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retro PC help

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First post, by God Of Gaming

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Hello, I'm new here 😀

Windows XP era games seem to run just fine on Windows 7. There's no hardware acceleration for EAX, but Creative ALchemy sounds the same I think, I don't notice any difference. DOS games I think work fine in DOSBox too. Windows 95 and 98 era games though, from my experience so far, I think will require a retro Win98 PC for the best possible experience, which is why I registered to ask here. I hope I'm not doing this in the wrong section of the forum.

I already did some research, but there's many things I'm not sure about. Here's what I've thought of so far:
motherboard Abit NF7 (Socket A/462)
processor AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (1833MHz)
memmory 2x256MB DDR400 Geil or SuperTalent or Kingston HyperX
graphics 3dfx Voodoo3 2000
sound Diamond MX300 for A3D and maybe Creative SB Live for EAX
WD Caviar Blue 500GB IDE/PATA formatted to four 125GB partitions
some modern case with side panel window and modern 80+ efficiency PSU
some sort of CD and Floppy drives
some sort of CRT monitor (never had one, so I don't know anything at all about models)

Not sure if for OS Win 98SE or Win ME would be better, but basically I want to enjoy Win 95 / 98 era games, maybe some DOS games too if there are any that work better on such a config than in DOSBox. I'm not very knowledgable about such old components, I picked those up after digging in google for info about what would be good for win98. My first PC was a late WinXP era PC so I'm in foreign waters here. Any tips and advices?

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 1 of 67, by leileilol

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Depends if you're using AGP or not. The motherboard sounds like it could be AGP 4x/8x, so the Voodoo3 might be off the table unless you're willing to find a PCI one and upgrade its cooling. (V3 AGP only supports AGP 1X/2X, any more and it'll fry )

Also no ISA slots, so working sound for DOS games will be a varying limiting experience, even with a SBLive

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Reply 2 of 67, by obobskivich

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leileilol wrote:

Depends if you're using AGP or not. The motherboard sounds like it could be AGP 4x/8x, so the Voodoo3 might be off the table unless you're willing to find a PCI one and upgrade its cooling. (V3 AGP only supports AGP 1X/2X, any more and it'll fry )

The motherboard *is* AGP 4x/8x - it's keyed for 1.5V and based on nForce 2 Ultra 400. So it's a total no-go for an AGP Voodoo3 (or any 3dfx card). I'd also generally think a Voodoo3+ and an XP 2500+ is kind of a mismatched proposition - the CPU is significantly newer/faster than the V3.

To God of Gaming: specifically what games do you need to support? Do you need GLide support? If not, I'd just dump 3dfx from consideration and go with a GeForce 3/4/FX and stick with the rest of the parts you've chosen. I wouldn't worry at all about brand-name on the RAM unless you're intending to overclock, and if that's the case only GeIL of the three you've chosen is "significant" for DDR400. OCZ, G.Skill, and unbranded/OEM DIMMs based on TCCD or similar would be the ideal. GeIL had some CL1.5 stuff that crops up on ebay from time to time, but expect to pay big money for it. Personally I'd just look for a single 512MB DIMM of ValueRAM or something that works (and why not dual channel? because it does nothing for the K7 platform performance-wise, so there's no point in bothering with it).

AthlonXP with an NV2x/3x would be very competent for "later" games in Windows 98, especially if you need pixel shader support. However if you want more DOS/95-era stuff, and GLide support, I'd probably scrap the entire K7 build and go with a Slot 1 or Socket 7 machine. That'll get you ISA, AGP 3.3V support for a Voodoo3, and still a relatively fast CPU (like a PMMX, P2/3, or K6). Some of the Dell machines from that era support a keyboard hotkey combo that drops the CPU clock for legacy compatibility - I don't know the extent of which models offer this, but it may be worth looking into if that's something you could make use of.

Finally - Abit was probably one of the worst offenders for bad caps on boards (they were sued multiple times over it before going out of business), and the NF7 comes right out of the cap plague era. Be careful when evaluating such a board for purchase, unless you're planning to completely re-cap it.

Reply 3 of 67, by ODwilly

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I would also like to add that if you buy an Abit board from that era even if the caps look good, the chances are that they will go bad soon or are already bad and you just can not tell.

Main pc: Asus ROG 17. R9 5900HX, RTX 3070m, 16gb ddr4 3200, 1tb NVME.
Retro PC: Soyo P4S Dragon, 3gb ddr 266, 120gb Maxtor, Geforce Fx 5950 Ultra, SB Live! 5.1

Reply 4 of 67, by God Of Gaming

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Now that I look at it the Voodoo3 really is AGP, I didn't pay attention and thought it was PCI... There's 2 of these for sale nearby, that's why I thought I could pick this, maybe I should wait for a Voodoo2 which I see is PCI? Is a Voodoo2 strong enough for all Glide games? And yes, I do want it for Glide, and I might look for another graphics card for games that don't support Glide. That's why I looked for a motherboard like this, with an AGP slot and as many PCI slots as I could find, so that I could just stick many expansion cards for different games and just unplug the cables behind the case when I'm done. As for which games, well, let's just say ALL DOS/Win95/Win98 era games, at least those that can give a more satisfying experience on actual hardware of the time instead of trying to play them on my modern i7 machine. I've already seen some of those, and I'm sure there's many more, and Im sure that I'd want to play them too. For example, I see Half-Life supports A3D and EAX, and A3D is the superior sound api, but the only way to experience is with an aureal3d sound card, no way to emulate it under win7 like alchemy does for EAX. Or, for example, there's Colin McRae Rally 1 and win95 version of The Need For Speed SE, which were a pain in the ass to get to work under Windows XP and even then they were crashing all the time, but under Win7 I just gave up. I could play the need for speed se with dosbox, but it was not a satisfying experience either, with broken car videos and slowdowns in some areas of the track, also the CD stops spinning sometimes and the game laggs until it spins up again... Then there's the Glide games, I could get some to run with nGlide wrapper, but it didn't work for all that I tried.

What motheboard would you recommend? Some particular models to look for? In one other forum they recommended me to look for a ABIT KT7A or KT7A-RAID because it has ISA slot, and also add a Rendition v2200 graphics card to the build.

Gonna add ram sticks with heatshields just for the looks, Im gonna put this build in some sort of case with a side window. They're cheap anyways, that pair of Geils is just 4 euros.

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 5 of 67, by tayyare

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As far as I can see from the posts in the forum, "Windows 95/98 retro PC" is a very popular subject, and there are many topics covering that, so if you do some digging here in this forum, you will find many valuable suggestions.

If you ask me, here are the major components that I would suggest (and happily use in real life). Please note that I'm considering your requirement is playing almost pure 95/98 games (i.e. early/non XP) with occasional late DOS (1995-1996) games:

Mainboard: Anything PIII. People here adores Asus P3B-F boards (rightfully, considering their rock solid stability) but I'm quite happy also with Gigabyte and Via Apollo chipsets (socket 370, 133 FSB and AGP 4x). PIII boards are good for having ISA slots, so you will be able to use some ISA sound cards for hassle-free DOS sound support. If you only consider pure W9x, then you can go even higher (P4, K8, etc. - boards with no ISA slots) since I always consider a bit of an overkill is good (because ability to max out the resolution and detail is always good 🤣).

CPU: Of course depends on your MB choice, but my personal preference is almost always 133 FSB PIII 1000 coppermine. In my opinion anything above 450MHz and 100MHz FSB is ok as an enough overkill for w9x only games. People also look after (mostly modded) 1.4GHz tualetins but I'm not one of them.

Graphics: First of all, PCI is for 486/early Pentium machines, for PII and up you should definitely go for an AGP card. My suggestion would be anything Geforce2 (Ultra?)/ Geforce4 (Ti4xxx but even MX would be ok) and in between the two. The PIII boards I use are almost always AGP 4X boards, so I have no problems regarding card/MB compatibility with the cards mentioned above. Most people here does not prefer ATI cards for that era, but I have no experience with them to speak about. NVidia was and is my only choice from the very beginning, I don't know why. 🤣 By the way, you could always add a couple of Voodoo2's in SLI mode if you also want to taste the good old days of Glide. It is definitely a matter of taste, and depends on which games you want to play.

Sound: I'm ok with mediocre sound, so my tastes are not so sophisticated when it comes to this subject. People here are sometimes go far when it comes to sound and MIDI, with all the rare and pricey hardware. I'm not one of them, so my suggestion would be a SB Live (too many versions of this card are around, so you need to do some research first) as a pure w9x card, and SB AWE64 for DOS compatibility, if required (providing that you choose a MB with ISA slots). You can even put two of them together.

Memory: 128MB is more than ok, 256MB is a nice overkill, 512MB is more than overkill and anything above is actually insane (providing that this will not be a multiboot machine with an XP partition). Besides, anything above 512 also requires some hooplas to make it boot with w9x. My suggestion is 256 or 512.

HDD:Anything goes.. IDE/PATA, SCSI, SATA (with IDE/SATA adapters) and even SSD. Size is just a matter of your needs (my first w95 machine in the past had a 1.2GB HDD) but remember that 128GB (which is also an overkill - but a nice one) is the maximum you can safely use with W98SE without any hooplas. And SCSI of course mostly requires a controller card (Adaptec 294x would be my suggestion). I genrally use a 60 GBish IDE for W95 and MS-DOS paritions, 120GB IDE for W98 partition, and a 70-140 GB SCSI for ghost images, backups and as a software library.

Floppy, CD/DVD, NIC: Anything goes. For NIC, my suggestion would be 3com 3c905 card, but there are many others (Realtek 8139, Intel, etc.).

GA-6VTXE PIII 1.4+512MB
Geforce4 Ti 4200 64MB
Diamond Monster 3D 12MB SLI
SB AWE64 PNP+32MB
120GB IDE Samsung/80GB IDE Seagate/146GB SCSI Compaq/73GB SCSI IBM
Adaptec AHA29160
3com 3C905B-TX
Gotek+CF Reader
MSDOS 6.22+Win 3.11/95 OSR2.1/98SE/ME/2000

Reply 6 of 67, by obobskivich

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ODwilly wrote:

I would also like to add that if you buy an Abit board from that era even if the caps look good, the chances are that they will go bad soon or are already bad and you just can not tell.

+1; good call.

God Of Gaming wrote:

Now that I look at it the Voodoo3 really is AGP, I didn't pay attention and thought it was PCI... There's 2 of these for sale nearby, that's why I thought I could pick this, maybe I should wait for a Voodoo2 which I see is PCI? Is a Voodoo2 strong enough for all Glide games?

Voodoo2 is slower than Voodoo3 (which may be a problem for later Glide games), nor is it a complete graphics card as you might expect. It's a 3D accelerator. It requires a separate 2D card (can be 2D/3D) to provide an image when it isn't running in 3D. It will also likely run fairly hot with an AthlonXP at the helm, which would be something to keep in mind. On the upside, you could add one (or two; in SLI) alongside whatever AGP card you like (like a GeForce 4) for Glide support. Assuming of course that the games you want to run in Glide are compatible and that you're okay with the performance limitations of the Voodoo2.

There actually are PCI-based Voodoo3 cards, but the prices have gotten silly recently. The same goes for Voodoo 4/5. 😊

And yes, I do want it for Glide, and I might look for another graphics card for games that don't support Glide. That's why I looked for a motherboard like this, with an AGP slot and as many PCI slots as I could find, so that I could just stick many expansion cards for different games and just unplug the cables behind the case when I'm done.

Stacking up a whole bunch of GPUs is not usually a great idea - it can create conflicts, be a general pain to deal with, and make a lot of waste heat. Much better to figure out exactly what you need to support, and target that. Unless you go with some obscure workstation card that nothing supports, you probably won't have too many support issues sticking with an nVidia, 3dfx, or ATi card. With 3dfx you can also consider SLI for the Voodoo2 if you're so inclined.

As for which games, well, let's just say ALL DOS/Win95/Win98 era games

That's far too broad.

For example, I see Half-Life supports A3D and EAX, and A3D is the superior sound api, but the only way to experience is with an aureal3d sound card, no way to emulate it under win7 like alchemy does for EAX. Or, for example, there's Colin McRae Rally 1 and win95 version of The Need For Speed SE, which were a pain in the ass to get to work under Windows XP and even then they were crashing all the time, but under Win7 I just gave up. I could play the need for speed se with dosbox, but it was not a satisfying experience either, with broken car videos and slowdowns in some areas of the track, also the CD stops spinning sometimes and the game laggs until it spins up again... Then there's the Glide games, I could get some to run with nGlide wrapper, but it didn't work for all that I tried.

I wouldn't get too hung up on "best" or "superior" - target "works" or "doesn't crash" first, and worry about the little details later. 😊

I think your original instincts towards the MX300 (since you want A3d) and Voodoo3 were pretty bang-on though; I'd just move away from the NF7-based platform for such a machine (for one thing, it isn't compatible with the Voodoo3).

What motheboard would you recommend? Some particular models to look for? In one other forum they recommended me to look for a ABIT KT7A or KT7A-RAID because it has ISA slot, and also add a Rendition v2200 graphics card to the build.

Why all the Abit boards and K7? I'd stay away unless you have the inclination (and time) to futz about with repairs. There was an ebay seller with Intel 440BX and 440BX2s in-box for reasonable prices not long ago - I'd look into one of those. Throw a decent P3 in there, grab your Voodoo3 and MX300, and you should be fine. If you find in the future that you need an ISA sound card, it'll support that too.

On newer boards with ISA you also have to be somewhat careful - they may not be fully compatible with soundcards, and the ISA slots largely exist for legacy support of industrial/scientific hardware that is cost prohibitive to replace. Give this a read: http://www.flaterco.com/kb/ISA_chipsets.html

A quick look and the Intel boards still appear to be available:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/390966414407

Of course you could go after any of the popular makes (e.g. Asus, Gigabyte, Tyan, etc) if you're so inclined. And don't write OEM machines like Dell and HP off entirely either - they're usually decently put together, aren't usually hard to find as complete systems (and for cheap, because nobody usually wants them), and can be an easy path to what you're looking for with a few add-on parts. Once they got into the P3 era they tended to stick to ATX or mATX (I've seen Slot 1 LPX systems with Pentium IIs, but never AGP-based Pentium 3 variants), so you could re-case into whatever you like as well. I have a Dell i815 board that I've done this with, since the original case fell apart.

Remember that older Dell PSUs may use a non-standard pinout on the ATX 20-pin connector though. Adapters do exist, and aren't terribly expensive. Some of the OEM Dell PSUs are pretty respectable though (assuming they're still in good working order of course).

Gonna add ram sticks with heatshields just for the looks, Im gonna put this build in some sort of case with a side window. They're cheap anyways, that pair of Geils is just 4 euros.

If you want something very flashy, Corsair had some DIMMs with LED lights at one point. I think some of them you could even program to display certain patterns. Try looking for "XMS Pro" or "XMS Extreme" or "TwinX" or something like that. I forget if Crucial BallistiX is available as DDR1, but those light up too.

If you go with the 440-platform though, you'll be using SDRAM. You can still affix heat spreaders if you like, but I'm not aware of any SDRAM with flashy LEDs. 😊

If you want something that requires heat spreaders, you can always go for an i820/i850 build and use RDRAM. 🤣

tayyare wrote:

As far as I can see from the posts in the forum, "Windows 95/98 retro PC" is a very popular subject, and there are many topics covering that, so if you do some digging here in this forum, you will find many valuable suggestions.

If you ask me, here are the major components that I would suggest (and happily use in real life). Please note that I'm considering your requirement is playing almost pure 95/98 games (i.e. early/non XP) with occasional late DOS (1995-1996) games

I agree with your overall to your suggestions 😀 , but I had a few comments on graphics and sound:

Graphics: First of all, PCI is for 486/early Pentium machines, for PII and up you should definitely go for an AGP card. My suggestion would be anything Geforce2 (Ultra?)/ Geforce4 (Ti4xxx but even MX would be ok) and in between the two. The PIII boards I use are almost always AGP 4X boards, so I have no problems regarding card/MB compatibility with the cards mentioned above. Most people here does not prefer ATI cards for that era, but I have no experience with them to speak about. NVidia was and is my only choice from the very beginning, I don't know why. 🤣 By the way, you could always add a couple of Voodoo2's in SLI mode if you also want to taste the good old days of Glide. It is definitely a matter of taste, and depends on which games you want to play.

GeForce 2 Ultra is a fine card, but some of them can have VGA output quality issues (it's a per-vendor/per-board issue; some AIBs went cheap on the output filters). I have an eVGA that is generally fine once drivers are loaded in Windows, but can exhibit the "wavy lines" in DOS-mode from time to time. They're also not the most common things on the planet. GeForce 4 MX is essentially the same GPU as the GeForce 2 series (they're all NV1x based; DX7 and h/w TnL support, but no PS), but adds VPE, LMA, and MSAA support. Watch out for boards that went cheap on the RAM though (true of any entry-level/value card).

GeForce 2/3/4 Ti/FX are all universal AGP cards, and will work on 3.3V slots ("AGP 4x" can actually be 1.5V keyed, as on early Pentium 4 systems with 845/850 chipsets; I'm not aware of any 1.5V 4x cards though). The biggest advantages I see for the FX series are dual-link DVI (some of the Quadro variants support this (like FX 3000), but none of the consumer GeForce-branded cards do), and potentially higher performance (especially with the 5700 and above) which would be a benefit if you're targeting higher resolution output. If you're planning to hook up to a modern monitor and want to support high resolutions and DVI, a Quadro FX would be a good candidate. Note that Voodoo2 will not do DVI for pass-through.

From what I understand, ATi never had such dramatic inconsistency with their analog video output quality. However if you're limiting yourself to Windows 9x, you will have broken table fog for all Radeon cards (it was fixed in a driver update that only supports Windows 2000 and above 😵 ). I'm a little leery of R300-based cards (mostly Radeon 9 series) as I've had a few of them cook themselves to death (and have heard of similar stories from others), but wouldn't say that's a guaranteed problem. Some of the older models, like Radeon 8500, support TruForm, which could be a consideration for some games.

Sound: I'm ok with mediocre sound, so my tastes are not so sophisticated when it comes to this subject. People here are sometimes go far when it comes to sound and MIDI, with all the rare and pricey hardware. I'm not one of them, so my suggestion would be a SB Live (too many versions of this card are around, so you need to do some research first) as a pure w9x card, and SB AWE64 for DOS compatibility, if required (providing that you choose a MB with ISA slots). You can even put two of them together.

+1 on SB Live. I've personally got both an "original" variant, and a Dell OEM variant - they seem to work equally well. I've heard that the Dell OEM cards will cry about the Creative driver package, but I've never tested that out myself - I just grab the drivers from the Dell support website and don't worry about it. 😊

Reply 7 of 67, by God Of Gaming

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Is MSI KT3 Ultra motherboard plus Athlon XP 2200+ or 2400+ a good choice? I think I will give up on DOS games and play them with DOSBox instead, so Win9x only retro PC this wil be. I think this motherboard has the right type of AGP slot for those old graphics cards.

Or, if going for a build that also supports DOS games, how does Pentium 3 compare to, say, Athlon 1400?

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 8 of 67, by Skyscraper

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God Of Gaming wrote:

Is MSI KT3 Ultra motherboard plus Athlon XP 2200+ or 2400+ a good choice? I think I will give up on DOS games and play them with DOSBox instead, so Win9x only retro PC this wil be. I think this motherboard has the right type of AGP slot for those old graphics cards.

It will work great with Windows 9x

I use an Athlon XP 2400+ with some VIA chipset motherboard, a Soundblaster Live! and some fast AGP card when I need that kind of speed in Windows 98.

For DOS I would stick to a motherboard with Intel 440 BX, a Pentium 3 450 - 600(100) and a Soundblaster AWE64 Gold or something like that.

Last edited by Skyscraper on 2015-04-03, 17:41. Edited 1 time in total.

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 9 of 67, by God Of Gaming

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DOS Glide Games List

I see here there are DOS games that support Glide. And at least a few of those titles are familiar to me. Will those work better on a 3dfx voodoo than dosbox + some sort of glide wrapper?

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Reply 10 of 67, by leileilol

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For the highest compatibility guarantee on them with the statically compiled trainwrecks, you'd need to go down further to Voodoo Graphics (V1). However on an Athlon XP system with no ISA I wouldn't even think about that because of the whole PCI sound compatibility dilemma thing. Please know that some of the 3dfx versions are pure novelty and could look worse, like Shadow Warrior and Blood. Their textures get horribly resampled with less color precision in their conversion and the performance isn't really better because it's still a software span rendering driver with the texture mapping offloaded to the card.

The games i'd think about on Athlon XP would be Battlefield 2, Doom3, Republic Commando, C&C Generals, Warcraft 3, etc.

Last edited by leileilol on 2015-04-03, 18:00. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 11 of 67, by God Of Gaming

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leileilol wrote:

Battlefield 2, Doom3, Republic Commando, C&C Generals, Warcraft 3, etc.

I believe all of those work great on modern machines. Especially Doom 3, with some mods you can boost the graphics to modern standards. It uses OpenGL and OpenAL by default, resolution and FOV can be edited in config files, so there isn't anything lost.

Last edited by God Of Gaming on 2015-04-03, 18:09. Edited 2 times in total.

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Reply 12 of 67, by obobskivich

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God Of Gaming wrote:

Is MSI KT3 Ultra motherboard plus Athlon XP 2200+ or 2400+ a good choice? I think I will give up on DOS games and play them with DOSBox instead, so Win9x only retro PC this wil be. I think this motherboard has the right type of AGP slot for those old graphics cards.

Or, if going for a build that also supports DOS games, how does Pentium 3 compare to, say, Athlon 1400?

Which Pentium 3? The fastest models will be equivalent, or better, than an Athlon 1400. They will also generally use less power. However a 400-500MHz Pentium 3 will be slower (there are slower Athlon models as well).

The KT3 has a universal AGP slot, so it will work with both 3.3V and 1.5V cards. Paired up with your 3dfx card, an MX 300 or SB Live, 128-512MB of RAM, and an AthlonXP and you'd be set. 😀

God Of Gaming wrote:
leileilol wrote:

Battlefield 2, Doom3, Republic Commando, C&C Generals, Warcraft 3, etc.

I believe all of those work great on modern machines.

They can, but that doesn't mean people aren't building older machines to run them.

Reply 13 of 67, by God Of Gaming

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An old machine for Doom 3 may be a bit silly IMO. My first PC had a socket A Sempron 2600+ and Radeon 9550 128MB, and I had to play Doom 3 on medium graphics 640x480 and still wasnt very smooth... Now add sikkmod and high-res textures and parallax mapping and you just need a good modern PC to enjoy it fully.

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Reply 14 of 67, by obobskivich

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God Of Gaming wrote:

An old machine for Doom 3 may be a bit silly IMO. My first PC had a socket A Sempron 2600+ and Radeon 9550 128MB, and I had to play Doom 3 on medium graphics 640x480 and still wasnt very smooth... Now add sikkmod and high-res textures and parallax mapping and you just need a good modern PC to enjoy it fully.

Different strokes for different folks and all that. 😊

Reply 15 of 67, by God Of Gaming

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In another forum they're recommending that I get an Abit KT7A or KT7A-RAID, install modded BIOS, and use a mobile Barton chip and overclock it... Is that a better idea than pentium 3, and do those have low quality capacitors too?

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 16 of 67, by obobskivich

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God Of Gaming wrote:

In another forum they're recommending that I get an Abit KT7A or KT7A-RAID, install modded BIOS, and use a mobile Barton chip and overclock it... Is that a good idea, and do those have low quality capacitors too?

I don't think there's any era where Abit could've been equated to "quality capacitors" to be entirely honest. The KT7 series was actually one of the product lines named in the class action lawsuit over capacitor quality, if that tells you anything. 😵 They made decent motherboards, most of which died relatively early due to awful caps, but were popular among overclockers. I don't see the point in having an overclocked mobile Barton for Windows 9x games though - if you were running Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 on the box in 2005 that would make sense, but you're trying to run Need for Speed and Half-Life. Pentium MMXs can do that (not great, but it can be done); you don't need a high performance CPU. Most of the parts you've thus far listed, excepting the Voodoo3 and MX300, are really bucking at a nice DX8/9 WinXP gaming system - not a 9x box.

I also don't like the idea of overclocking old hardware in general - for two reasons:

1) It risks damage to hardware that may be relatively hard/obnoxious to find replacements for.

2) You can usually just buy something newer and faster. For example instead of overclocking a mobile Barton, why not just get an Athlon64? Or a Core 2 Duo? It'd be faster than anything you could ever get from a K7. But you don't need that kind of performance - for the games you've specifically mentioned, a Pentium 3 1GHz or Athlon 1400 is already stupendous overkill.

Reply 17 of 67, by God Of Gaming

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There is no kill like overkill 😀 I guess I'll do a lot of research on Pentium 3 motherboards tomorrow. I think the latest games that I might install on this PC will probably be from 1999 or 2000, which is why I'm not sure if a pentium 3 can really handle them with ease. BTW, if going for P3, Slot 1 vs socket 370, is there any particular reason to go for one or the other?

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Reply 18 of 67, by Skyscraper

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God Of Gaming wrote:

There is no kill like overkill 😀 I guess I'll do a lot of research on Pentium 3 motherboards tomorrow. I think the latest games that I might install on this PC will probably be from 1999 or 2000, which is why I'm not sure if a pentium 3 can really handle them with ease. BTW, if going for P3, Slot 1 vs socket 370, is there any particular reason to go for one or the other?

Not really, most BX boards are Slot-1 boards, but a FCPGA BX board is also a good choice.

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 19 of 67, by obobskivich

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l33t
God Of Gaming wrote:

There is no kill like overkill 😀 I guess I'll do a lot of research on Pentium 3 motherboards tomorrow. I think the latest games that I might install on this PC will probably be from 1999 or 2000, which is why I'm not sure if a pentium 3 can really handle them with ease.

A Pentium 3 should have no problem with later-90s titles, as long as it's a faster model (the 1GHz CuMine that was suggested earlier would be a good candidate). Maybe this article will help: http://www.anandtech.com/show/557

BTW, if going for P3, Slot 1 vs socket 370, is there any particular reason to go for one or the other?

Aside from Slot 1 usually meaning BX (-> ISA), nothing major. Both are good. You can adapterize S370 chips into Slot 1 boards (with "slotkets"), but not the other way; just something else to keep in mind.