I decided to go down the rabbit hole of old gaming pc's.

Right now I have an ibm aptiva (don't know the model, at work) motherboard with a p2/300 and ~350 megs of ram. It has 3 pci slots and a few ISA.

Will this be sufficient to run build engine games depending on graphics card?

I only tried playing a bit of shadow warrior and it seemed fine but this was before loading win98 and without sound and low res.

I've been looking at an mx4000 which might be overkill but its cheap and has passive cooling.

The system came with an ati (i think) 2d card and a monster 3d ii, but I don't have the cable to try it out yet.

Would upgrading to win2k pro be a good idea? I ran it for a long time when it was current and enjoyed the stability. I don't remember having many gaming issues with it.

Also I'm using CF->IDE adapters for the hard drive(s), will the read speed eventually become a bottleneck? I already know writing has been a bit slow and I've been packing them up just incase something goes wrong.

I stumbled across this site on accident while searching for old pc information and its been really helpful. So much information though kind of put me into analysis paralysis so I figured I would just make a thread.