Hamby wrote:

So it popped into my head to (eventually) try building a vintage system to run Win7, and/or a get a modern system to run Win98 w […]
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So it popped into my head to (eventually) try building a vintage system to run Win7, and/or a get a modern system to run Win98 without emulation...

Would Win7 run on a stock Pentium MMX? What do folks think would be the minimum clock speed?

I can't imagine Win98 running on a quad-core i7...

But maybe it could run on an atom-based system? Or one of the intel-based SBC Rasberry Pi competitors? (that would be cool; home-built UMPC...)

Then there are the issues of getting Win98 to talk to a modern GPU, and Win7 talking to a vintage GPU... soundcards... network adapters...

Sounds like a difficult, time-consuming project... I'm looking forward to tackling it when I have time/money to spare.

Lots of clips on Youtube with Socket754 running Win7, and a lot of people here, have had Win98 running on Socket 478 and Socket 754.

I believe Win7 uses 686 instructions. I vaguely remember trying to get it to run on a P233MMX and not having any luck. It ran (well, crawled) on a P2, however.

But there's plenty of hardware out there that will run both quite well, provided that you give it 2GB of RAM for Win7, and apply the necessary tweaks to Win98 so that it works reliably with that amount of memory. Any S478 P4 board with a Radeon 9500-9800, GeForce FX, or GeForce 6 will work. Most S754/939 boards will work as well!

For Win98se the Pentium-3 motherboard works well.
You want to get a bare bones motherboard with no audio so you can add your own and have no conflicts.

As for Win7 probably a Core-2-Quad socket 775 motherboard.

Although WinXP will run on a 12-core, 24-thread Dual Xeon machine.
I recently had XP Pro running on an HP-z800 with Dual Xeons and 48gb ram.

Worked fine.

HP elite 6000 / 8000 class computer and older Z-class computer support WinXP thru Win-10. HP provides drivers on there website.

I have a Win98SE Build on a Core2 Duo E8600 setup. Pretty much the last Intel chipset to actually have drivers for Win98 although people have jimmied Win98 on much faster systems.

For Windows 7, absolutely no reason to use gimpy hardware other then to eventually want to gouge your eyes out with a rusty spoon.

Core i7 + Win98SE : LINK
Here's great thread about compatibility : LINK
Official newest platform for win98 is LGA 775.
However you must check if there are Win98 drivers available to board you want to use.
Check Realtek/Marvell/AnalogDevices for them and NOT only ASUS/Gigabyte/MSI websites.
Oldest with Win7 support was mentioned before.

I would like to add here that you need to have an idea of what you actually want to use this rig for.
Making this kind of stuff work usually isn't easy, and having to redo it because you selected a part that can't work or creates issues in some cases is real pain.
Choose parts wisely and have a clear idea of what it must do.

I'd never use 7 on anything older than Core 2 Duo... it'd crawl. I guess maybe Pentium D dual cores would be somewhat ok but...

I use 98 on i7 to 3770 and my friend use 98 on xeon skylake server mobo.
What work: only one core at nominal frequency, no turbos; memory - up to 3.5 gbytes; video - vbemp only; usb - 2.0 only; network - yes, here is some internet... disks subsystem - work very good, with dma even in ahci mode 😀 sure this is not vanilla 9x, but heavy parched, especially with non-free Rudolf R Loew patches.
What Not work: audio, except external sound cards; usb3+; any power management; any acceleration video; etc...
I also can run win 3.1 on i7, even with Internet access... 😁
More questions? 😀

MERCURY127 wrote:

I use 98 on i7 to 3770 and my friend use 98 on xeon skylake server mobo. What work: only one core at nominal frequency, no turb […]
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I use 98 on i7 to 3770 and my friend use 98 on xeon skylake server mobo.
What work: only one core at nominal frequency, no turbos; memory - up to 3.5 gbytes; video - vbemp only; usb - 2.0 only; network - yes, here is some internet... disks subsystem - work very good, with dma even in ahci mode 😀 sure this is not vanilla 9x, but heavy parched, especially with non-free Rudolf R Loew patches.
What Not work: audio, except external sound cards; usb3+; any power management; any acceleration video; etc...
I also can run win 3.1 on i7, even with Internet access... 😁
More questions? 😀

Win 3.1 on an i7!?

That would mean DOS 6.22 also, right?

Suddenly I'm having dreams of a DOS / WFW 3.11 machine on an i7.

Oldest Win7 Pro x32 machine for me was an IBM ThinkPad X20 (800MHz P3 (I think its a P3)) with 320MB memory.

Not intentionally mind you. I pulled the hard drive out of a dead machine and put it into the X20 and missed the Press F12 to PXE boot prompt so it fired up off the hard drive instead of the network (no optical drives, won't boot from USB so only option really is RIS). Amazed it even booted let alone allow let me to log in with a machine so far removed from what is considered min spec for this OS.

>>> Win 3.1 on an i7!?
yes.

>>> That would mean DOS 6.22 also, right?
no, me want not make fat16 part on my big sata hdd, so i just used existed fat32 part...

>>> Suddenly I'm having dreams of a DOS / WFW 3.11 machine on an i7.
there was even LESS problems, than with 9x...
NO normal svga drivers, NO 800x600 4bit mode in bios (here no any 16 color banked svga modes, only 256, Hi and True colors) = VGA mode only...
for network i used intel pro100 pci card. no 32bda, no sounds. no usb = ps2 kbd & mouse only.
but it work, i try WinCmd 16 bit, MS Word 6, IE5, Opera 3.62, Netscape...

>>> Amazed it even booted let alone allow let me to log in with a machine so far removed from what is considered min spec for this OS.
I try boot Win7 Memtest module on P3 via PXE. its work Ok, but i can not find way to look test results 🤣

If you do run Win7 on old hardware, it's worth looking at the 'ThinPC' released version of it.

Core i7 + DOS 6.22 :

Pentium III 4293MHz.
I WISH!

For one system that does both?

Assuming it is for games, so video and/or sound acceleration are mandatory.
Maybe a socket 478 setup with a Northwood P4 (although drivers work up to ICH7, so something like LGA775 with 975X could work), or a Athlon 64 on socket 754. Paired with either a geforce 6800 or Radeon 9800. (But your best bet are the Geforce 6 cards as they got actual driver support for both)
Something that has a wide range of speed available would be best.

For comfortable and/or reasonable use:
Try to keep Win 98 unter ~2 GHz (actually a Win 95 limitation, but doesn't hurt to be sure) also max 512 MiB RAM.
For Win 7 Anything dual core should work fine (Just don't gor for a P4 HT, that runs, but is not nice) Also 2 GiB minimum for comfortable use. In terms of graphics a Geforce 6200 or Radeon HD 2400 would be pretty much the weakest with actual drivers.

If it's more about getting it to run with some tinkering, some guys on winhistory got Vista running on a K5 running at 90 MHz, the same guys had Win 3.1 on a Core 2 Duo. (Oh, and Win 98 on a 386) There is even more, might want to check it out: https://www.winhistory.de/more/386/winq.htm (Warning: site is in german, but the technical stuff should be obvious and somehow I remember seeing an english translation somewhere)