3c905b or 3c905c is fine. Its too anal to worry about that, it uses is a parallel tasking III which was on the market since 1994. You are looking at a date on the PCB that says 1999, but you are forgetting that, by 1999 that was already borderline obsolete technology that had on the market for 5 years.

So I guess that's brings me to a broader point, I understand how a lot of people want to make the perfect 1999 computer, but the reason why I never do is because it is very much a transitional year. I could easily build a 1999 computer but it will be technology that is already 2-5 years old. I mean a Pentium II came out in 1997, so even if by 2000 Pentium III was the standard, if I build a 1999 computer its really not a 1999 PC, its a 1997/1998 computer, unless it is a Pentium III which is really a Quarter 4 1999,Q 1 2000 computer. And I just think its pointless. If I want to make a Pentium II 1998 computer Id just do that.

In my mind and how I feel it is like building a 2005 computer that I spend 2000 dollars on back in the day and in 6 months core 2 duo comes out and what I have is a waste of money cuz this really happened to a lot of people, back in 1999 and in 2005 to a larger extent. Myself having lived through both of these transitional periods its not something that I want to relive.

Keeping in mind your other post asking if set point in time is worth it, and as your STILL trying to achieve that here I'm guessing no one convinced that pcb dates aren't important.

SO as your after full on authenticity I'll let you decide which NIC to use.
I think the TNT2 is good choice, if your overclocking the celeron your a "gamer on a budget" you could afford a graphics card but not a P2/3

chinny22 wrote:

Keeping in mind your other post asking if set point in time is worth it, and as your STILL trying to achieve that here I'm guessing no one convinced that pcb dates aren't important.

SO as your after full on authenticity I'll let you decide which NIC to use.
I think the TNT2 is good choice, if your overclocking the celeron your a "gamer on a budget" you could afford a graphics card but not a P2/3

It's what I've done up until this point, and if I have a NIC card that's older, why not? I also was asking because of the fact that I am honestly swamped at the moment. It's not a bad problem to have, because the more computers, the better, however, the fact that I'm working towards 3,000 different builds at once is slowly starting to drain my sanity. A list of all of the builds I'm planning/working on:

Socket 3, ~1995
Pentium II MMX 266 Laptop, ~1998 (I don't know if mine has MMC-1 or MMC-2)
Slot 1, ~1999
Super Socket 7, ~1999
Socket 370, ~1999
Socket 370, ~2000
Socket 462/Socket 754, ~2004
Socket LGA 775, ~2008
Socket LGA 1155, not vintage, just building a PC out of one of my old main rigs and see how far I can push it

All of the builds that I actually have parts to/work at least a little:

Pentium II MMX 266 Laptop, ~1998
Slot 1, ~1999
Super Socket 7, ~1999
Socket 370, ~1999
Socket LGA 775, ~2008
Socket LGA 1155

The "Windows XP build," as I call it, the 462/754 setup, has only a case. No motherboard, no CPU, no GPU, no RAM, nothing.

I'm planning on constructing a new, custom-built 100MHz 486 build using the superior PCI bus and FPM RAM capability, will be using 16MB of 60ns EDO, in FPM mode. I only have the RAM for it. That's it.

I have a 1GHz CPU for the S370, ~2000. A 1GHz Coppermine, and that's it. I would have a motherboard, but nope, one that I got has 3,000 bad caps, and I have no money to buy more caps, so it's a flat, green rectangular brick that has a bunch of shiny, fancy looking things all over it.

no money = no progress, so im stuck with a ton of unfinished builds or builds that havent even been started, and i dont know where to start when (if) i ever do get any money to buy things. A new Slot 1 board? A new 486 board? A GTX 280 for the 2008 build? A PSU for the Core i5 build? A Socket 462 board, or a Socket 754 board? I've not even listed everything here. It's incredibly difficult to just choose one to work on, because one day I will be in the mood to work on the Slot 1 build, and the next I will want to work on the 2008 build.

Confusion.

I feel your pain.
I would say don't be afraid to compromise in the sort term though. No point not having half dozen unfinished machine and nothing to play on.

As an example I've been waiting on specific RAM modules for a decent price for 4 years now. Self imposed limitation as I want all matching, but until then I've been using 2 miss matched sticks hours enjoying the rig till then.

On the other hand I've just got the last bit of hardware I've been wanting for a Voodoo 3 build, but rather then have it sit idle the Voodoo was in another PC so I could at least scratch my 3dfx itch even if the PC wasn't ideal by my standards.

chinny22 wrote:

I feel your pain. I would say don't be afraid to compromise in the sort term though. No point not having half dozen unfinished m […]
Show full quote

I feel your pain.
I would say don't be afraid to compromise in the sort term though. No point not having half dozen unfinished machine and nothing to play on.

As an example I've been waiting on specific RAM modules for a decent price for 4 years now. Self imposed limitation as I want all matching, but until then I've been using 2 miss matched sticks hours enjoying the rig till then.

On the other hand I've just got the last bit of hardware I've been wanting for a Voodoo 3 build, but rather then have it sit idle the Voodoo was in another PC so I could at least scratch my 3dfx itch even if the PC wasn't ideal by my standards.

I don't know which CPU to put in that Slot 1 machine, or I would've chosen by now. It already has that RIVA TNT2 in it, which is honestly a beast, but I'm afraid something like a Pentium II or Katmai Pentium III might actually be a bit slow for it, let alone a Celeron.

I still want to get a non-OEM board for it, but after that, a lot is left up to mere chance as to what I will use.

How would I overclock that Celery? I've heard about tricks regarding blocking pins and what-not, but I don't know what it will do on an 100MHz FSB, seeing as it would be a full hardware overclock, especially if I go ahead and do it on the OEM board.

Speaking of RAM, I once had a huge amount of issue finding two 2GB sticks of time-accurate DDR2 1066 RAM, that also had prices I could use. It's a kit of Mushkin(?) stuff, and it was made in 2007. Yay.

Sounds like an excuse to try out all 3 and try some benchmarks I think 😉
From personal experience our C500 came with a TNT2 Pro or M64 can't remember which which I stole and swapped with the TNT in my P2 400 and remember noticing the difference. Then upgraded again to a GF2 MX and still noticed the difference, but have no numbers to back this up, and it was 20 years ago!

chinny22 wrote:

Sounds like an excuse to try out all 3 and try some benchmarks I think 😉
From personal experience our C500 came with a TNT2 Pro or M64 can't remember which which I stole and swapped with the TNT in my P2 400 and remember noticing the difference. Then upgraded again to a GF2 MX and still noticed the difference, but have no numbers to back this up, and it was 20 years ago!

You stole the graphics card out of your parents' computer?

Impressive.

The extra VRAM likely helped tremendously, considering that most TNT's came with 8MB of VRAM and that the M64 usually came with a minimum of 16MB of VRAM. I've noticed that VRAM does make a difference in performance, considering that I have a TNT2 Pro 16MB (with higher clock rates, and a 128-bit bus), but it is slower than my RIVA TNT 32MB (slower clock rates, and a 128-bit bus).

I can't say that for all video cards, certainly, because I've had cards with 2GB of VRAM be completely destroyed by cards with half that. In the 90's, I'd say VRAM made a much larger difference than it does today, ignoring the 64-bit bus garbage cards (TNT2 M64's are misleading, and will lag in anything higher than 640x480@16bpp).

[EDIT]

I may run several configurations, and see how much of a difference the graphics card/CPU combinations make. I have so many TNT2 cards that it's absurd, so why not? I remember complaining a long time ago that I needed vintage AGP video cards, yet I had none, but now I have five AGP cards in the TNT2 line alone. Configs I will test:

3DMark '99, 3DMark '00, 3DMark '01
Windows 98 SE, nVidia Detonator 2.08 (thank you vogons drivers)

640x480@16bpp, 640x480@32bpp
800x600@16bpp, 800x600@32bpp
1024x768@16bpp, 1024x768@32bpp
1280x1024@16bpp, 1280x1024@32bpp, I may or may not do this res because I don't know if all of the cards support it or not.

Intel Celeron SL2WN, TNT2 M64 16MB
Intel Celeron SL2WN, TNT2 M64 32MB
Intel Celeron SL2WN, TNT2 Pro 16MB
Intel Celeron SL2WN, TNT2 32MB

Intel Pentium II SL357, Same video cards as before

Intel Pentium III SL35D, Same video cards as before

Intel Pentium III SL43E, Same video cards as before

I still need to get a cooler for the Pentium II, so those results will likely be delayed by some time.
I need to get a fan zip-tied to the Katmai heatsink like I have done to the Coppermine. I also am testing the Coppermine simply to see how much extra speed the Coppermine architecture provides, and while it is a full 150MHz faster than the second fastest one in this lineup, I think it will give some insight into whether or not the Coppermine really gives as much of a 3D performance boost as I think it does.

I also need to attach a fan to the Celeron heatsink as well.

I will not be using my fifth TNT2 card, as it is a Vanta LT, released in 2000 as an ultra-budget card, and I believe that it is even slower than my TNT2 M64 16MB.

Things have changed slightly since I made this post. First, I got very lucky to be given US$100 as a present, and once I got home I immediately began searching online for Slot 1 motherboards.

I came upon an EPoX EP-61BXA-M, a 440BX based motherboard that is old enough to see PIII 450MHz CPUs as PII 450MHz CPUs- I definitely don't have to worry about this board being too new or being an OEM board. Both of those boxes are now checked off. Seller has 100% positive feedback, said he tested it with a PIII 450 (hence, how he figured out the quirks it has, such as that) in both Win98SE and WINNT4, etc. Knock on wood, I'll have a decent board going again- not to say that Gateway Tabor III isn't a trooper, because it is. It has a special new future as a server-class system.

Anyways, now that I have this motherboard, I'm staying in the Pentium II generation of CPUs- I don't want to put a PIII in here and have little strange things like that occur. I still currently have that PII 400 (untested, I have had no cooler to test it with), it looks like it should work fine anyways, so I potentially may use that.

This board, however, is unlike even the SE440BX-2 board I owned prior, because it not only allows you to force an 100MHz FSB, but it also allows you to change the processor voltage- a prime environment for a Celeron 300A @450MHz to thrive.

My question is this: should I put the PII 400 in there and forget about it, or will it be worth spending some extra money on a 300A and a SECC (not SECC2) cooler sufficient to handle the heat of the overclocked processor? Logistically, getting a Celeron back in the day and overclocking it would save you some money from buying a PII that you could spend on a graphics card, while still retaining the performance. I have about US$40 left over after the motherboard has been said and done.

I would go with the PII-400. My first ATX build (and it was in 1999, I think) was an Asus P2B with a PII-350 in an Enlight case running Win 95. Perfection. I had never had a computer that stable and consistent before, and I ran it hard straight into the ground over the next few years. (Still have the board and CPU, still working great, and it's now being put back into service as I've found a similar Enlight case, to replace the previous AT case and Totem motherboard I had been using.)

Celerons are OK, but why settle?

I installed a 3Com 905B about a year after first building it, having moved in with my college roomie and sharing the Internet between us. Absolutely an era-appropriate card.

If it were me, given the inventory you have, I would probably go with the 3D Blaster. (Given my druthers, I would probably opt for a Banshee, just for the character, but a TNT2 is a solid choice.) At the time, I had a Matrox Mystique, but I rocked that card well past the point where it was showing its age. I replaced it with a Voodoo 3 with AV in/out sometime around late 2000, I think. What a difference that made! Holy cow, texture-mapped 3D support is awesome! Does anybody else know about this?? 🤣

SirNickity wrote:

I would go with the PII-400. My first ATX build (and it was in 1999, I think) was an Asus P2B with a PII-350 in an Enlight case running Win 95. Perfection. I had never had a computer that stable and consistent before, and I ran it hard straight into the ground over the next few years. (Still have the board and CPU, still working great, and it's now being put back into service as I've found a similar Enlight case, to replace the previous AT case and Totem motherboard I had been using.)

Celerons are OK, but why settle?

With the research I've done, it seems to actually be vice-versa: the PII 400 is OK, but why settle?

While the PII 400 is not mentioned on this, I'm going to assume it scores around 3159 3DMarks, with very basic averaging math I did between the PII 350 and PII 450. This is with a nVidia Quadro2 Pro, a card that I assume is faster than my TNT2 32MB. This isn't the end all be all of benchmarks obviously, but Phil does a good job with consistency with his benchmarks, even between different videos. This coincides with what I've read online: the full speed cache, even if it is only 128KB, is faster than the half-speed 512KB of cache on the Pentium II line of CPUs. This gives an overclocked 300A an edge against a Pentium II 450, let alone a Pentium II 400. This is the same principle that gives Pentium III Coppermines such an edge over their Katmai predecessors- the cache is cut in half, at 256KB, but it is so much faster because it matches the processor's clock speed that the Coppermine's absolutely kill the Katmai's.

I use 3DMark 2000 as a prime example because I will be running hardware accelerated DirectX 7 (in OpenGL mode, of course) games under Windows 98, and I have found that 3DMark 2000 coincides well with results I might expect from Half-Life, the game that this build is essentially being created to play. Ideally, I want this to run at a minimum of 800x600x32, with full OpenGL hardware acceleration (no software spirtes, etc.), while retaining an average of at least 40FPS. Half-Life WON will always have frame drops and performance issues, this is something that I know I'm not going to be able to fix without ditching era-appropriate hardware, but at the moment it runs well even at 1024x768 with my PIII Coppermine 600 and my 3D Blaster. It just is unfortunate that the Coppermine is more Y2K era than 90's era, so I have to find alternatives- I just want those alternatives to perform as close to how it performs now as possible. I remember that with the PIII Katmai 500, this machine was even able to do Quake III at 1024x768x32, medium to high settings, with the same 3D Blaster/TNT2 card I have.

Eventually, I will have to grab a Voodoo 3 3000 or a similar card, as even though that is closer to 1999 era, it will absolutely demolish Half-Life at even 1024x768, likely better than my TNT2 can- while still having been made in the '90s, whereas my 3D Blaster was produced post-Y2K.

Don't get me wrong, however, I am still seriously considering sticking with my 400MHz Pentium II, as it may be just enough to do what I want it to without the risk of overclocking the processor.

I also don't want a Pentium II 450MHz in there- every single '98-'99 machine I see on YouTube uses a friggin PII 450, and I'd rather not be that conformist- I like to be that way with quite a few things, but I feel like the PII 400 would have dropped in price when the PII 450 came out, allowing people to buy it for cheaper than when it was new.

I just fear that it will bottleneck the 3D Blaster, because with the Coppermine being a full 200MHz faster than that PII, with SSE, and full-speed cache, there is no way it isn't at least be faster than the PII by a large margin.

OK, you make a compelling argument -- that little guy OC's like a champ. (I would still go with a PII just 'cause, but I never really have cared much about benchmarks, so take that with a grain of salt.) 😀

Just to play devil's advocate... I ended up with two PII-450 CPUs without trying. It's just what happened to come with boards I salvaged. So, it might just be the case that the 450 sold like hot-cakes. (Or maybe I just got lucky. Who knows.)

SirNickity wrote:

OK, you make a compelling argument -- that little guy OC's like a champ. (I would still go with a PII just 'cause, but I never really have cared much about benchmarks, so take that with a grain of salt.) 😀

I don't personally care very much for benchmarks either, except when it pertains to a specific goal of a build. In this case, I really don't want to have to ever deal with what I call "Half-Life Hell," again. It is far more CPU intensive than I first recognized, and while a good 32MB TNT2 will get you through things such as Quake III (unless you just have an absolutely horrendous CPU for the time), having the card alone will not guarantee you good performance in Half-Life.

It is quite irritating that Half-Life is as CPU intensive as it is, as while later machines have the CPU's to cut it, even PIII Katmai CPUs seem to just barely have the oomph to chug Half-Life along "decently". I'd even go as far as to say anything slower than a PII 400 is going to fail to give me the kind of performance I want, if that- I know that a Pentium III Katmai 500MHz does decent with Half-Life, though when I had to upgrade to the Pentium III 600E due to my 500MHz Katmai dying, I remember that there was honestly a jump in performance over the Katmai. This is why I'm starting to fear going down to a Pentium II, because not only am I losing full-speed cache, and at least a good 150MHz in clock speed, I'm also losing SSE; granted, Half-Life may not use SSE, but I suspect that other games I may end up playing will. I wonder if even the overclocked Celeron would come close to what the PIII Coppermine is giving me, and that worries me a little.

This new motherboard I've purchased is also in no way going to be able to support the lower voltage Coppermine CPUs, if I ever decided I needed to upgrade to one. With the motherboard treating the 450MHz Katmai as a 450MHz Deschutes, I wonder if it would even be a good idea to try and use, say, a 600MHz Katmai as a last ditch effort. I don't know what that might break, and what it might not.

I don't mean to say that it will damage either part on a hardware level, but I also don't want instability brought on by using a CPU on a motherboard that was likely made before the CPU was even announced, let alone released. Not only that, but about the fastest CPU I could put in this system that would allow it to make any real sense at all would be a Katmai 550, and that's going by the release dates, not even considering when the hardware would be physically available to anybody.

This means my best bets on the Pentium III line would be really limited to the Katmai 450 and Katmai 500- that's if I even want to throw a Pentium III in there in the first place, considering that I already have a Katmai 450.

Which brings me back to the original problem. I'll need a Pentium II 450, a Pentium II 400, or a Celeron 300A @450. The issue here is that I don't know for sure if my Pentium II 400 even works, I don't know if my Pentium III 450 works, and the only Celeron I have is a Celeron 333, which has a 5x multiplier instead of a 4.5x multiplier. This means that if I were to overclock it, it would have to reach 500MHz to have a stable FSB speed (PCI/ISA clock dividers only work well at 100MHz or 66MHz FSB), and from what I've read online, I roughly have a 15% chance that the overclock will work.

I have essentially backed myself into a neat little corner with very thin margins of operation. I always somehow end up doing this to myself.

SirNickity wrote:

Just to play devil's advocate... I ended up with two PII-450 CPUs without trying. It's just what happened to come with boards I salvaged. So, it might just be the case that the 450 sold like hot-cakes. (Or maybe I just got lucky. Who knows.)

The problem with my logic on using the PII 400 in the first place is that I'm assuming the PII 400 will give me the performance I want, and am also simultaneously assuming that the PII 450 isn't going to be the minimum to get the performance I'm wanting from this machine, if you want some food for thought.

Playing games on a 1999 system is so much better with a Voodoo 3 (or Voodoo 2 SLI). The much lower CPU and FSB load of the Glide API helps tremendously with games like Unreal and Half-Life.

As for SSE, I think it is near completely useless unless you want to play 2002+ games. When the Athlon XP came out (with SSE support) in late 2001 it was about 2-5% faster than the old Athlon in games. It claimed to have an improved hardware data prefetch and translation lookaside buffer, so there was probably no speed improvement from SSE support.

Because of the faster cache the coppermine is faster than the Katmai though, by about 5-10%.

I did something I consider stupid, and took the heatsink off of my Coppermine and put it on the PII 400.

A) I wish my PII 400 did not have an exposed die. I f*cking hate exposed dies. To whatever horrid, demented engineers working for Intel when this CPU was produced, who hurt you?

B) I hate all of my Slot 1 coolers. They force you to place tremendous amounts of pressure on said exposed die when both removing and installing the heatsink, especially during the latter stage. They look like this:

No. I said never again with the Coppermine, but now I really mean never again. No. I hate this I hate this I hate this.

When I first put the Pentium II in the system after doing that and being sure I broke the die, I plugged it in and the system immediately turned itself on. Not good.

Unplugged it, plugged it back in, it did the same thing.

Then I set the configuration jumper on the motherboard to accept a different CPU. It started doing two short beeps and one long beep, and the floppy seek was much longer than usual, and sort of glitchy. Then I set it back to normal mode and it POSTed. What the f*ck?

It detected it as a Pentium II 400MHz, it's in Windows 98 SE, right now, showing the 3D pipes screensaver, and it ran GLQuake.

I know this is a stupid question, but I am incredibly stressed about this kind of thing- does it work? Is it alright to be comfortable with? Did I possibly crack the die putting 300,000lbs of force on those stupid little clips to get them to interface with the card properly? How do I test if the CPU is 100% okay? Did I break the die and now it's just thermal paste and pressure holding it together so when it gets jarred in the slightest it will come apart and be destroyed?

I hate these stupid cooler designs I hate these stupid cooler designs no exposed dies are bad

I agree. The PIII / Athlon era was a circus of broken CPU dies and gouged motherboards near the CPU fan clip. I worked for a computer store during the tail of that period, leading into the P4.

BTW, 🤣 @ "who hurt you" -- I had the same reaction when I did some work on Sun SPARC servers. Taking those things apart was like working on a car where the engine had to be compressed into a tight wad of aluminum and rubber to fit under the hood. It convinced me that the Sun engineers had had a falling out with the field techs at some point, and this was their revenge.

Anywho. I've never seen a damaged die that didn't translate immediately into a complete lack of pulse. I suppose it's possible but there's not a lot of wasted space on those things, so it should be pretty evident that it's damaged. Even a hairline fracture would be enough to tear apart regions of the CPU's core.

SirNickity wrote on 2019-12-30, 19:47:

I agree. The PIII / Athlon era was a circus of broken CPU dies and gouged motherboards near the CPU fan clip. I worked for a computer store during the tail of that period, leading into the P4.

Mmm, and I bet once those P4's and P3's with heat spreaders started appearing, the screwed up dies went down by a lot. I just had to change the cooler again, to the new, actual, proper "EverCool," HSF I bought on eBay. Thing looks way better than the ugly OEM ones, and it seems to work alright. Knock on wood, the P2 still works. This thing is only second to my Coppermine 600 in terms of how much trauma it has endured. The Coppermine has had me take off a non-OEM cooler, when I was working with Slot 1 for the first time and barely knew how to even put thermal paste on CPU's, put it back on, take it off to put one of those awful OEM coolers on it, take off the OEM cooler, put back on the custom cooler, take it off, and then put on the OEM cooler again, and recently, take off the OEM cooler again to put it on the PII to test it- not joking. I hope it still works, because if it did, it is one of the toughest CPU's I've ever owned.

SirNickity wrote on 2019-12-30, 19:47:

BTW, 🤣 @ "who hurt you" -- I had the same reaction when I did some work on Sun SPARC servers. Taking those things apart was like working on a car where the engine had to be compressed into a tight wad of aluminum and rubber to fit under the hood. It convinced me that the Sun engineers had had a falling out with the field techs at some point, and this was their revenge.

I've had some things (namely, a GTX 280 that I 100% needlessly killed) that acted similar. I don't know who comes up with some of these genuinely awful design decisions, or why, but it makes me think that there was something going on where malicious intent was involved. Maybe they had to build it like that for some reason, maybe they didn't, but either way my patience with taking fragile, complex things apart and putting them back together again is slowly growing thin.

SirNickity wrote on 2019-12-30, 19:47:

Anywho. I've never seen a damaged die that didn't translate immediately into a complete lack of pulse. I suppose it's possible but there's not a lot of wasted space on those things, so it should be pretty evident that it's damaged. Even a hairline fracture would be enough to tear apart regions of the CPU's core.

I've had a Katmai 500 die (no pun intended), but it was the CPU installed on my SE440BX-2 when it died. It was unstable, wouldn't get past Windows 98/98 SE setup, and didn't act right after that. It wasn't caused by physical trauma, but likely an overvolt of some sorts. I think the cache got fried, I'm still not sure to this day.

Anyways, I recently got the EPoX motherboard in the mail- it works, knock on wood, and actually has some pretty cool features, like the ability to read CPU/chipset temperatures, force FSB 100 via hardware, and uses a row of pins to determine the multiplier your CPU uses, with labels like "266/400," or "333/500," to guide you on which pins to short relevant to your CPU. It also allows you to change your FSB speed to 75 and 83MHz respectively in BIOS.

I tried to force FSB 100 on the Celeron 333, and it didn't even POST. Figures, I guess it didn't like the 150% overclock.

Eh, my Slot 1 build isn't working. Throws a code 00C1 (bad RAM), but all of the RAM sticks work in my Socket 370 build, which means the caps on the board are probably shot. ASUS P2B-F is the board and it has a Celeron 400/66 Slot 1 installed. Going to build another Socket 7 system or upgrade my current one to a better one that has AGP and place the other board in my 10x 5.25 bay computer case for DOS games and stuff.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2019-12-31, 02:16:

Eh, my Slot 1 build isn't working. Throws a code 00C1 (bad RAM), but all of the RAM sticks work in my Socket 370 build, which means the caps on the board are probably shot. ASUS P2B-F is the board and it has a Celeron 400/66 Slot 1 installed. Going to build another Socket 7 system or upgrade my current one to a better one that has AGP and place the other board in my 10x 5.25 bay computer case for DOS games and stuff.

The possibility of bad caps makes me paranoid, because I don't have the skill or resources to replace capacitors across an entire motherboard. I don't know about going Socket 7, because those CPU's in general don't seem to "go," as much as Slot 1 builds do. If you're used to the speed of a Celeron 400 though, a high-end K6 should probably keep up just fine. I have had quite a lackluster experience with Socket 7- bad AGP, mainly. If you're okay with using a PCI Voodoo 3 or a Voodoo 2, I'd say go for it, but if otherwise, I'd say that you should find a new 440BX Slot 1 mobo online and throw in a CPU that uses 100MHz FSB, probably a PII 400 or later, but ideally a PIII CuMine 600 or similar CPU if time-accuracy isn't a problem and your (new) motherboard supports it. Those CuMines fly, and you can pretty much play any 90's to possibly even early 2000's game ever made at good resolutions and good settings depending on your video card. It just sucks that at the moment, most Slot 1 prices are garbage, around $20 higher than usual, and I'm not sure as to why. I've seen motherboards going for US$30 before, that's plus shipping, but minimum for them at the moment is US$40, minus shipping, so that's garbage in general.

If you can find one for cheap, and don't care to have an OEM board, Gateway Tabor III motherboards are really solid, and support CuMines up to 800MHz I believe. I've used one for a little while now (since the summer of 2018), it's taken its fair share of trauma, and the only real problems I've had with it are that GeForce 2MX cards on it are glitchy (everything else under the sun works fine) and PCI Slot 2 always has a hardware conflict no matter what cards you put in it or what settings you use.

The Gateway Tabor (and other Gateway motherboards round that era) are actually made by Intel which is why they are such high quality 😀