VOGONS


First post, by candle_86

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Ok well my Nforce2 board was a no post, a local guy on CL a has Biostar M7VITPro KT400 motherboard, that would give me 3 ram slots, and AGP 8x, vs my current K7VTA3 V8.0 with aGP 4x and 2 ram slots. It's an entire lot though, I'd also end up with these other items, all are tested good.

MSI K7T Turbo2 motherboard w/an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ processor, heatsink & fan. Comes in its box with driver/software installation CD, manuals and rear I/O plate.
HP Asus Pavilion P4B266-LA DANUBE-ULAS 478 motherboard w/1.6Ghz Intel Pentium 4 processor, heatsink & fan installed.
Imperial GV 20030812 Socket 478 motherboard w/onboard Intel onboard graphics and an AGP video card slot.

do yall think its worth the 50 dollars, and is going to AGP 8x going to really help my 6800GS strech it's legs.

both 478 boards are limited to 400mhz FSB, and of course the MSI is a KT133A motherboard but perfect for 98SE I think

Reply 1 of 9, by candle_86

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and if I buy it, id use the MSI K7T for a dedicated Windows 98 box, as its from early 01, before XP shipped. What would be period correct for it, I have a case already, but enternals id like era correct for late 2000/early 2001

My ideas

Video (Geforce 2 Ultra/GTS/Pro, Geforce 3, Radeon DDR 64mb, Voodoo 5 5500)
Ram 2x128mb PC133?
CPU: Keep the XP 2200+ or replace with a Thunderbird
Sound?

Reply 2 of 9, by Skyscraper

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The price sounds fair if all boards are fully functional without bad caps. A boxed board is always going to cost a little more.

New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.

Reply 4 of 9, by obobskivich

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+1 with Skyscraper if they're all in good shape. One advantage to the Kx333 (and older) is they support universal AGP, so you can go with the Voodoo5 + AthlonXP. IIRC the KT400 is where that ended, and they went to 1.5V keying like the nForce and most Intel P4 boards. I think there's a few members around here with KT333 boards and 3dfx cards - might be worth skimming the retro PC thread or something for ideas. I have a KM266 board; it's basic, stable, and provides universal AGP. Performance in that board with an XP 2000+ is better than my 2GHz P4, which would be more than good enough for ~2001 (my P4 system was brand-new in late 2001, so it truly is "era accurate"). AthlonXP is more of a 2002+ thing, but honestly I'd cheat and go for the T-bred 2200 over the T-bird. I say this because you get SSE and other internal improvements (it has higher clock-for-clock performance), and the slower XPs tend to use less power/run cooler than the high-end T-birds. The Palomino may be a good compromise if you want something that was released in '01, but still has SSE and other improvements.

Graphics-wise, the GeForce 2, 3 or Voodoo5 would be a fine choice any which way. The Voodoo5 will be likely much more expensive than GeForce, so unless you either have personal motives for owning 3dfx hardware (e.g. nostalgia), or you need Glide support, I'd probably go GeForce. Other advantages for GeForce include the potential for DVI support (not all GF2/3 cards have DVI, but finding one with DVI isn't as hard/expensive as finding a Voodoo5 with DVI), TnL support (on GF2), and DX8 support (on GF3). Depending on what games you're looking to run, and what monitor you need to plug into, these considerations may or may not be a factor.

On the RAM, I'd just max it out to 512MB. It won't hurt anything, even if a lot of games don't really need it. It wasn't inaccurate in '01 either - just expensive. RAM is cheap today though, so why not? It can also be a benefit if you ever want to run 2k or XP on the box (with 512MB of RAM and the other specs you've mentioned, this thing would probably be setup pretty well for dual-booting 98SE and XP assuming you have enough disk space for both).

Sound-wise, either SB Live!, SB Audigy, or a non-Creative card (e.g. Envy24 based). I'd say go with whatever supports the games (e.g. do you want/need EAX, A3d, etc) or connectivity you need (for example my '03 machine "cheats" there and has a somewhat newer Razer soundcard because I needed optical digital out, and that's what I had already).

Reply 5 of 9, by candle_86

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well no need for dual booting, other systems are so far

Pentium 4 3.2, X800XT AiW, 2gb DDR400, Audigy Platnium, XP SP3
Athlon XP 2800+, 6800GS, 1gb DDR 333, Audigy Platnium, Windows 2000 SP4

So I'd just build a 98SE box, and might use a Pentium for a dedicated ME box 🤣.

in my spare parts box, that pertains to any of these.

2x256mb PC 2100
2x256mb PC 2700
2x128mb PC 133
SoundBlaster Live 5.1
Soundblaster Live 24bit (aka not a real soundblaster, not even hardware offloading)
Pentium 4 1.8 Northwood
Riva TnT2 m64
Stock AMD Barton Cooler
2xStock Intel Prescott 478 coolers.

Reply 6 of 9, by candle_86

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nah I called a local shop, they have a T-Bird 1200C and T-Bird 1333 which seems more era correct. I think ill go with the T-Bird 1200C and focus on a computer build of the year 2000.

Here is what I'm thinking

Athlon T-Bird 1200C
3x128mb PC133 for 384mb Total
Geforce 2 Ultra/GTS/Pro whichever I can honestly find
SoundBlaster Live 5.1 (already have it, will use it)
80gb IDE
Windows 98 SE or Windows ME havn't really decided
And I have the perfect case for it.

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Reply 7 of 9, by bjt

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Have a similar KT333/1200C build here: Athlon Thunderbird Win98 Build

KT333 gives you the option of DDR too, although I don't know that the Thunderbird gains too much from it.
I have a GF3 and Voodoo3 PCI in mine and switch between them using the BIOS AGP/PCI setting.

Reply 8 of 9, by swaaye

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KT333 is a favorite of mine because most of the boards support 3.3v AGP and that opens the doors to a zillion video cards, including Voodoo cards. KT400 does not support 3.3v AGP cards.

KT266A pretty much gets you the same end result as KT333 too. The async PC2700 support of KT333 is nearly worthless for performance.

Reply 9 of 9, by candle_86

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yea but i wont be using the KT333 for that build, ill be using the KT133A, the KT333 vs KT400 was for my current athlon XP desktop, though I'm getting an opty 144 on an nforce 3 250 later today so my 6800 wont be in my AXP for long 🤣