There are some game and hardware compatibilty issues with Win2k but is more stable OS than Win98 for business purposes. Not all older win9x games will work under 2k but do under XP..

Ultimate by what metric, exactly? Win 2000 is an OS, lots of stuff has drivers for win 2000, you can build a lot of computers faster than p3.

Personally, I don't like "ultimate OS builds". They are way too subjective if they are anything other than ultimate for some kind of function, imo. Just pick a date and go with that. "Ultimate 2002" build you can build off of (or whatever).

Oh another ultimate build. Haven't you learnt anything from the last couple?

I can guide a little bit I came up with this when I did some playing with hardware.
Dual Pentium III tuned for performance of games and playing videos. Not expensive but not cheap best to go for newest parts possible.
Pentium dual cpu system best with Pentium III say 850mhz to 1 ghz coppermine they are still cheaper and popular tualatins are harder and typically chew more power.
64mb to 256mb AGP 2X - 4X GPU Nvidia over Ati but both pretty good
512mb to 2gb pc133 memory the single chip side ones of the day were quite more faster than double chip sided but not so with more modern DDR speeds they can access both sides at same time so single sided ones of newer generations steer away from.
A RAID 0 mode disk controller with say 2 to 4 disks 7200 rpm can be either SATA or PATA bios CONFIG not to boot on just to store games and multimedia. Pentium 3 built in ports are slowish but good for windows 2000 system boot and cacheing. (PATA disks only)
A system boot hard disk and a secondary disk to handle swapping, temporary files and if big enough handle backups of the raid partition.
The system boot disk NTFS with 16k clusters, secondary 32k clusters, RAID 64k clusters. Nice and tuned.
You can try swapping the ram sticks with slower and fast ones sometimes that increases performance. (speed frequency interference EMI)
SMP isn't really popular in windows 2000 started to pick up in xp generations thus a core 2 quad 775 cpu on xp would impress with windows 2000 games.
Yes I have done this but if its ultimate its probably have a period of wow of between 2001 and 2003. Add SATA probably prior to XP realease where pentium 4's started to make things more interesting than making pentium 3 users snug.
Play original WoW or Final Fantasy XII PC edition etc but is it for windows 2000 or just the games for windows? if its for just the games an XP era PC can give Quad core powers faster SATA, a windows managed 10 port SATA RAID array on secondary PCIE etc

Win2000 and gaming don't mix as well as with WinXP or Windows 9X, in my experience.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2021-07-11, 07:29:

Win2000 and gaming don't mix as well as with WinXP or Windows 9X, in my experience.

I agree especially where single core cpu is pentium 4 as 9x only uses 1 core perfect for 9x 90's to early 2000's xp / y2k compatible games.

Yes, I want Win-2000 build. I already have allot of Win-XP computers.
I think I want a Pentium-3 . ( 1ghz ) build. ( Maybe Dual CPU )
Maybe 256mb ram.
SCSI Hard drive ( No Raid ) just 2 fast SCSI drives
Sound card ?
Video card ?

I already have some cases like these.
One is an HP 1ghz Pentium-3 computer.

But I think I want to build my one computer.
I say "Ultimate" because I want to know what are the best components to put on a Pentium-3 , Win-2000 computer for gaming ?
I am not sure about Video card or Sound card ?

Shopping list:

Tyan Thunder 2500 motherboard
2x Powerleap PL-iP3/T adapters
2x Pentium 3 1400S
8GB registered SDRAM
3dfx Voodoo5-6000 AGP
64b/66MHz PCI FC-AL single-port adapter
Array of 15k rpm FC-AL HDDs
And an AdLib Gold with reverb module in the ISA slot.

Would also recommend a Sony FW900 monitor and an IBM beam spring keyboard.

dionb wrote on 2021-07-11, 12:39:

Shopping list: […]
Show full quote

Shopping list:

Tyan Thunder 2500 motherboard
2x Powerleap PL-iP3/T adapters
2x Pentium 3 1400S
8GB registered SDRAM
3dfx Voodoo5-6000 AGP
64b/66MHz PCI FC-AL single-port adapter
Array of 15k rpm FC-AL HDDs
And an AdLib Gold with reverb module in the ISA slot.

Would also recommend a Sony FW900 monitor and an IBM beam spring keyboard.

I think I want more common components that are actually obtainable today.

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2021-07-11, 13:09:

[...]

I think I want more common components that are actually obtainable today.

Then you don't want the ultimate, just the affordable. Bit of an anticlimax with a topic title like this.

My dream around 2001 or so was to upgrade my Abit BF6 to a PIII-s 1.4 with the Powerleap adapter, with 768MB RAM overclocked to 133MHz with good quality CL2 memory, a Voodoo5-5500 and AWE64G with ram expansion. Then l found out about those Serverworks dual tualatin boards and really wanted the hell out of one of those. Mind you all of this stuff was pretty damn expensive, especially compared to Athlon setups, so I never bothered.
You can of course run Windows 2000 on faster hardware, but after XP came out most people didn't bother (assuming they even knew 2000 existed).