Welcome!

That is one beast of a Windows 98 machine 😀

a friend of mine told me that my q6600 is being hold back because of the ddr400 ram if so what cpu should i throw in the computer..? or is any motherboards that are ddr 2 that can support windows 98se

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Welcome!

That is one beast of a Windows 98 machine 😀

Thank you

is it a dual channel even? can You saturate the memory interface? maybe o/c is a way out?

Great build.
Dual channel DDR400 is enough for XP and for Win98 doesn't matter much.
Dual DDR400 (6.4GB/s) is fine for C2Q FSB 1066 (8.5GB/s).

Memory speeds really do not matter much in practice. FSB1066 means a bus speed of 266MHz. DDR-400 is 200MHz. Being a 865G/DDR board, it must have dividers that allow RAM to run slower than the FSB. With DDR2, most chipsets stopped having such dividers - RAM could never be slower than FSB, only faster.

So, as long as your board does not downclock the Q6600 to 200MHz (which would make it a 1.8GHz chip), I wouldn't say it's held back. Then again, even a 1.8GHz quad core is ridiculous for Win98, and most likely more than XP can make use of as well. 😀

ASRock 4CoreDual series supports Quad Cores with DDR2 and they all have Win 98 support.
Win 98 SE is using only one core of that Quad Core, so DDR400 isn't that big of a deal for it.

For Core2 memory wasn't that big of a deal, it wasn't deeply pipelined like Pentium 4 was, now Pentium 4 could eat bandwith like a fat kid in a cake factory

ok so i would say that the build is complete and i will just leave it as is thanks for all the help from everyone

Great! Reminds me of my system here: Win 98, XP & 8.1 fully supported on one dual core PC? Here is my retro approach!

I was able to overclock (unlocked multiplier) the CPU to 3.4GHz without any mods or extra voltage.
Maybe a Q6600 with 2GB of DDR1 memory is a bit too much. My dual core system is super responsive with newer OSes anyway.
And it has official Windows 98 support, too!

The only drawback is that with this board and an FSB1066 CPU installed, the memory divider is locked, so the ram does not operate at 400MHz.

agent_x007 wrote:

ASRock 4CoreDual series supports Quad Cores with DDR2 and they all have Win 98 support.
Win 98 SE is using only one core of that Quad Core, so DDR400 isn't that big of a deal for it.

Yes, but not Intel chipset (and Intel official driver stability 😉 ) in Windows 9x invironment. 😀

GeorgeMan wrote:

Great! Reminds me of my system here: Win 98, XP & 8.1 fully supported on one dual core PC? Here is my retro approach!

That build was the reason why i built mine i had the cpu laying around from a dead motherboard and the hard drives too.I just had to buy the case memory motherboard video card (Freaking 40 dollars and the VGA port does not work) (I have to use DVI to VGA 🤣) and the sound card for the windows 98 (AW724)

Sounds like a great system

syndicator wrote:

GeorgeMan wrote:

Great! Reminds me of my system here: Win 98, XP & 8.1 fully supported on one dual core PC? Here is my retro approach!

That build was the reason why i built mine i had the cpu laying around from a dead motherboard and the hard drives too.I just had to buy the case memory motherboard video card (Freaking 40 dollars and the VGA port does not work) (I have to use DVI to VGA 🤣) and the sound card for the windows 98 (AW724)

Hehe nice! 😁
This was my family's main computer till some months ago.
I recently took it and will Install:
a) Win 98SE and every game that works in it in a 120GB IDE HDD.
b) Win XP and every game that I can fill into a 500GB Sata HDD
c) Win Vista SP2, just to also have this OS 😵