If that's one of the newer Velociraptor 300gb it will be a nice fast drive.
But why not a 120gb ssd? Those are cheep these days, also keep in mind your need the 137gb hdd patch for 98se to work with such a big HDD. You could partition the drive so 98 does not get more then 137gb.

I wouldn't have enough space for all the three OSes. With the Velociraptor, I can give some extra room to XP, since it's the main OS of choice for me on the machine. If I'd have enough money, a 240GB SSD would be perfect for me, but I don't, so I have to resort to a cheaper alternative, and at the moment, the 300GB Velociraptor seems to be the best choice. But I'll have to wait for October, in order to buy that one, because I already got the pin-modded Tualatin in my bucket list to buy in September.

Alright, so I begun to install some games on the computer and see what's capable to do. So far, the games I've installed are:

-MDK
-MDK2
-Tomb Raider 1
-Tomb Raider 2 + Gold
-Serious Sam
-Quake (the D3DQuake port, since GLQuake is incredibly dim for my screen, I can't see anything!)
-Quake II

Along with SNES and Sega Mega Drive emulators, which look great on a CRT. I forgot how good a game looks on such a monitor, after many years of being used to LCD screens. I've also installed some DOS games that seem to run well on NTVDM. All the games above have been installed on Windows XP and run fine. I've also installed nGlide with the hope to run 3DFX-only games such as Pandemonium 1 and 2, but whenever I try to run a 3DFX version of a game, the framerate is very choppy, almost as if I'm playing on a S3 ViRGE.

The only games I've encountered issues with are Moto Racer 1 and 2, the GOG versions, where the framerate is low to the point of being almost unplayable, giving several memory related errors despite having no problems with my memory sticks. After cleaning the graphics card up, the average temperature varies between 55°C in idle and 65°C under load, which is not bad for a card like the 6800GT, that tends to run quite hot, from what I've read on the internet. Another game that gave me troubles was La Mulana, always the GOG version. It runs smooth at the beginning, but as soon as I get the first item of the game, it goes in slow motion, too slow to play it properly. The classic version instead doesn't recognize the 84 keys AT layout, so I can't use the directional keys of the numerical pad. Those dagnabbit ANSI keyboards ruin everything! 🙁

What's been giving me major headaches is the monitor instead, for two reasons. The red pin is slightly shorter than the other ones, making the connection quite lousy and often, red flickers and disappears, leaving a blueish tint on the screen. As a last resort, I have soaked the connector with isopropylic alcohol and then with a plier I've tried to pull the pin out. So far, the monitor isn't giving issues anymore since three days, and I hope I've fixed it for good.

The other issue is a very faint, almost unnoticeable shadowing to the right of text and pictures but only with some colours, such as black text on white background. But it is only noticeable with large and bold text, not regular one. I've tried to put a pair of ferrite cores in order to reduce the issue, but nothing changed. I guess it might be always a cable issue. In the long term I'll have to take the monitor to a friend to replace the cable, hoping it can improve the picture quality. I can live with the faint shadowing anyway since it's not very noticeable, at least until I have the opportunity to contact my friend to perform a little "surgery" on the monitor.

I find it amusing to see a DVI connector next such an old metal style vga cable 😀

Not sure if a agree with it still being productive, unless you mean useful for old gaming in which case it most definitely is.
But lubuntu installed on a maxed out P4 has limited usefulness on the internet.

But as a retro gaming PC, it's a very nice build.

Thanks! I'm actually using the PC as a daily driver since a week and it performs very well for its age. Internet surfing is good after tweaking Firefox, K-Meleon and Palemoon in order to consume as less CPU and RAM as possible. For word processing and spreadsheets I've installed Office 97 that's quite lightweight on specs nowadays, and for classic gaming and emulation, it's unbeatable.

I always had fun at squeezing old machines to the max and see if they can still be used as main computers today, so I can't blame you for not agreeing with me. 😀
But I'm having a lot of fun using this PC for daily operations. It does everything I do on my Core2 Duo laptop, which is basic computer usage anyway, so nothing particularly powerful and intensive. And I can watch Youtube videos through Minitube, converting videos to MPEG in real time, without straining the good old fellow too much.

In fact, I've written this post using this very Pentium 3. 😊
Hopefully soon enough I'll be able to snatch both the pin-modded Tualatin and the Velociraptor hard drive. It's going to be an interesting experience, for sure. From what I'm experiencing since I started to expand and tweak the machine, it still can be very useful for basic tasks, and it's amazing, especially when we think about the age of that architecture.

I'd be happy to provide my about:config settings and the list of plugins I use on Firefox and Pale moon for people who want to try them. They are optimized to run on 1Ghz CPUs upwards with 1,5GB of RAM.

So, why are you using an XT keyboard and such an ancient monitor? Seems like kind of a waste for a P3.

If I'd have to find a reason, I just don't know. But I find them very cool looking, a sort of weird and fun contradiction between old and "slightly" new; I mean, who's ever seen a Pentium 3 from 2000 coupled to a 1992 CRT monitor (unless being on a budget and upgrading to a new PC), an XT compatible keyboard and a very old serial mouse?

I guess I'm a sucker for old peripherals and old school looking, since I grew up seeing XTs, 286, 386 and 486 machines being taken to my family store for repairs, and that's how PCs looked like to me, when I was a kid. They had a minimalistic, almost industrial style I haven't found anymore since the mid 1990s. Maybe I just want to replicate that feeling, I don't know. But I know I'm enjoying it a lot.

On the other hand, the 84 keys keyboard saves a lot of space on the desk where I keep my computer, unlike the Chicony KB-5181 I had before, so that's a plus for me.

New updates about the computer. As promised, I finally have replaced the PSU, since this morning, the P&O I had in my computer started to act up: it rebooted by itself without giving any BSOD and then I noticed the voltages were much lower than expected.

So, today I started rummaging through the old PCs I have at the store, and I've retrieved three different PSUs. A 300W Bestec ATX-300-12Z taken out of a Compaq Presario Athlon 64 computer, a 450W Tecnoware from an Olidata with an AMD Sempron and a 550W Colorsit taken from another Athlon 64. All these three PCs work properly, despite we don't use them.

So, I took the P&O out and I tested the Bestec first. The PC booted up fine, it stood the load of all the devices I have connected and the graphics card performance is even better now, allowing me to score around 6600 3DMarks in 3DMark 2001SE (I'll have to repeat the test for a more detailed report), compared to the 4500/4800 3DMarks I had with the P&O.

Satisfied with the outcome of the first one, I then decided to try the other two. As soon as I plugged the Tecnoware in, and pushed the power button, nothing happened. The PC did not power up. I begun to disconnect everything and remove the RTC battery, but nothing happened. So, I switched to the Colorsit and no sign of life. Still not working.

I have put the Bestec once again, and guess what? Not turning on! I was desperate, I was afraid one of those PSUs fried my motherboard. So I did the same thing I've done with the Tecnoware; disconnecting everything and reconnect stuff one by one, without connecting the graphics card though. Thankfully, the PC turned on once again, only being greeted by an high pitched beep coming from the beeper of the graphics card, because I didn't plug the additional power connector (I left it disconnected on purpose). So, I reconnected everything to the new PSU and installed it into the case.

So far, so good. The computer works as it should with the new PSU, and I did not imagine that a 300W model would be adequate enough with my setup. I have fired up AIDA64 and ran a stress test on the CPU, graphics card, RAM and hard drives for an hour, and it showed no signs of strain, remaining rock solid and stable.

What I mostly hope is that nothing has damaged the motherboard, because I really can't figure out why the Tecnoware and Colorsit PSUs worked on their original computers while they haven't on mine. But at least, the Bestec I have now is way better than the old one I had, even with half the power. Thankfully, I have found a spare P3 motherboard that works, a QDI Advance 10T, so in the remote case my 6309 V2.0 gets borked, I have a replacement.

I later found out that the Tecnoware and Colorsit PSUs are just other brands of the maligned Deer Computer Corporation. A lesson learned.

EDIT: I later found out that there was something that shorted the motherboard, putting it into protection mode. I haven't found out what exactly caused the short, but I have disconnected everything and checked every part one by one, and the PC ran. I've checked the Molex connectors and done some cable management, and now the PC runs fine and slightly cooler, since there's more airflow into the case now. The Colorsit works, but it has the annoying coil whine issue. No signs of life for the Tecnoware instead. So I'm currently running it with the Bestec.

EDIT 2: I found out that not all the Tecnoware PSUs are made by Deer. So they just stick their own brand on several models made by different manufacturers. I have salvaged a 500W model from a working PC we received as a trade in, and it's working quite well in my Pentium 3. I'm keeping the Bestec as a spare PSU. Meanwhile, I hope in future I'll put my hands on a top brand PSU.

So, in the end I've done the great leap forward. I have bought the pin modded 1.4Ghz Tualatin from South Korea, alongside a Cooler Master Jet 7 heatsink.

Apparently, I will have to update the BIOS with a custom version provided by the seller in order to let it detect the microcode of the Tualatin by the 6309. I'm also curious to see how the Jet 7 heatsink will perform, both on the Coppermine and Tualatin.

It's just a matter of waiting now... 😎

Many months have passed, after all this time I had the duty to post the latest updates about my "retro daily driver", now renamed "Tualatinator".

So, where to start? First of all, I have replaced the motherboard. The MSI-6309 V2 is long gone (joking, it's sitting in a box as a spare motherboard), replaced by a QDI Advance 10T inherited from the computer of my aunt. Compared to the MSI, the QDI is miles better in terms of performance and quality: it has Rubycon capacitors and the motherboard uses a BIOS from Award Software, that allows me to tweak some more aspects of the board such as the RAM timings, the AGP fast writes and other nice little features. Unfortunately, the only drawback of the 10T is that it won't support hard drives larger than 137GB natively: in order to extend the support you must install a beta BIOS, v1.8, that adds the support to large hard drives, but unfortunately removes the Hardware Monitor feature, rendering me unable to check temperatures and voltages of my CPU and PSU. Maybe someone who knows how to mod BIOS images can add it back, but I'm a total inept about it, so it's definitely not something for me. 😢

You gotta do a compromise when it comes to RDDs, after all.

Compared to the MSI, the Advance 10T, being a native Tualatin motherboard, supports the CPU in its full speed, and the performance increment compared to the other one is quite noticeable. The score in 3DMark2001 SE doubled compared to the MSI, allowing me to reach 10806 3DMarks at 640x480 @32bpp (with my overclocked Inno3D 6800GT) compared to the 5000/6000 3DMarks I reached with the MSI. Another nice addition are the two 300GB Western Digital Velociraptor hard drives, one for the OS, hooked directly to the motherboard with a Delock SATA to IDE adapter, and a data one, connected to a non bootable VIA VT6412 SATA150 controller card. I soon plan to replace the card with a Promise TX2300 card, which is bootable and supports SATA3Gb/s. It would definitely make things even more snappy.

In order to maximize the speed of the system and squeeze as much performance as possible, I've installed a slimmed down version of Windows XP Pro SP3 called XP Ultra Lite, and starting from that I began to apply all the optimizations I previously adopted for XP Home. That, alongside disabling the OHCI controller of my USB 2.0 card, helped to improve speed significantly.

I'm very satisfied by the usability and speed of the computer, and I really didn't expect a Pentium 3 to be so usable and useful despite its age (it's almost 20!), plus there's still a lot of room for improvement, since I need to look for a faster graphics card, such as an ATI Radeon HD3850 or an X1950 Pro, buying CL2 PC133 sticks in order to tighten the RAM timings and a TX2300 controller, so I can use XP in AHCI mode.

But enough with words, here's a video showing the machine in action doing some basic home tasks. No gaming because I'm not really much of a gamer, despite I have my fair share of retro games I like to play on it. But I hope you will enjoy the video despite its "potato" quality and the background music added to cover up my sinusitis due to this horrible weather! 🤣

Here it is, the Tualatinator in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v9t8qPXmkU

And finally, I managed to get one of my most desired upgrades for my Pentium 3 system: an ATI Radeon HD3850! I have found it in a local ads site, for sale at 25 euros plus shipping. Compared to the prices of the card on Ebay, I was astounded, so I bought it in a heartbeat.

I haven't received it yet because it's been shipped today, I can show the pictures of the seller:

The card looks quite cruddy and definitely needs to be cleaned up, and most likely a new drop of thermal paste. The seller told me he used to glue an additional fan behind the card to give it extra cooling.

I'm quite curious to see how much I'll gain with this card compared to the 6800GT I have at the moment... But first, for the price I paid it, I mostly hope it works 🤣

Hey dude, you're not seriously using 640x480 on a 14" monitor as a "daily driver"? Even back in the day, I couldn't stand anything less than 800x600 in Windows. In one of my retro PCs I'm using a Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro card and it runs at 1920x1080 no problem.

Also that BTC keyboard is just horrible! Get yourself a Cherry G80-1000 or G80-3000, if you want a quality keyboard.

Useful can mean different things to different people depending on what their needs are. If your needs are very low it can be useful But for modern workloads a smartphone is more useful.

Modern workload is like watch a youtube video at 1080 without stutter, while firing up skype so you can video chat with your girl, and having like multiple other web browser tabs open that have facebook, twitter, and gmail, while typing a word document or working with a spreadsheet, all while running a virtual machine in the background that is doing something and have like 10 other programs running. I am not even including gaming since OP said they don't game but also having like steam open in the background. This is all at once. This is like a modern workload. Playing DVDs on a 14inch monitor could be a thing but nowerdays people want to play a bluray on a widescreen.

So I agree its still useful, I just don't thin such a pc is useful as a daily driver in 2018 doing normal things that normal people do.

I do use that monitor and keyboard on my computer, and I don't have any reason to change them. They work well and I have no problems at running Windows at 640x480 on a 14" monitor that has a very good dithering, smooths fonts out to not make them too sharp and has good colours and brightness despite its age.

I like the XT layout because it's more compact and leaves more free space in my desk. Plus I like it more over ANSI keyboards. I don't see why there's so much hatred towards my setup. I don't do videochats so I don't care about Skype, since I don't have it. I don't need Youtube at 1080p, 360p is fine to me. Anyway, to each their own.

The XT layout is lovely, it's just that particular keyboard model that I hate 😁 It feels mushy and weird. You really should try a good mechanical keyboard to know what I'm talking about.

I have a mechanical keyboard, the Chicony KB-5181. White Alps switches, very nice and clicky. It's just too friggin' wide!! I had the BTC stored since years and it was a shame to leave it in a box. Foam and foil is fine to me, I'm used to the mushy keys of my old Atari Mega ST2 so I'm familiar with it. It's not so bad when the foam is okay. 😁

So far it works well, but the best would be an 84 keys AT keyboard (best would be if it has a non separate numpad like XT ones) with alps switches, but they cost an arm and a leg...