Mephusto wrote on 2020-08-13, 05:12:

Hi, I'm not sure if I overlooked it or not, if I did please just point me in the right direction, but I have an intel se440bx system that I am planning on building but I can't seem to find info on whether or not a new psu will work with it or not and how many watts I need. I just want to make an old 98/dos machine to play with. I got into PC's around 2000 so I am not real well versed on the older systems. I am slowly trying to build my knowledge until I can get a 386 pc for straight up dos. Thanks for any help you can offer.

Have a look at this thread . Any modern psu's that have large 5v rails

darry wrote on 2020-08-13, 05:41:

Have a look at this thread . Any modern psu's that have large 5v rails

Hey thank you very much! I read through and I am going to see if I can find something. The Antec seems like a good place to start. Any idea where I could find what is required, power wise, for that motherboard? All the places I have seen have manuals but not those specifications.

Depending on what other hardware you're planning to put in there you'll probably need a PSU that'll output a continuous 12-20A on +5V. Don't fall for people's panic of needing 20 gigawatts of +5V power on all their retro systems; the 450W Pentium II processors aren't that power hungry.
All modern PSUs will deliver sufficient +12V and -12V. Some 440bx boards will complain if there's no -5V rail (and you'll hardly find -5V on a modern PSU) even though you probably won't need it anyway.
I would also recommend a PSU with 20+4 pin cable so you can split the cable in order to not to collide with components next to the 20pin connector on the motherboard.

Another relevant thread: What modern PSU powers your Pentium3 setups?
The thread Darry linked will include quality power supplies, but an Athlon XP is more demanding than a P2/P3, especially if you add powerful video cards (i.e. with their own power connectors) into the mix.

Doornkaat wrote on 2020-08-13, 06:44:

the 450W Pentium II processors aren't that power hungry.

That was supposed to MHz, not Watts. 😅
450W PIIs are very power hungry.😉

Thanks for the assistance! As for what else will be attached, I am looking for a good AGP video card, ISA sound card maybe SB 16. For storage IDE to SD or CF. 3 ram cards 256Mb total, CD drive and 3.5 floppy drive. As of right now that is all. If ya'll have any suggestions I am open for them 🤙

Mephusto wrote on 2020-08-13, 17:16:

Thanks for the assistance! As for what else will be attached, I am looking for a good AGP video card, ISA sound card maybe SB 16. For storage IDE to SD or CF. 3 ram cards 256Mb total, CD drive and 3.5 floppy drive. As of right now that is all. If ya'll have any suggestions I am open for them 🤙

Suggestions depend on games you're planning to play.
My personal overall suggestion would be a GeForce MX 440 or 460: great Win9x performance, good DOS compatibility, good DVI support on cards with that feature, faster than your CPU can utilise while having low power requirements plus cheap and readily avaliable.
Closer to your motherboard and CPU's time of manufacture would be a Nvidia Riva TNT2 (Pro/Ultra) which may even be more compatible with a few games but are slower, often more expensive and rarely feature DVI for modern screens. If they do it's sometimes a bit janky.
In case you're more focussed on early Win9x gaming you might consider a 3Dfx card but don't fall for the hype! For what they are they are way too expensive imho. The proprietary Glide API is cool for some older titles but come 1998 most games look just as nice and run well on D3D or OpenGL too. If you can get one cheap, sure go for it! For a PII 450 system the best bang for your buck would probably be a single Voodoo2 8MB for those older Glide titles plus the GeForce MX 440/460 for 2D and later 3D. If you want a 3Dfx 2D+3D combo the Voodoo3 2000 should match a PII 450 better than the 3000. Most 2000s can be overclocked to 3000 levels as well but a GeForce MX 440 is going to run circles around either of those at a fraction of the cost.

Also get a SBLive! for 3D sound in Win98. ISA cards are better suited for DOS imho plus you can have both in your system and the SBLive! will cost you next to nothing.

And as one last suggestion go for an SSD plus IDE-SATA converter if you're taking the flash storage route. A decent 120GB SSD is cheaper than a CF card and better at being a system drive.

All of this will keep your +5V requirements well below 20A.👍

If you plan to use graphics for both DOS and win 98 on a Pentium 2 450:
TNT2 would be an affordable choise. This provides good DOS / vesa support and has good Windows drivers for directx.
Voodoo will be fine too, but is more costly.
Faster Nvidia MX cards would be fine, but there performance gain will be small, the CPU will be the bottleneck.

Storage: I'd suggest an industrial class compactflash at least. SD would work, but you'll burn it up when Windows will get swapping memory. And it will, unless you turn it completely off. A real SSD or HDD above 40GB would be theideal choise.
I always prefer HDD, because of the sound.

Thanks so much for that info.

Doornkaat, I am looking just to play some later DOS titles and learn how to use DOS, and games from the mid 90s to maybe early 2000. I have an XP machine that will do any newer things. I crawled down the rabbit hole searching cards from that era and got so messed up from crazy suggestions 🤣.

Waterbeesje Thanks I was already going to stay away from Voodoo cards they are crazy expensive unless I just come across one crazy cheap 🤣.

And to both, I have a 60Gb OCZ ssd just sitting around not being used, would that be a better choice?

For late DOS and basically all of Win9x gaming the GeForce MX 440/460 is really a decent card.
Riva TNT2 (Pro/Ultra) too, especially with your system, but again in my experience they're a bit more expensive, probably a bit slower on your system though slightly more compatible.
Both are great and affordable choices. 👍

That OCZ SSD is probably a good choice too, especially since you've already got it. 🙂 Get an adaptor and see if the SSD's controller, the adaptor chip and the 440bx IDE controller get along well. Probably they will.
There's a whole lot of discussion about strategys for using SSDs on OSs with no TRIM support. Personally I recommend taking the SSD out and putting it into a modern system to TRIM every once in a while.

Doornkaat wrote on 2020-08-14, 08:47:

For late DOS and basically all of Win9x gaming the GeForce MX 440/460 is really a decent card. Riva TNT2 (Pro/Ultra) too, especi […]
Show full quote

For late DOS and basically all of Win9x gaming the GeForce MX 440/460 is really a decent card.
Riva TNT2 (Pro/Ultra) too, especially with your system, but again in my experience they're a bit more expensive, probably a bit slower on your system though slightly more compatible.
Both are great and affordable choices. 👍

That OCZ SSD is probably a good choice too, especially since you've already got it. 🙂 Get an adaptor and see if the SSD's controller, the adaptor chip and the 440bx IDE controller get along well. Probably they will.
There's a whole lot of discussion about strategys for using SSDs on OSs with no TRIM support. Personally I recommend taking the SSD out and putting it into a modern system to TRIM every once in a while.

Running TRIM under DOS on a FAT32 filesystem is possible. See Corruption issue when using rloew's TRIM.EXE (TRIM utility for DOS) with FreeDOS FDISK 1.2.1/1.3.1 partitioned DISK . Also, AFAIK, Windows 10 will not let you TRIM a FAT32 filesystem .

EDIT: See Re: Planning to install SSD in my Windows 98 machine. Help, advice, suggestions, etc.? about issue with lack of FAT32 TRIM suport under Windows 7 and 10 .

Doornkaat wrote on 2020-08-14, 08:47:

For late DOS and basically all of Win9x gaming the GeForce MX 440/460 is really a decent card. Riva TNT2 (Pro/Ultra) too, especi […]
Show full quote

For late DOS and basically all of Win9x gaming the GeForce MX 440/460 is really a decent card.
Riva TNT2 (Pro/Ultra) too, especially with your system, but again in my experience they're a bit more expensive, probably a bit slower on your system though slightly more compatible.
Both are great and affordable choices. 👍

That OCZ SSD is probably a good choice too, especially since you've already got it. 🙂 Get an adaptor and see if the SSD's controller, the adaptor chip and the 440bx IDE controller get along well. Probably they will.
There's a whole lot of discussion about strategys for using SSDs on OSs with no TRIM support. Personally I recommend taking the SSD out and putting it into a modern system to TRIM every once in a while.

Would you do the same with CF cards? I am running Windows 98 on a UDMA 4 speed CF card for over a year now with no issues, but I would like to keep it this way. Only the OS is on the CF, the software and the page file are on a mechanical hdd.

darry wrote on 2020-08-14, 13:50:

Doornkaat wrote on 2020-08-14, 08:47:

For late DOS and basically all of Win9x gaming the GeForce MX 440/460 is really a decent card. Riva TNT2 (Pro/Ultra) too, especi […]
Show full quote

For late DOS and basically all of Win9x gaming the GeForce MX 440/460 is really a decent card.
Riva TNT2 (Pro/Ultra) too, especially with your system, but again in my experience they're a bit more expensive, probably a bit slower on your system though slightly more compatible.
Both are great and affordable choices. 👍

That OCZ SSD is probably a good choice too, especially since you've already got it. 🙂 Get an adaptor and see if the SSD's controller, the adaptor chip and the 440bx IDE controller get along well. Probably they will.
There's a whole lot of discussion about strategys for using SSDs on OSs with no TRIM support. Personally I recommend taking the SSD out and putting it into a modern system to TRIM every once in a while.

Running TRIM under DOS on a FAT32 filesystem is possible. See Corruption issue when using rloew's TRIM.EXE (TRIM utility for DOS) with FreeDOS FDISK 1.2.1/1.3.1 partitioned DISK . Also, AFAIK, Windows 10 will not let you TRIM a FAT32 filesystem .

EDIT: See Re: Planning to install SSD in my Windows 98 machine. Help, advice, suggestions, etc.? about issue with lack of FAT32 TRIM suport under Windows 7 and 10 .

I shouldn't have opened that can of TRIM worms.😅

I had read that thread before and it made me not really want to try TRIMing my drives under DOS. Also I'm uncertain wether the old integrated IDE controller can pass TRIM to the drive? Here's what I do to 'manually TRIM' my drive: I make an image of the drive, wipe the SSD with the integrated secure erase and copy the image back. That's about 40GB of writes. With how little I use the PC I don't do this more often than twice a year.
There's a good chance this actually increases wear compared to regular write amplification seeing how little Win98SE writes to the drive but even at that pace the SSD is going to outlive me.👌
I don't claim this is the best or only solution and it certainly isn't the gospel of flash longevity. But if you think this is contraproductive best tell us so nobody repeats my mistakes.👍

Epirean wrote on 2020-08-14, 14:14:

Doornkaat wrote on 2020-08-14, 08:47:

For late DOS and basically all of Win9x gaming the GeForce MX 440/460 is really a decent card. Riva TNT2 (Pro/Ultra) too, especi […]
Show full quote

For late DOS and basically all of Win9x gaming the GeForce MX 440/460 is really a decent card.
Riva TNT2 (Pro/Ultra) too, especially with your system, but again in my experience they're a bit more expensive, probably a bit slower on your system though slightly more compatible.
Both are great and affordable choices. 👍

That OCZ SSD is probably a good choice too, especially since you've already got it. 🙂 Get an adaptor and see if the SSD's controller, the adaptor chip and the 440bx IDE controller get along well. Probably they will.
There's a whole lot of discussion about strategys for using SSDs on OSs with no TRIM support. Personally I recommend taking the SSD out and putting it into a modern system to TRIM every once in a while.

Would you do the same with CF cards? I am running Windows 98 on a UDMA 4 speed CF card for over a year now with no issues, but I would like to keep it this way. Only the OS is on the CF, the software and the page file are on a mechanical hdd.

Sorry, I don't know enough about CF cards to answer this question with certainty.
In the way you are using the card and since you aren't writing much to it I guess you should be fine though.

Is your CF industrial class? Then it shouldn't be much of an issue as they are designed for this sort of tasks. They can handle far more r/w ops than non-industrial.

You say the swap file is set to a mechanical HDD. That's a good thing to expand lifetime of the CF. On the other side, it's a bit slower. With a ***load of ram, you could disable swapping, to save r/w ops and I think you should be ok with any CF (industrial preferred ofc)

On the other hand: CF cards become dirty cheap. Replacing it once in a while won't cost you an arm and a leg, do why bother? Just keep a backup to set up a new CF if needed.

I was also looking at the industrial class CF cards. They don't seem to expensive or hard to get.

Once you've TRIMmed a drive, you can mitigate the issue from then onward by leaving a reasonable portion of the total capacity as unpartitioned space. I like to say something like 25% unpartitioned but adjust according to how much space you actually need.
If the drive has been prevented from ever thinking more than 75% of it's capacity holds important data, then it will always have enough slack to work with that write amplification can't reach serious levels.
That's for SSDs though. That theory probably doesn't work for dumber devices like CF.

TRIM must be supported by SDD. I doubt most old and compatible CF cards are capable of such feat, but industrial grade cards use SLC memory anyway.

waterbeesje wrote on 2020-08-14, 17:44:

Is your CF industrial class? Then it shouldn't be much of an issue as they are designed for this sort of tasks. They can handle far more r/w ops than non-industrial.

You say the swap file is set to a mechanical HDD. That's a good thing to expand lifetime of the CF. On the other side, it's a bit slower. With a ***load of ram, you could disable swapping, to save r/w ops and I think you should be ok with any CF (industrial preferred ofc)

On the other hand: CF cards become dirty cheap. Replacing it once in a while won't cost you an arm and a leg, do why bother? Just keep a backup to set up a new CF if needed.

I couldn't find speed specs on the industrial ones I could buy, so I got a regular Transcend 800x, it is around 30 mbps (random write). I was hoping it would be much faster, but it only boots the OS, so it's ok. When I replace it I will probably try an industrial one. If you guys have cards that are actually faster than ATA 33, let me know.

Epirean wrote on 2020-08-15, 13:13:

waterbeesje wrote on 2020-08-14, 17:44:

Is your CF industrial class? Then it shouldn't be much of an issue as they are designed for this sort of tasks. They can handle far more r/w ops than non-industrial.

You say the swap file is set to a mechanical HDD. That's a good thing to expand lifetime of the CF. On the other side, it's a bit slower. With a ***load of ram, you could disable swapping, to save r/w ops and I think you should be ok with any CF (industrial preferred ofc)

On the other hand: CF cards become dirty cheap. Replacing it once in a while won't cost you an arm and a leg, do why bother? Just keep a backup to set up a new CF if needed.

I couldn't find speed specs on the industrial ones I could buy, so I got a regular Transcend 800x, it is around 30 mbps (random write). I was hoping it would be much faster, but it only boots the OS, so it's ok. When I replace it I will probably try an industrial one. If you guys have cards that are actually faster than ATA 33, let me know.

Unless I missed something in the thread, you are using the integrated ATA controller on your 440BX, which is limited to ATA 33 .

EDIT: Sorry I mistook you for the OP .