First, total system power draw, efficiency.

Idling on the desktop, XP, 7 and Linux all draw about 40 W. The reading for Windows 98 in its virtual machine I looked at but didn't write down, so we can say 50 W.

Thief 2 (original) pulled just over 40 W in Windows 7 and about 70 W in Windows XP, vsynced at 60. Quake 3 Arena did 55 W in 7 and 65 W in XP. GLQuake in Windows 98 (G550) showed 65 W.

With relatively newer games, Assetto Corsa ate about 100 W in Windows 7 and Spintires in Linux through Proton with amdgpu about 90 W. This is with hyperthreading disabled.

Overall, we can predict the system will do 1995~2015 gaming with a 40-100 W total draw. Probably won't exceed 150 W. For best efficiency you'd favor Windows 7 over XP for older games, maybe install the 32-bit version as well.

Great compilation! Win98 can be installed natively on it, it is not necessary to put it in an emulator.

I don't know that there's much to be gained from running it natively. CPU and GPU performance should be relatively close to native with KVM and passthrough, plus among other things you get legacy sound emulation and in theory the ability to emulate a slower CPU for the few speed sensitive Windows 9x games. The only downside to emulation I can see is if the G550 loses any performance vs. native, since it's not a fast card to begin with. With passthrough in 98 it's close to native in XP, but I don't know what its performance would be in 98 natively.

There's also an experimental VFIO fork of 86Box that lets you pass through PCIe and PCI devices. It only partially supports the G550 at the moment, but maybe in the future this would be an extra way to go for compatibility. Might also allow for emulation of faster CPUs on this hardware since it doesn't have to emulate the video then.

vvbee wrote on 2025-09-06, 15:23:

I don't know that there's much to be gained from running it natively. CPU and GPU performance should be relatively close to native with KVM and passthrough, plus among other things you get legacy sound emulation and in theory the ability to emulate a slower CPU for the few speed sensitive Windows 9x games. The only downside to emulation I can see is if the G550 loses any performance vs. native, since it's not a fast card to begin with. With passthrough in 98 it's close to native in XP, but I don't know what its performance would be in 98 natively.

There's also an experimental VFIO fork of 86Box that lets you pass through PCIe and PCI devices. It only partially supports the G550 at the moment, but maybe in the future this would be an extra way to go for compatibility. Might also allow for emulation of faster CPUs on this hardware since it doesn't have to emulate the video then.

It also depends on how you look at it, or what your goal is.
For example, the following is impossible to do in an emulator:

I don't immediately see it being impossible, run KVM on the Ryzen and pass through a 7900 GTX. But I found the Nvidia G71 to not have the greatest backwards compatibility in DX. The G550 smokes it, runs much slower but is more period correct if you will.

Second, compatibility.

I briefly tested 50 Windows games from 1995-2015 (median 1999). All were playable except F1 Racing Simulation, which is sensitive to CPU speed.

Four games needed to be run in software mode to work well: Delta Force 2, Warhammer: Dark Omen, Castrol Honda Superbike World Champions, and Agile Warrior F-111X. Depth glitches in Delta Force 2 in Direct3D mode are common on many systems, in this case the G550 rendered it correctly but only at 15 FPS. Agile Warrior F-111X would freeze after one frame of gameplay on the G550, but I didn't immediately see any glitches.

To support 256-color video modes on the G550 bus mastering has to be disabled. This is relevant to run Windows 98 games in true 256-color software mode. Otherwise bus mastering has to be on for 3D support.

With 98% of the 50 games being playable we can say the system supports DirectX 1-11 and generally will run anything in this range. Games that are speed sensitive will give issues, and the handful of retained mode D3D games may all need to be run in software mode, which the CPU is easily fast enough for.

The HD 7750 also supports Vulkan, useful for DX8+ in Wine and Proton.

Third, thermals.

The case has one 140 mm fan at the front and one 120 mm at the back, connected with a Y splitter to the motherboard's CPU fan header. From the BIOS I've set fan management of this header to silent, or whatever the lowest option was. The case has negative pressure as I prefer, I've covered the top vent so most of the passive intake is through the side panel for the benefit of the two GPUs behind it. The CPU cooler has no fan so the third and last fan in the system is the HD 7750's. I have a custom curve for it in Afterburner, 10% below 50 C and 30-40% at 60 C, something like that.

Idling on the desktop with an ambient of 24 C the GPU is at 40 C and the CPU at 34 C, fans barely audible. Ten minutes of Prime95 (hyperthreading off) has the CPU at 60 C and the VRM at 70 C, fans audible but not loud. Exiting Prime95 brings the CPU to 40 C within a second or two and to 34 C at some point in the next minute or two, the fans immediately go quiet.

Ten minutes of Quake 3 with 8xSSAA has the GPU at 51 C, fans barely audible. Ten minutes of Project CARS at medium settings has the GPU at 64 C, the CPU at 50 C and the VRM at 64 C.

Since it's a high-efficiency low-power system you expect it to have good thermals and low noise levels, and it does.

Fourth, performance in 14 Windows games from 1995-2015.

• 1995, Destruction Derby. Win98. Using the ViRGE version with my S3d-to-software wrapper. Runs without issues at the game's 23 FPS cap using the better-quality rasterizer.
• 1996, Monster Truck Madness. Win98. Max settings. Average 100 FPS in chase view, 35 FPS in cockpit. No visual glitches.
• 1997, Redline Racer. Win98. Max settings. Average 100 FPS. No visual glitches.
• 1998, Thief. WinXP. Max settings, 1024 x 768, 8xSSAA. Average 230 FPS. No visual glitches.
• 1999, Quake 3. WinXP. Max settings, 1600 x 1200, 8xSSAA. Average 130 FPS. No visual glitches.
• 2000, Need for Speed 5. WinXP. Max settings, 1024 x 768, 8xSSAA. Average 65 FPS. Some Z fighting in the background.
• 2001, Operation Flashpoint. WinXP. Max settings, 1024 x 768, 8xSSAA. Average 80 FPS. No visual glitches apart from a pixel-thin line at the left edge of the screen.
• 2002, Gothic 2. WinXP. Max settings, 1024 x 768, 8xSSAA. Average 90 FPS. No visual glitches. Using my DDRAW.DLL passthrough wrapper to pre-allocate 200 MB of VRAM to fix a Radeon driver bug in WinXP that results in the game running at 20 FPS. This was fixed in Windows 7.
• 2003, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. WinXP. Max settings, 1024 x 768, 8-sample AA. Average 70 FPS. No visual glitches. Had to set "Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=0" in the INI or camera movement would stutter. This is a GOG release, originals may not have that setting in the first place.
• 2004, Far Cry. WinXP. Max settings, 1920 x 1080. Average 140 FPS. No visual glitches.
• 2008, Race Driver: GRID. WinXP. Max settings, medium shadows, level 1 AA, 1920 x 1080. Average 60 FPS. No visual glitches besides a small texture hiccup on the steering wheel in cockpit view.
• 2010, Just Cause 2. Win7. High settings without SSAO, 1920 x 1080. Average 65 FPS. No visual glitches.
• 2014, Assetto Corsa. Win7. High/medium settings without post-processing, 1920 x 1080, 2xAA. Average 75 FPS in bumper view, 48 FPS in cockpit. No visual glitches.
• 2015, DiRT Rally. Win7. High/medium settings, 1920 x 1080. Average 65 FPS in bumper view, 55 FPS in cockpit. No visual glitches.

When it's said there were no visual glitches it means I saw none during brief gameplay.

Overall the system supports two decades of gaming with acceptable FPS and clean rendering. The XP era runs comfortably, the 9x era is supported well enough, and the Windows 7 era is accessible.

Fifth, some highlights in practice.

High compatibility in Windows 98 under Direct3D. Clean HUD in Colin McRae Rally. Proper depth sorting in Delta Force 2. Fog and 16-bit dithering in Thief 2. Texture transparency in Rainbow Six.

Broad compatibility in Windows XP. F1 2000 for example is a problem on many systems, but here we can skip the third-party workarounds and wiki browsing.

Playability from Windows 98 to Windows 7. DiRT Rally from 2015 is enjoyable at 1080p.

The CPU is comfortable with retro rendering in both Windows 98 and NT environments.

Sixth, vs. a period build, K6-2+/450 with a Voodoo Banshee.

FPS recorded in Windows 98 at a certain point in gameplay, timedemo average for GLQuake:

1                    Period	This
2GLQuake	            76	    112
3Thief	            35	    98
4Thief 2	            40	    87
5Homeworld	        39	    80
6TOCA 2	            35	    29
7F-22 Lightning 3	36	    24

For 2-3 times the cost the period build offers only half the performance. The tests were run in 640 x 480, the G550 has the edge in fill rate so even in the two games where it was slower it would likely catch up at higher resolutions. The HD 7750 in Windows XP will of course run any compatible game from this era at about 1000 FPS.

Beyond nostalgia period builds like that have no clear benefit over this one for Windows 98 gaming. In theory older builds are more compatible with games of their era but in this case this build is already competitive in that space. At the same time Windows 98 in this build has a relative period-correct level of performance vs. running the games on much faster hardware.

Seventh, vs. a period build, Pentium 4 2.4 with a GeForce 4 Ti 4800. The period build is using Windows 2000 since that's what I had on hand for this motherboard. Driver 44.03.

Usually 1024 x 768 with 32-bit colors, max settings. About half are demo versions. Red means the game didn't run or had too many issues, yellow means the game ran but slower than on the other system.

The period system, whose graphics card alone is the cost of this entire system, was worse in almost everything. Motocross Madness is glitched on the HD 7750 and runs slow on the G550, so the period system got a win there. Unlike the GeForce the 7750 was able to run Delta Force 2 but with the usual depth issues, the G550 runs it ok but sluggishly. If you don't mind third-party patches then the 7750 may win out in that game.

You could argue the period build would run better in Windows 98, but still slower and probably not more compatibly in these games.

Great job, congrats! Do you know if it's possible to passthrough a sound blaster into a windows 98/xp vm? Would something like that work without any hiccups?

Best regards

Only way to know is to try on that specific hardware.

Replaced the HD 7750 with a HD 7770, the goal being to retain the high backwards compatibility while pushing the range in DX10/11 and still keeping power draw down.

• Race Driver GRID: 60 → 90 FPS
• Assetto Corsa: 48 → 77 FPS (SSAA)
• DiRT Rally: 55 → 85 FPS

Downclocking to 1000/1000 MHz and undervolting to 1150 mV, system power draw in Assetto Corsa compared to the 7750 went up by ~10%, acceptable. Performance remained in the ~60 FPS range with SSAA and ~90 with MSAA.

Didn't bother testing many old games for this occasion, in theory the two models have identical backwards compatibility. F1 2000 ran on the 7770 and that's enough to convince me for now.

Prices are more or less even so the build remains cheap.

In fact I've gone and retitled the build an ultimate DX1-11 template, since that's what it is.