Reply 20 of 51, by Amigaz
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wrote:Dump it. :cool: I had big plans myself some years ago. I got hold of a A7M266-D motherboard with 2 mobile Athlon XPs wired to 22 […]
Dump it. 😎
I had big plans myself some years ago. I got hold of a A7M266-D motherboard with 2 mobile Athlon XPs wired to 2266MHz, 2GB 400MHz(@266MHz 2-2-2) ECC REG memory, iPanel Deluxe, 80GB hdd, Aureal SQ2500 OEM(?)+Prodigy 7.1 HiFi, varying graphics from Videologic 3Dx to Geforce 3, with Geforce 6800GT/Ultra and Radeon HD3800 planned.
I thought this would be the perfect Win98/XP dual boot machine. Well it did not work out well as i planned, despite the fact the machine was fast as a 3200+ A64. Win98 had serious problems with more than 512MB memory, the board was discomfortable with a modern PSU, various driver troubles in Win98, the Prodigy 7.1 had IRQ issues even if it was alone, i could not put vidcards with back mounted heatsinks int the mobo, beacause the enourmus CPU coolers got in the way, the board was picky about IDE devices, and other nuisances.
XP portion was used only for web browsing, and simple office tasks, as i was playing the modern games on a C2D machine, and to my suprise a lot of Win98 games im interested in run just fine on the main Xp rig.
Recently one of the modules got faulty, and after that the motherboard did not accept any IDE devices.
That is my luck. 😦
Oh well, i had an Abit KA7-100 board with a K7100 cpu lying around, i used them to make a machine with the same purpose as the old one. My experiance with the new machine is much better, it has less ram(2x256MB PC133), and less processing power, but is much more compatible(ISA slot for DOS sound, Win98 is working fine with less driver trouble), and still feels quite responsive in WinXP.
Overall its far better suited for retro gaming, and while i really like that Athlon dually, it was total overkill for the task.
The 512mb + RAM issue is easy to solve with the unofficial windows 98 service pack so that propblem is nothing to actually whine about
You can have gig's of RAM without any issues with this service pack
http://exuberant.ms11.net/98sesp.html
Running win98 happily on a P4 3.06ghz HT 1gig of rambus RAM rig
The problems I've encountered are mostly speed related.
My retro computer stuff: https://lychee.jjserver.net/#16136303902327