agp geforece 4 TI with a pentium M, instead of trying to run PCI-E graphics card. Then taht will give me the mose fastest compatible 98se computer that can run XP decently. since the games i want to run are only single threaded the 2.13 ghz Pentium M will be fine for what i want.

Spent way too long removing the Gigabyte heatsink from the back of the motherboard, finding screws for the top of the motherboard heatsink and installing the Zalman but finally got it installed and seeing 40C sitting at the BIOS screen.

Finally figured out the overclocking issue. Had to remove the KVM USB connection from the onboard USB2 ports. Once that was done then I could finally change settings for overclock and bootup speed increased significantly.
Wasn't able to use this KVM with DOS or the BIOS anyway so no big loss. Plugged it into the USB3 card and keyboard and mouse work fine in Windows.

Now to see how high of a stable overclock I can get.

I did leave it running Gears 5 all night long but the auto voltage in the gigabyte BIOS went crazy and ramped the vcore way up and downclocked the CPU. System was still running in the morning so at least I know it's stable. heh.

Currently running 400x9=3.6ghz at default voltage with ram at 800mhz. Looking like 66C with cpu-z stress test.

DosFreak wrote:

Currently running 400x9=3.6ghz at default voltage with ram at 800mhz. Looking like 66C with cpu-z stress test.

Note, that IIRC, "default voltage" (i.e., if you leave it on auto) will raise the voltage at 400MHz compared to stock (333MHz). Not that it matters. These CPUs are rather cool and stable. I ran my QX9650 for years at these settings (until mobo got finicky).

Yeah changed auto to manual this morning after that fiasco. Using the minimum voltage needed right now.

Was seeing high temps so redid my fans.

Front fans were not running at 100% when hooked up to motherboard. Ran them straight off the PSU so now drawing more cool air in.
When I put the Zalman heatsink and fan on for the processor I messed up the fan orientation so it's pointing down instead of up...unfortunately you have to remove the heatsink which requires removing the motherboard and balancing the motherboard on your nose while you are upside down so....I just removed the fan and replaced it with an old CoolerMaster 120mm case fan (with led) with fan blowing up.

Previously there was a massive warm spot right above the video card now it's very slight.

Temps are alot better now. 70Cish on all four cores @ 3.9GHZ at 1.28v while running cpu-z stress. 47C while sitting at the Windows 10 desktop.

70ish seems higher to me. I have one of those copper zalman fans and only under full load does my x3380 xeon ever get hot.

Latest specs here

DosFreak All System Specs 10-25-2022

I'm looking at the actual core temps and running Gears 5 which seems to stress the cpu even more than CPU-Z. I can barely switch back to the desktop and load task manager it's hitting the cpu so hard. No issues when in game though.

Need to do some more testing though since I'm now using this Noctua case fan for the cpu fan. Room temp is 25C. Motherboard temp is 34C. CPU at Windows Desktop at idle is 46C (supossedly)

It's also in a case with 80mm 3,000 RPM fans and a 980ti right below the CPU only so much I can do.