Welcome 😀

What an impressive first post - and an equally impressive list of stuff.

Couple of quick thoughts

P3-450
- That P3-450 is really a bit slow for Win9x games like Unreal. It looks like a great late DOS build though. As you have more than enough faster stuff, I'd focus solely on DOS here.
- Turtle Beach Fiji is a very high-end late 1990's card, but only the MPU-401 MIDI will work in DOS. That's a bit of a waste.
- For DOS you will need something that is Sound Blaster compatible, preferably an ISA card (DOS and PCI sound is a bit of a headache). Don't see one on the list, so that needs sourcing. How deep down the rabbit hole you want to go is up to you, and you will find many competing opinions. My somewhat leftfield preference is for a CMI8330-based card if you only want one, as (unlike anything by Creative) it supports SBPro2 and SB16, and has relatively bug-free MIDI (although with the Fiji you already have that more than covered). Plus it's relatively easy to find and cheap, with sound quality no worse than an average SB16.
- DOS basically only uses the VGA card as a frame buffer. VESA support is the main criterium to choose. 3dfx, early nVidia and S3 lead the pack there, but ATi is decent enough. If you have a TNT, TNT2, GeForce2 or just a simple GeForce2MX, it would be perfect.

Win9x...
Tbh, I'd say that i865-based P4 is the best option. Pair that with the Gf4Ti4600 and an SBLive and you can run basically anything for Win9x, with 3D Sound too. There's not really any added value on going for a P3 866-1000 in between. If you want to for nostalga's sake, by all means do. I'd recommend the same GF4Ti4600 and SBLive there too. As for the motherboard, QDI is much-loved, but you might need to swap the caps, and i440BX isn't ideal for 1GHz unless you want to overclock it, and even then you're stuck with no AGP divider, AGP 1.0 interface and ATA-33. The AOpen MX3S is a nice i815E board which does native 133MHz, has AGP 2.0 (4x) and ATA-100. Check the caps here too, AOpen is just as notorious as QDI (and so's Abit, particularly the KT7a).

But mainly I'd focus on exactly what you want to achieve and let that be the prime consideration. Also, if hardware keeps dying on you, you might want to make sure you're storing it in a static-safe environment. ESD is real and kills stuff with a delay so you don't notice until it's too late.

Are you retromancave or another popular YouTuber/podcaster?

Anyway, the ti4600 belongs in a much faster machine, a high end athlon xp is perfect, but p4 will do. You probably want at least one voodoo card in there somewhere, and maybe a system with ISA slots for sound cards and dos games.

I would go for more variety...three p3s and three p4s seem a bit much.

Good luck!

dionb wrote on 2020-01-25, 17:25:

Welcome :) […]
Show full quote

Welcome 😀

What an impressive first post - and an equally impressive list of stuff.

Couple of quick thoughts

P3-450
- That P3-450 is really a bit slow for Win9x games like Unreal. It looks like a great late DOS build though. As you have more than enough faster stuff, I'd focus solely on DOS here.
- Turtle Beach Fiji is a very high-end late 1990's card, but only the MPU-401 MIDI will work in DOS. That's a bit of a waste.
- For DOS you will need something that is Sound Blaster compatible, preferably an ISA card (DOS and PCI sound is a bit of a headache). Don't see one on the list, so that needs sourcing. How deep down the rabbit hole you want to go is up to you, and you will find many competing opinions. My somewhat leftfield preference is for a CMI8330-based card if you only want one, as (unlike anything by Creative) it supports SBPro2 and SB16, and has relatively bug-free MIDI (although with the Fiji you already have that more than covered). Plus it's relatively easy to find and cheap, with sound quality no worse than an average SB16.
- DOS basically only uses the VGA card as a frame buffer. VESA support is the main criterium to choose. 3dfx, early nVidia and S3 lead the pack there, but ATi is decent enough. If you have a TNT, TNT2, GeForce2 or just a simple GeForce2MX, it would be perfect.

Win9x...
Tbh, I'd say that i865-based P4 is the best option. Pair that with the Gf4Ti4600 and an SBLive and you can run basically anything for Win9x, with 3D Sound too. There's not really any added value on going for a P3 866-1000 in between. If you want to for nostalga's sake, by all means do. I'd recommend the same GF4Ti4600 and SBLive there too. As for the motherboard, QDI is much-loved, but you might need to swap the caps, and i440BX isn't ideal for 1GHz unless you want to overclock it, and even then you're stuck with no AGP divider, AGP 1.0 interface and ATA-33. The AOpen MX3S is a nice i815E board which does native 133MHz, has AGP 2.0 (4x) and ATA-100. Check the caps here too, AOpen is just as notorious as QDI (and so's Abit, particularly the KT7a).

But mainly I'd focus on exactly what you want to achieve and let that be the prime consideration. Also, if hardware keeps dying on you, you might want to make sure you're storing it in a static-safe environment. ESD is real and kills stuff with a delay so you don't notice until it's too late.

Hey firstly thanks so much for the reply!

It seems a shame to not use the turtle beach but compatibility trumps all I guess? Can I reuse the DB50XG daughterboard with another card? It's detachable so I'm guessing it's possible? I wanted to stick with win98 as the newest OS on this machine as I felt it too underpowered for anything else. I’m trying to recall back to the P2-400 that my friend used to run with a banshee – I believe back then he was playing windows games such as black and white, and Battlezone. Hopefully the machine is enough for that, I need to dig through my collection of floppys to work out what dos games I want to revisit 😊

The P3 1GHz cpu collection I have are all 100MHz FSB chips so run ok on the bx and don’t require anything to be run out of spec as far as pci and agp go, but I fully get your comment regarding the ATA-33 limitation. I considered getting a PCI card to upgrade the standard to ata100/133 or similar – do you think this is a reasonable option?

I just like the 866s because they’re mATX format and take up less room, I’ve no need to have more than one of those systems but I think I’ll perhaps keep the other boards as spares? The only issue with that machine in its current state is that it has a very small form factor power supply which I don’t have much faith in as far as current delivery goes! I may have to look at the ability to fit a full size unit, from memory the P3s were still of the era where 5v current was most important?

Thankfully none of the boards I have look to have any capacitor issues, well that’s partly true! I also have an intel 478 board which definitely does want some new capacitors – D865GLC.

With regards to ESD, the G400 never worked, it’s the only thing I’ve been given that has not worked so far, all of the rest of the bits listed above are fine. The geforce 2 was quite happy but started showing artifacts – I may well do a fresh install of windows and try this again though.

I'd like to make an NF7 based AMD system too, but I don't have the IO shield for this board, and that's something that really bugs me! 🙁

Again - thank you 😀

kolderman wrote on 2020-01-25, 17:44:

Are you retromancave or another popular YouTuber/podcaster? […]
Show full quote

Are you retromancave or another popular YouTuber/podcaster?

Anyway, the ti4600 belongs in a much faster machine, a high end athlon xp is perfect, but p4 will do. You probably want at least one voodoo card in there somewhere, and maybe a system with ISA slots for sound cards and dos games.

I would go for more variety...three p3s and three p4s seem a bit much.

Good luck!

Hi, thank you for the reply! 😀

I'm not a youtuber at all, although I do watch all of Phils videos, LGR and a couple of others! I have Athlon xp cpus up to the 3200 but would quite like to get hold of a xp-m chip at some point (this I had, back in the day!). I have the same p4 board that Phil reviewed (asrock) - but it has no real options in the bios as such and I can't resist the urge to tinker just a little bit with the EE cpu! I hear you on the variety - I may well get a duron based build too, but I don't currently have one of those cpus in my collection!