Which OS are you intending to run and which revision P5A-B?

The early revision P5A-B boards (<=1.04) have early revision Aladdin V chipsets that can only cache 64MB RAM. If you add more, everything over 64MB will be uncached.
If it's a rev 1.05 or later, it will have G-stepping Aladdin V and can cache all that RAM.

What this means depends on your OS:
If you want to run DOS as well as Windwos, be aware HIMEM.SYS doesn't like over 64MB and a lot of memory detection routines will fail with more, leading to games not running with 'memory too low errors'. Limit RAM to 64MB max.
With Win9x, <=1.04 is bad news, as it uses the uncached part first. Given that few things that will run on a K6-2 need more than 64MB RAM, in this situation I'd recommend limiting RAM to 64MB. If you have >=1.05, there is no disadvantage to 512MB
With Win2k/XP, the OS uses a lot more RAM, so the benefit of more RAM will outweigh the lack of caching. In that case 512MB is probably the better choice even if not fully cached. Note you do NOT want to install XP service packs on a system this old; stock XP will run reasonably, with service packs you need far more RAM and all the extra overhead will bring your CPU to a crawl

Then that sound card: why splash out on an expensive Voodoo and pair it with a buggy and low-end sound card?

For Win9x a card with 3D audio (Aureal A3D(2) or Creative EAX) would be much better, for DOS something less buggy (i.e. not an SB 16, and particularly not a Vibra) would be recommended.

Thanks a lot for the answer. Now let me answer your questions.

am planning to build or purchase a Windows 98 gaming rig. The revision of the P5A-B is not mentioned by the seller but I could ask him of course. But yeah, the sound card choice was also a bit strange to me. There were much better sound cards out there that get recommended all the time like the ones you mentioned.

Socket 7 is good for reliving childhood trauma. This is late 1999 computer unable to play smoothly 1999 games. UT, Tony Hawk, Driver, NFS5, Half-Life pretty much all will drop fps deep into teens on this platform. Might be ok if you are into playing 1996-7 games.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-05-02, 21:11:

Socket 7 is good for reliving childhood trauma. This is late 1999 computer unable to play smoothly 1999 games. UT, Tony Hawk, Driver, NFS5, Half-Life pretty much all will drop fps deep into teens on this platform. Might be ok if you are into playing 1996-7 games.

In that case i am going to keep looking for spare parts and make my own rig. This time I want to play the 97-99/2000 games in good quality. In the past I was indeed among the people that were forced to play the games in rather low quality because I just a had rather low spec Pc back then.

For that time period you probably want to around the Slot 1 or faster.
Basically find your most demanding game check its recommended system requirements and go slightly higher to have some performance in reserve.

"Faster"

Being able to play 2000 games at good quality means you need at least a high-end late 2000 build, or - better, cheaper, easier to find - a mid-range 2001/2002 build.

That means you're looking for an (early) P4 / Athlon or if you really want P3, a Tualatin P3. Which is best depends on how much you want to cover with the system:

- P4 chipsets don't have native ISA support, so DOS is not (easily, fully) an option. However they are probably the cheapest of the lot, they use ATX12V power supply so can run optimally on modern PSUs. Also no issues with SBLive compatibility (unless you choose a board with Via chipset - don't, take an Intel i845 or i850 instead).
- Athlon chipsets support ISA, but you'll only find it on the oldest motherboards, usually only with 100MHz FSB support. An Athlon Thunderbird 1200B-1400B would however be more than powerful enough to support games from 2000. Here power supply can be more interesting - the Athlon CPUs draw quite a lot of power, and do it from the 5V line. Particularly if going for a Thunderbird 1400 you need to have a beefy 5V line. Another potential issue is the fragile, exposed Athlon cores. They chip easily, particularly when mounting heavy heatsinks (which are a good idea to keep temps low without needing hearing protection).
- Tualatin is arguably the most elegant of the lot, but also the most expensive. The CPUs themselves aren't too bad, but motherboards with Tualatin support are hard to find and command a hefty premium. They are however potentially the best bet for native ISA support without compromises. "Just" look for something with Via 694T (ApolloPro133T) chipset. Of course you then hit the Via 686B southbridge with its SBLive incompatibility. Nothing's perfect.

In all cases, the early 2000's were peak capacitor plague era. Assume whatever you get the caps will be dead or dying, unless already replaced. Some brands were so notoriously bad that all would have died long ago (Abit, Epox, MSI), but others are only now starting to fail (Asus, Gigabyte). In fact a board sold as dead with clearly visible bad caps is probably your best choice, as it will be cheap(er) and you can be fairly confident it will work after replacing those dead caps.

As for the rest of the system, it's a matter of taste, but I like GeForce3 or 4Ti GPUs. Radeon 9700/9800 will be faster, but they ran hot, so chances of duds are much higher, same with the GeForce FX. Radeon 8500/9500/9600 would also be a good pairing. DX9 support isn't really that relevant, games from 2000 (DX7 era) don't use it and these CPUs can't really run games that do. For sound, as I already mentioned, you'd want 3D audio, either Aureal or Creative. With Creative, bear in mind the Via south bridge compatibility issues. A safe rule of thumb is not to mix SBLive/Audigy and Via chipsets (even if some do work together); with one of those chipsets take Aureal cards or (if the A3D is too expensive) something that supports A3D and EAX, such as the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz (Crystal CS4360 chip) or anything with the Yamaha YMF744 chipset. Note that these implementations aren't as good as Creative or Aureal's original ones.

P4 system with AGP slot will be fine for '97-99/2000 games'. There were ton of them manufactured and you should have little trouble scoring one for next to nothing. You can even go all the way to core2, same price 2-3x the speed.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-05-03, 11:53:

P4 system with AGP slot will be fine for '97-99/2000 games'. There were ton of them manufactured and you should have little trouble scoring one for next to nothing. You can even go all the way to core2, same price 2-3x the speed.

Possibly, but aside from being completely OP that won't easily run with Win98SE, so you have three choices:

- use PCI VGA and accept no drivers for pile of system devices
- get one of the Asrock Frankenstein-boards grafting C2D support onto an older AGP chipset with Win98 support (ConRoe865PE etc)
- abandon Win9x and use WinXP instead

To me, this sounds like a different build for a different purpose (2003-2005 games, which are a whole different kettle of fish). I'd keep it simpler and stick to a 2000/2001 build for 1997-2000 games.

predator_085 wrote on 2023-05-02, 13:14:

Any thoughs about these specs?

I would start with a list of games that are interesting.
Maybe it`s all run great on Windows 11.
If not, then determine which extensions that are not supported in 2023 are needed - A3D, glide, etc.
And under them to collect hardware.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-05-03, 11:53:

P4 system with AGP slot will be fine for '97-99/2000 games'. There were ton of them manufactured and you should have little trouble scoring one for next to nothing. You can even go all the way to core2, same price 2-3x the speed.

You need to be extremely careful about the chipset if you look to run Windows 98. Avoid ATI, stick to VIA but Intel 8xx and some early 9xx should be ok as well as certain SIS chipsets (not exactly sure which but Phil's Computer Lab did a video recently on a SIS P4 motherboard and it worked well on 98. SATA can work on 98 if you have the proper patches (rloew's PATCHATA) but it's wise to stick to IDE (invest in a IDE2SATA adapter from StarTech). What I did was made a 80GB partition for 98 and let the rest of the drive which was 1TB in this case be Windows XP.

About the 98SE RAM size limitations, it depends on the chipset however it's only software that will complain about a certain amount of memory. 98SE can work fine with 1024 MBs of RAM but I usually use LIMITMEM by rloew and limit 98 to 512MBs of RAM as anything I'm running on it is unlikely to use that much memory contrary to XP

Thanks a lot for the further replies.

A big thx to dionb for the very detailed answer. Concerning the gpu recommendations have to agree the GF 3 and 4 Ti are very often mentioned and recommended. Especially the GF4 seems to very popular card among the retro gaming community.

Checking out the radeon 8000/9000 series as well is something I am going to do as well.

The advice from chinny22 to look into the specs of the games I am into and then get a bit higher is also a very good idea which I am going to do as well.

I think any good (spec wise) 2000 or early 2001 build should serve me well.

Concerning the CPU I do not want to go into the dual-core territory a more period-correct Pentium III or IV is more interesting for me.

A Pentium 4 or Athlon XP based computer will be good for late 90s and early 2000s gaming.

My own Windows 98 rig uses an Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67 GHz), GeForce4 4200 Ti and Diamond Monster MX300 sound card.

Runs all Windows 98 era games with no issues and provides a degree of backwards compatibility even for older DOS titles.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-05-03, 16:06:

A Pentium 4 or Athlon XP based computer will be good for late 90s and early 2000s gaming.

My own Windows 98 rig uses an Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67 GHz), GeForce4 4200 Ti and Diamond Monster MX300 sound card.

Runs all Windows 98 era games with no issues and provides a degree of backwards compatibility even for older DOS titles.

I have not looked into the athlon cpu yet but I will compare them with the P3 and P4 just in case to really think about everything.

It is also good to know that such System have also some degree of backwards compatibility for older does games. Dos is not my main field of intrest to be honest but after checking it out it might be interesting to try out some later Dos games as well if possible. But that's not a must. My field of interest is late windows 98 gaming from 97 to 1999/2000.

@all speaking of the GF 4 4200 ti. Should I look for the 64mb ram version or is 128mb version more preferable?

I personally would go with a Pentium III system but there are pro and con elements to such a system. Pentium IV is really Windows XP era and you ideally want no more than 512MB of RAM on a Windows 98 system. Then there's the drivers which could be wonky for Windows 98 (that was my experience back in the day at least).

The "problem" is finding a good Pentium III motherboard with the right AGP slot (there are several AGP slot types). I'd also go for a Socket 370 motherboard and not the Slot 1 which uses older technology. There's websites that also tell you which CPUs are compatible with which motherboards - ideally find a motherboard that supports a 1Ghz Pentium III. With a half decent heatsink & fan you can overclock these CPUs to 1.2Ghz easily.

Then a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 with a Voodoo 2 card besides it (to cover all bases) seems the best and cheapest solution. There's patches for quite a few Voodoo games to also support D3D but if you want to go the full hog, a Voodoo 2 8MB (which is not that expensive) is a nice addon.

Also you don't really need the 128MB version - they cost a LOT more than the 64MB which you can find for about €50.

This may take some patience to find - but once you do find it, you basically have a period correct but very fast solution that will play every game from 199... to 2002 easily.

red_avatar wrote on 2023-05-04, 07:47:

I personally would go with a Pentium III system but there are pro and con elements to such a system. Pentium IV is really Window […]
Show full quote

I personally would go with a Pentium III system but there are pro and con elements to such a system. Pentium IV is really Windows XP era and you ideally want no more than 512MB of RAM on a Windows 98 system. Then there's the drivers which could be wonky for Windows 98 (that was my experience back in the day at least).

The "problem" is finding a good Pentium III motherboard with the right AGP slot (there are several AGP slot types). I'd also go for a Socket 370 motherboard and not the Slot 1 which uses older technology. There's websites that also tell you which CPUs are compatible with which motherboards - ideally find a motherboard that supports a 1Ghz Pentium III. With a half decent heatsink & fan you can overclock these CPUs to 1.2Ghz easily.

Then a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 with a Voodoo 2 card besides it (to cover all bases) seems the best and cheapest solution. There's patches for quite a few Voodoo games to also support D3D but if you want to go the full hog, a Voodoo 2 8MB (which is not that expensive) is a nice addon.

Also you don't really need the 128MB version - they cost a LOT more than the 64MB which you can find for about €50.

This may take some patience to find - but once you do find it, you basically have a period correct but very fast solution that will play every game from 199... to 2002 easily.

Thanks for the info. Yes going with Vodoo 2 as ad one was on my agenda anyway. it was my plan anyway to with gf 3/4 or Radeon 8000 or 900 series rig with a v2 as a backup before I also started to research a v2-only system. I for all in for plan A now because it is the most flexible option for my preferred time frame.

I am researching the parts every day to be there in case I can find a bargain. So it is very clear to me that lots of patience is needed until I have all the parts together. I do not mind it though.

Especially finding v2 at a good price is tricky.

thanks fo the info about the 64mb before 4. The 64 MB sounds also more reasonable to me concerning the price.

According to this contemporary article

https://www.anandtech.com/show/934/2

the performance gap between 64MB and 128 is not big enough to be concerned at all. The 64mb version would be perfectly fine for me.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-05-02, 21:11:

Socket 7 is good for reliving childhood trauma. This is late 1999 computer unable to play smoothly 1999 games. UT, Tony Hawk, Driver, NFS5, Half-Life pretty much all will drop fps deep into teens on this platform. Might be ok if you are into playing 1996-7 games.

There's a way of getting around this - use a Voodoo 3. Half-Life will play perfectly on a decent K6-2+ / K6-III build paired with a Voodoo 3. UT99 will drop frames but it is more than playable* on such a build, same with NFS5 - if you use a later 3dfx card. For some reason super-7 and nvidia cards don't play very well together. From my experience so far at least. nvidia cards on super-7 platforms tend to provide higher max fps but the lows stay the same. I've also noticed micro stuttering with nvidia cards, witch is not present when using a voodoo 3 + driver 1.06.

*playable - not sure if enjoyable, especially considering the game can be played on a pentium 3 or early socket A offering a much more enjoyable experience.

Socket3 wrote on 2023-05-05, 08:12:

*playable - not sure if enjoyable, especially considering the game can be played on a Pentium 3 or early Socket A offering a much more enjoyable experience.

That's a good point. My pc back then was not the best so the big hitters then were just playable not enjoyable though. It did not bother me that much back then, because I was more of a console player, and even ultra-low frame rate games like goeldeneye 64 and later perfect dark were playable enough for me.

For my time machine though I want the best of the best so to speak.

I want to build a rig that enables me to play the top games from 97 to 99/2000 in the best possible settings. I want to experience the late 90 premium pc gaming experience now in 2023.

predator_085 wrote on 2023-05-05, 11:44:

That's a good point. My pc back then was not the best so the big hitters then were just playable not enjoyable though. It did n […]
Show full quote

Socket3 wrote on 2023-05-05, 08:12:

*playable - not sure if enjoyable, especially considering the game can be played on a Pentium 3 or early Socket A offering a much more enjoyable experience.

That's a good point. My pc back then was not the best so the big hitters then were just playable not enjoyable though. It did not bother me that much back then, because I was more of a console player, and even ultra-low frame rate games like goeldeneye 64 and later perfect dark were playable enough for me.

For my time machine though I want the best of the best so to speak.

I want to build a rig that enables me to play the top games from 97 to 99/2000 in the best possible settings. I want to experience the late 90 premium pc gaming experience now in 2023.

That's easy. Basically anything that can correctly run win98 (with drivers correctly installed) will work, so there's a wide array of hardware to chose from:

- Socket A mainboard, VIA KT266/KT333/KT400/KT600/KT880 or SiS 760 chipset + your choice of AMD athlon XP
- Socket 478 mainboard, preferably intel i865/i845 + the Northwood P4 of your choice (Wilamette are pretty slow - celeron slow, and Prescott run really hot and use a lot of power)
- Socket 754/939 mainboard WITH AGP, VIA, Uli/ALi or SiS chipset (nforce have poor win98 compatibility and support) + the CPU of your choice
- LGA775 i865 / VIA / SIS mainboard + pentium 4 (you could use a pentium D, but there's no benefit since no game* of the era benefits from more then one CPU core - you'll just be making some extra heat)

Pair any of the above with either a high end 2001(ish) video card like a Radeon 8500 or Geforce 3 Titanium or a mid end 2003-2004 card like a FX 5700 / Radeon 9600 and you have your build.

Don't go nuts with RAM. 256MB is more then '98 needs, 512 is overkill. You can run over 1GB on 98 with PATCHMEM.EXE, but there's no benefit whatsoever.

If you want period correct, a Socket 370 pentium 3 - preferably a Tualatin, or Socket A KT133/AMD 760 + 1333/1400MHz Athlon (non-XP) is the way to go, but not evry 2001 game will be perfectly smooth on such a setup. Good KT133 boards are hard to find, most are budget boards and suffer from instability and incompatibility issues. A good socket A KT133 board would be the Abit KV7 or Asus A7V, but they're not issue free either. The asus board can corrupt the eeprom for no reason (should be fine if you don't swap CPU's every other day) and the Abit is prone to capacitor rot. Frankly cap-rot will affect the asus as well. Gigabyte, Soltek and Chaintech also made good KT133 boards.

Tualatin motherboards are rather rare and can get expensive. For what you'll have to spend on a 1.4GHz p3-s + compatible board, you'd be better off buying a Geforce 4 Ti4400/4600.

My advice is - got with cheap and available. A socket 754/939 system paired with a Radeon 9600 or FX 5700 will provide all the performance you will need for that time period, and should be very, very easy to find. LGA 775 boards with the intel i865 chipset and AGP are somewhat rarer, but also budget friendly.

Socket3 wrote on 2023-05-05, 12:40:

Pair any of the above with either a high end 2001(ish) video card like a Radeon 8500 or Geforce 3 Titanium or a mid end 2003-2004 card like a FX 5700 / Radeon 9600 and you have your build.

Those cards are fine if all you want to do is max out the in-game graphical settings. But if you also want to bump the resolution to 1600x1200 as well as crank up AA and AF while maintaining a locked 60 FPS, you'll need something like a GeForce FX 5900 or a Radeon X800. You do lose a bit of compatibility with either of those cards, so there's a trade off. Personally, I think the GeForce 4 Ti cards hit the Win9x sweet spot in terms of power and compatibility.

Don't go nuts with RAM. 256MB is more than '98 needs, 512 is overkill. You can run over 1GB on 98 with PATCHMEM.EXE, but there's no benefit whatsoever.

Some games like Diablo 2, Gothic, Deus Ex and Max Payne can benefit from 512 MB RAM (compared to 256 MB), but it's not a huge difference. Going over 512 MB under Win9x is asking for trouble though, and a couple of games can give weird errors on certain platforms even with PATCHMEM applied.