IMHO the Sempron system. Definitely faster and cooler (literally and figuratively) than the P4. Up the memory to 2 GB if you can.

That is what what I was leaning towards, the 533 bus P4 runs nice and cool. Never seen it go past 50c under 100% load for hours, but its just not very fast. It has a lot of sentimental value, lots of nice pci slots and IDE controllers an agp slot and that is about it going for it. Might be able to scrounge up a pair no-name generic 1gb sticks of DDR400 later on, but the only spare 1gb sticks are 266

Another vote for the Sempron.

The Sempron 3400+ only has 256kb cache though but this matters little, even the 128kb Semprons perform well.

Hmmm I wonder what kind of clocks I could hit with the stock fx-8350 cooler.

ODwilly wrote:

Hmmm I wonder what kind of clocks I could hit with the stock fx-8350 cooler.

Its very hard to say.

At least 2600, with extreme luck as high as 3000.

The funny thing is that I feel like the 8800gt is way overkill. But the only other pcie card I might be able to get ahold of would be a HD4650

+1 for the AMD. (by the way.. I have the same mainboard lying around here whit a 3000+, can good be overklocked).

Roman78 wrote:

+1 for the AMD. (by the way.. I have the same mainboard lying around here whit a 3000+, can good be overklocked).

Ha! That is funny, mine came with the exact cpu! I swapped the 3400+ out of an old Compaq machine.

I also have a K8NF6G-VSTA!

It's a good board and AMD gear is rarer than Intel so I would go with the AMD.

+1 on the ASRock/AMD system too. It offers PCIe, the 754 chip should be faster (especially if overclocked or upgraded (or both)), and I've had generally good experiences with ASRock over the years. On the other hand, every Soyo I've seen recently has leaking/blown caps and I never remember them being very popular "back in the day" for overclocking or tweaking compared to other brands (like Asus or Abit).

On the graphics card front - I don't think there is an HD 4870 for AGP. There's HD 3850 and 1950, but they're generally gouged to the moon when they come up for sale (especially versus their PCIe counterparts). It's also worth noting that nVidia AGP cards tend to have a lot of their decoding features disabled at the hardware level; I have yet to find out if this is true of AMD, but it really doesn't matter because X1950, HD 3850, etc cannot do a lot of decoding stuff anyways. With PCIe you can just go for a G9x (like 8800GT) or R7xx card and have complete decode, including Flash. It will probably end up somewhat CPU limited in games, but who cares - crank up the IQ and let it ride.

obobskivich: The caps are not an issue on my Soyo board, freshly recapped with Sanyos and also 🤣 late night typo there, it is a 4670. I have both a 4670 and x1950 on the shelf right now so prices are not an issue. The Soyo boards seemed to be really good from the 486-Slot1 era, it seems that they started using bad caps early on so just about everything 370 to the company's death was crap. We had a Tiger Direct 370 soyo pc that we nicknamed the Crash Master because it was so bad. My family had around 3 Slot 1 Soyo systems from around 98-2007/9ish and they ran amazingly. Lost my first pc (which was one of those 3) when the cpu fan died on a hot day and the cpu CAUGHT ON FIRE. But from all the responses I think I am going to go with the AMD system.

ODwilly wrote:

obobskivich: The caps are not an issue on my Soyo board, freshly recapped with Sanyos and also 🤣 late night typo there, it is a 4670. I have both a 4670 and x1950 on the shelf right now so prices are not an issue. The Soyo boards seemed to be really good from the 486-Slot1 era, it seems that they started using bad caps early on so just about everything 370 to the company's death was crap. We had a Tiger Direct 370 soyo pc that we nicknamed the Crash Master because it was so bad. My family had around 3 Slot 1 Soyo systems from around 98-2007/9ish and they ran amazingly. Lost my first pc (which was one of those 3) when the cpu fan died on a hot day and the cpu CAUGHT ON FIRE. But from all the responses I think I am going to go with the AMD system.

Yeah, I felt it was worth pointing out if it had never been touched it may be in bad shape. Good to know it was "saved" though. 😊 I'd still go with the AMD. 🤣

obobskivich wrote:

Yeah, I felt it was worth pointing out if it had never been touched it may be in bad shape. Good to know it was "saved" though. 😊 I'd still go with the AMD. 🤣

Thanks for the feedback! and ya, I was amazingly happy to revive the ol p4. It will rest cozy in an anti-static bag and it's own box until I decide on what to do with it. I might end up putting a 1.8 Willamette p4 in it and use it as a second "fast" 98se system. The first one is a 1.8 Athlon xp machine, so pitting them against each other would be fun.

UPDATE: Started putting the machine together and I was half right with the cpu, it is indeed a 3400+ but it is an Athlon not a Sempron. Heck yes! Using a semi-proprietary case so it will take a bit of tinkering to replace the front panel connectors with standard switches and wires. Using a Dell Dimension 4100 case that was the one out of a pair that had a bad motherboard. Still has the p3 and Designed for Win2k/98 stickers on the front! Really like the simple bios on this Asrock board and the easy OC options, should be able to make this thing scream 😀