I keep falling further down the rabbit hole of trying to fnd the smallest SFF systems that will run Win98 and DOS, and this is the latest thing I've found - a "Kiosk PC KP3 - B72" - found in a search looking around for badly described PCs. The tiny size really appealed to me - basically the same size as two normal 5.25" drives side by side!

This model is the Celeron M 1.5Ghz, and it comes with a 512Mb SODIMM of DDR-266 RAM, a 40Gb 2.5" HDD, and a slim DVD-ROM (both on the secondary IDE channel, which has a 44-pin header).

Clearly it was intended for public kiosks - the manual talks about optional wall mounting kits etc., but although there is some grime under the CPU fan, it is relatively clean inside, so can't have seen that much use. It also seems interesting that it came with a not just the power brick but manual and driver CD, so I'm intrigued where it came from and what it had been doing for the last 20 years ... I asked the eBay seller and she explained it had belonged to her late husband who had it for a hobby project but never got around to it (familiar huh). The HDD is unfortunately wiped and not even partitioned.

I've swapped the 40Gb spinning disk for a 64Gb mSATA SSD in a 44 pin PATA enclosure - it recognised a 128Gb drive in the BIOS, but simply wouldn't boot from it, which was a little disappointing. The Intel i852 chipset has official drivers for Win98 on the driver disc, and everything including USB2 works perfectly in a fresh install of Win98SE.

Obviously the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 iGPU is not that strong, and the frame rates in 3DMark2001 hover between 15 and 35fps at 1084x768 - not really playable for games of that era. But for desktop use, this thing FLIES! Windows booting and general desktop responsiveness seem dramatically faster than the Socket754 Sempron system I had built as my main Win98 gaming system - the GeForce 4Ti obviously puts that leagues ahead in gaming, but somehow this little thing seems much faster in non-3D stuff. (Tempted to think thats the product of an Intel chipset versus VIA? )

I've stripped it down as far as I can - I think the whole chassis would have to be disassembled to get the motherboard out - the front USB and (only) audio are soldered on to the board at the front. No sign of any bad caps or other problems as far as I can see, apart from the coin cell CMOS battery needing to be replaced.

The PCI riser is pretty constrained by the CPU fan and the optical drive mounting, but luckily this ESS Solo-1 card I had spare is just the right size to fit! Luckily the BIOS has the option to assign 'channels' to 'slots' - which seems to mean IRQs - setting the one which listed the PCI Multimedia Device (plus other stuff) to 5 succeeded in getting the Solo onto IRQ5 - so it is working flawlessly in DOS games now too! The ESS drivers report TDMA mode. I've just figured out that what looks like a proprietary power cable to the DVD is actually the CD audio cable, and the pin out matches the lower of the two headers on the ESS card - need to check if it physically fits ...

So this ticks a lot of boxes for me - very small form factor, fast and responsive (much faster than a VIA Epia), real optical drive with CD audio, and with the ESS Solo good DOS game compatability! The 50mm fan is NOISY though, so waiting for a replacement.

Has anyone else on here used one of these?

Are there any PCI GPUs out there that would both improve on the 3D performance of the Intel IEG2 AND fit in the constrained space in this system (max size 124.5x81mm, according to manual)? Better graphics and SBEMU might be a worthwhile alternative setup?