First post, by BeginnerGuy
- Rank
- Oldbie
I've just inherited a very nice Pentium 3 setup from a junk machine. Beautiful after cleaning and swapping it into a modern case (rosewill challenger circa 2009) and have a few questions as I would like to turn this into my main retro rig. In those days I never really cared for headphones or usb since flash drives weren't a thought.. Nor did I care for DOS compatibility since I always had my 486.. Anyway, just some general questions for a "what would you do"
Motherboard is Intel SE440bx-2 with dual ISA, 4 PCI and one AGP, P3 650/256/100 and I threw in 512MB (1x 256, 2x 128 mb PC100) running Windows 98 SE (I could install the unofficial service pack if needed).
1. Are there PCI USB cards that provide a USB header for me to connect this cases front panel USB 2.0 header (which I believe is backwards compatible with 1.0).. That would make swapping files with a flash drive so much more convenient as I have to get behind the PC constantly as is.
2. Sound / front panel headphones. I'm currently using an ISA Aztech washington 16 and I'm wondering if I can throw in a PCI card for use with Windows. Would that conflict with the SB16 ISA, and are there any cheap PCI sound cards that I can expect to have a port for a modern front panel headphone (I believe it's an AC97 header) that are supported by windows 98? Audigy 2zs with front panel is a bit pricey.. If there is nothing cheap I guess I can just use an old sound blaster USB sound card or just route a splitter to an SB Live!, but would prefer front panel.
3. Graphics. I'm not sure what speed the AGP slot on this board is or what graphics card to look for, for now I just have an s3 verge PCI but I'll be wanting to play somewhat more modern games. Any good all around cards that will give me good performance in later 90s games while still being mostly fine with MS-DOS??
4. CPU: I'm not sure if I should even bother upgrading beyond 650 yet.. I can get an 800/256/100 for a good price but not sure if I should bother, or should I consider a slotket and a later CPU and if so what is out there? I wouldn't mind upgrading just for the sake of having a ridiculously overkill slot 1 rig that I could have never afforded in '99
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Any other cool bits and bobs out there to look at? I'm not interested in flash boot drives and such, as I'd like to keep it pretty much time correct. Thanks for looking 😊
edit: also curious if these boards can go over PC100 memory without issue or run over 512 on this machine?
Any benchmark information I can look at to compare CPUs?
Sup. I like computers. Are you a computer?