4X Overclock wrote:

I'm pretty new to this whole Retro PC thing. But I've worked on machines since the early days of Socket A. Good old days, when you could just buy a pencil instead of a K-CPU. 🤣

Welcome. 😀

4X Overclock wrote:

The Win98 rig is the one that gives me the most headaches. Spend weeks searching the net for information, but most times I end up here.

As far as I understand, I can't use PCIe GPUs without chipset drivers. P965 is the last OC chipset that has unofficial drivers. So a Yorkfield Core 2 Extreme would be the maximum. Is this correct?

There may be ways to push it further, but there is no point. Even Yorkfield is way faster than any Win9x game needs. Win9x itself does not really use multi-core CPUs as far as I know. A game that can benefit from a Yorkfield C2Q definitely does not need Win9x.

A high-end P4 may make sense for Win9x in some scenarios, but beyond that - it's a lot of headache for very little gain.

Well, my 7800 GTX worked OK with Win98SE, and chipset drivers aren't be all and end all for compatibility. You just need to have important ones (like USB/SATA/IDE/LAN - which can be bypassed if it comes to it by getting a PCI or PCI-e add-on cards).

Not used/needed stuff you simply disable in Device Manager, and that's that.

I HIGHLY recommend doing something on LGA 775 BEFORE going newer for 98SE.

dr_st wrote:

There may be ways to push it further, but there is no point. Even Yorkfield is way faster than any Win9x game needs.

When you press "End Turn" in a 4X game (like Civilization), it's like starting Prime95. There is no overkill for Prime95, because calculations get longer and longer. A slow machine would also do the job, but it would take forever. It's the same for 4X. You want as much processing power as possible.

Wait times could exceed an hour on mid 90s machines. Gameplay was much more fluid with a late Win98 system (Pentium 3, Athlon), but if you got further into the endgame, the experience was about the same. You need more than meager 1-2GHz for a smooth experience in this kind of games.

dr_st wrote:

Win9x itself does not really use multi-core CPUs as far as I know. A game that can benefit from a Yorkfield C2Q definitely does not need Win9x.

Yes, you can only use one core in Win98SE.
But I wasn't talking about Core 2 Quad. I was talking about Core 2 Extreme, because of the open multi. Disable 3 cores and overclock the shit out of it. 😊 There is also one C2E Dualcore. But it's a Conroe (65mm) so it's rather shitty compared to QX9650 and QX9770.

agent_x007 wrote:

Well, my 7800 GTX worked OK with Win98SE, and chipset drivers aren't be all and end all for compatibility. You just need to have important ones (like USB/SATA/IDE/LAN - which can be bypassed if it comes to it by getting a PCI or PCI-e add-on cards).

Oh btw, I'm also confused about GPUs.
Some say, the 8000 series works with inofficial drivers. Others say the 7000 series is the best that still works.
I've also read all the GPUs after the 5000s series have some issues with older games? Which kind of games are affected by this? I also want a pure DOS build in the future. Because of ISA sound. My Win98 machine will be for Win9x games only.

4X Overclock wrote:

When you press "End Turn" in a 4X game (like Civilization), it's like starting Prime95. There is no overkill for Prime95, because calculations get longer and longer. A slow machine would also do the job, but it would take forever. It's the same for 4X. You want as much processing power as possible.

Wait times could exceed an hour on mid 90s machines. Gameplay was much more fluid with a late Win98 system (Pentium 3, Athlon), but if you got further into the endgame, the experience was about the same. You need more than meager 1-2GHz for a smooth experience in this kind of games.

Well, I never played Civilization, so I don't know. I have played Heroes of M&M though, on systems as week as a K6-II, and found the wait times manageable. Wait times exceeding an hour? Would anyone really play a game under these conditions? But, to each his own.

4X Overclock wrote:

But I wasn't talking about Core 2 Quad. I was talking about Core 2 Extreme, because of the open multi. Disable 3 cores and overclock the shit out of it. 😊

Is that even possible on a Core 2? In the sense that if you disable cores (how?) you can get a better overclock?

In any case - good luck with your endeavour. Even though I will remain unconvinced about the practical benefits, such benefits may exist for you, and in any case they are by no means a requirement to have a project discussion going on VOGONS. 🤣

If OCing a single core as far as possible is the goal maybe other CPUs are a better option - No personal experience here, but I remember seeing GHz records being set with some unexpected Celeron D CPUs. Certainly there were more unexpected CPUs at the top of the GHz charts than C2E or C2Q. Someone did 8.5GHz with a Celeron D 352 according to CPU-Z - That's probably with LN2, but maybe 5+GHz is achievable with something more usable.

Do a search for Pentium D here:

Doom 3 timedemo shootout with period correct hardware.

You will notice that Core 2 Duo/Quads are handily beating a overclocked Pentium D even with much slower graphics cards. That Netburst architecture just can't compete with Core processors.

dr_st wrote:

Well, I never played Civilization, so I don't know. I have played Heroes of M&M though, on systems as week as a K6-II, and found the wait times manageable.

Heroes of Might & Magic works different.
100 units get coupled to one unit with a x100 multiplicator. Plus you're very limited in the amount of units you can have, because they have to be accompanied by a hero.
Try Civilization II or Master of Orion II on such an old machine and put the settings on max.

There are open source clones, which run on modern machines. FreeCiv is almost a one by one clone of Civ2. Managed to get it to 15 minutes on a huge map with my Haswell. Then the engine crashed, because too much units. 🤣

dr_st wrote:

Wait times exceeding an hour? Would anyone really play a game under these conditions?

I tried, but stopped after a few weeks. Some people lasted longer.

dr_st wrote:

Is that even possible on a Core 2? In the sense that if you disable cores (how?) you can get a better overclock?

A good question. That feature might have arrived later. I should investigate this.
If you disable cores, you can achieve better OC results. It's not like you can double the clock speed. But it helps to push it a few hundret MHz further. If you can't use them anyway, why not take a 10% boost or so?

dr_st wrote:

Even though I will remain unconvinced about the practical benefits, such benefits may exist for you, and in any case they are by no means a requirement to have a project discussion going on VOGONS. 🤣

Yeah, for most people that much GHz would be overkill. For me it isn't.
4X pretty much is like Prime95, except it can run only on one core. You wouldn't go hunting for new prime numbers with an old Athlon. These games grab everything they can and you can't really use the machine for anything else.

dr.ido wrote:

Certainly there were more unexpected CPUs at the top of the GHz charts than C2E or C2Q. Someone did 8.5GHz with a Celeron D 352 according to CPU-Z - That's probably with LN2, but maybe 5+GHz is achievable with something more usable.

Well, if you underclock a modern CPU to 1ghz and compare it to a 1ghz Athlon in benchmarks, it will beat the shit out of the Athlon.
Gigahertz isn't everything. I need max single core processing power.

4X Overclock wrote:

Oh btw, I'm also confused about GPUs.
Some say, the 8000 series works with inofficial drivers. Others say the 7000 series is the best that still works.
I've also read all the GPUs after the 5000s series have some issues with older games? Which kind of games are affected by this?

The 6000 series is the last to officially support Win98 so anything else isn't guaranteed
Win98 also struggles with PCI-E and cards with more the 256MB of memory, things can get tricky here.

As it sounds like you need raw CPU power more then Graphics, if it was me, I'd not try and push to hard in this area, and get something like a 6600 GT.

Catch is this is the first generation that breaks comparability with older games, the issue is they dropped palettized texture support, you just need to check if any games in your list need this