Try to get one with at least 1GHz and a mobo with an ISA slot

The Intel chipsets tend to be more stable but amd has the better cpu's. If you want Isa I suggest socket 370 or slot A not socket 462.

There was a little overlap, but technically Socket A (June 2000) lines up better with Socket 423 and 478 (Nov 2000). Socket 370 (Oct 1999) competed primarily against Slot A Athlons, because AMD was slower than Intel to get their on-die cache CPUs out the door. Tualatin Pentiums that used socket 370 (July 2001) overlapped with the P4 for a little while, but was pretty much non-existent in consumer products at that time. To give you an idea of how popular Tualatin was, let me share with you my experience living in university dorms at an engineering school at the time. I was was pretty much the only person out of perhaps 1000 dormies to have a PC based on a Tualatin. Everyone with a new PC had an Athlon, Duron or P4. If it was a PIII it was an older model.

Just be sure that your psu can handle those power hubgry cpu available in socket 462

Abit KT7A or Abit KT7A-Raid. (Expect to have to recap the board if it hasn't been done already)

Flash to the modified BIOS to handle Barton CPUs.

Get a Mobile Athlon XP 2800+

Pin mod (wire strand) the socket for selecting the higher multipliers and have a nice 2.5Ghz socket 462 system that has an ISA slot.

And make sure to use a good cooler. Something with heatpipes.

Thanks for the input everyone. I've decided that Socket A is too modern for my plans and not, well, interesting enough. So I got an MSI Slot A system with a 550MHz Athlon and 64MB RAM for £15- much cheaper than Slot 1 stuff (and socket A for that matter). Although there are very limited numbers of CPUs for sale if I want to upgrade.

Wow it's really cheap! Is it argon core or orion core? Is it AMD chipset or VIA chipset?
Slot A is definitely unique and interesting, but 550MHz might be a little bit slow for the games after 2000...

For a really fast Win98-only gaming machine, I recommend Socket-A. It can even be used for some of the really early XP games. For a mixed highend DOS and Win98 gaming machine, I recommend Socket-370. For a more allround mid-range win98 and highend dos machine, I recommend Slot1. There is only two major drawbacks regarding Socket-A, wich is that you need a beefy PSU and the caps tend to bulge more often than Slot1 and Socket-370.

lazibayer wrote:

Wow it's really cheap! Is it argon core or orion core? Is it AMD chipset or VIA chipset?
Slot A is definitely unique and interesting, but 550MHz might be a little bit slow for the games after 2000...

The CPU model number is k7550mtr51b aaaaaand I have no idea what core that would be. Which is the better core?

It is an MSI MS-6191 Motherboard, with an AMD 751 'irongate' chipset.

I basically pounced on this as soon as I saw it (it was on ebay, and was only an hour or so into it's 10 day BIN listing, and already had 10 watched on it, so I just went for it... after all, £15 is cheap!) after getting a feel for various prices of Socket A and I knew the prices of Slot 1 equipment...

I do also have the option to go for a 700MHz CPU for about £20 extra, apparently they're new. Not sure if they have the heatsink on them, I assume not.

Almoststew1990 wrote:

The CPU model number is k7550mtr51b aaaaaand I have no idea what core that would be. Which is the better core? […]
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The CPU model number is k7550mtr51b aaaaaand I have no idea what core that would be. Which is the better core?

It is an MSI MS-6191 Motherboard, with an AMD 751 'irongate' chipset.

I basically pounced on this as soon as I saw it (it was on ebay, and was only an hour or so into it's 10 day BIN listing, and already had 10 watched on it, so I just went for it... after all, £15 is cheap!) after getting a feel for various prices of Socket A and I knew the prices of Slot 1 equipment...

I do also have the option to go for a 700MHz CPU for about £20 extra, apparently they're new. Not sure if they have the heatsink on them, I assume not.

I made a mistake... 550MHz has two versions, argon and pluto, not orion. Pluto is newer and orion is the newest. It can be distinguished by the letter after k7550mtr51b:
k7550mtr51b "C": argon, 250nm, 46W TDP
k7550mtr51b "A": pluto, 180nm, 31W TDP
Pluto has higher potential in overclocking... If you wish to go that route...
Irongate has better reputation than KX133 in terms of stability. Lacking ISA kills a little bit fun but for 15 pounds everything is justified.

Pop the cover off of that Athlon. It probably has a 650 or 700Mhz core in it. A couple smd jumper changes and you can run it a the real core speed of overclock it to probably 800-900 with a good cooler. The only iffy thing is what cache chips it has as to how far you can overclock.

lazibayer wrote:

k7550mtr51b "C": argon, 250nm, 46W TDP k7550mtr51b "A": pluto, 180nm, 31W TDP Pluto has higher potential in overclocking... If y […]
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k7550mtr51b "C": argon, 250nm, 46W TDP
k7550mtr51b "A": pluto, 180nm, 31W TDP
Pluto has higher potential in overclocking... If you wish to go that route...
Irongate has better reputation than KX133 in terms of stability. Lacking ISA kills a little bit fun but for 15 pounds everything is justified.

Mine is a argon core it seems 🙁

I don't actually have any ISA soundcards to use anyway (and I would have thought older cards wouldn't have been as good for games from 1997 onwards) so I don't mind the lack of ISA too much.

Almoststew1990 wrote:

Mine is a argon core it seems 🙁

I don't actually have any ISA soundcards to use anyway (and I would have thought older cards wouldn't have been as good for games from 1997 onwards) so I don't mind the lack of ISA too much.

Well if you don't plan to overclock it the core revision doesn't matter.