First post, by Standard Def Steve
I haven't posted any hardware porn in a long time, so I figured I'd show off my Windows 98SE rig. I found this machine in the dumpster around six years ago, but it cleaned up real well! This machine was specially crafted to only handle three things and handle them well: DOS games, Windows 9x games, and Glide supported games.
The main specs:
Dell Dimension XPS T550
Originally shipped with a Katmai-550; upgraded to a Celeron-1400
512MB of CL2 PC100 SDRAM (2*256MB)
Voodoo3 3000 AGP
Aureal SQ2500 Vortex 2 PCI audio
Sound Blaster AWE64 ISA audio
Dell version of the Intel SE440-BX3 motherboard
Hitachi 80GB 7200RPM HDD
Usually hooked up to a NEC 21" flat CRT and an older Kenwood component system. For this photo shoot, I moved the computer upstairs and hooked it up to the big plasma screen.
Here's the beast in all its glory. Me? An artiste? Aw, shucks. 😊
Yowza! 1.4 gigahertz of power is plugged into the mobo's Slot 1 connector!
Two layers of conversion are required to support all this horsepower: an Asus Slotket, and a Lin-Lin FC-PGA2 socket adapter.
Expansion cards:
Voodoo3 AGP 3000 in the AGP slot, slightly overclocked.
3Com 10/100 NIC in PCI slot
Aureal Vortex 2 SQ2500 in PCI slot. I bought this card new in 1999!
Sound Blaster AWE64 in ISA slot
All hooked up and ready for some big screen, plasma-powered arcade action! The game on the screen is Cyber Troopers Virtual On. It's the software/MMX version of the game, so it doesn't really make use of any of the Voodoo's features. However the 1400MHz Celeron easily handles it in high-res 60fps mode. My old P2-233 certainly couldn't do that back in 97!
94 MHz NEC VR4300 | SGI Reality CoPro | 8MB RDRAM | Each game gets its own SSD - nooice!