Auron at the end we are still talking about 2 different things, things like listening to magazines or following price drops is not absolutely period correct, i added a hermeneutical term because we have to actually study how people behaved and reasoned at the time, upgrading only the GPU was still more cost effective than changing the whole system, motherboards went from the AT form factor to the ATX, it meant changing pretty much everything but the monitor.
The MMX and voodoo2 combo was a classic at the time and i bench marked a decent amount of games from 97\98 "realistically" which means playing at 640x480 maybe 800x600 with a framerate starting at 25 and fluctuating at a max of 45, some games ran better and some worse (half-life 2 ran like shit regardless until the PIII)
but it was a satisfactory experience.